Michael asked:

I am preparing an exercise with the topic: "Philosophy — has it any value today?"

Yes, this is a tough one but I just wonder if the basics of philosophy should be reconstructed to meet
present day issues at a level equivalent to them and not using answers developed during past days
when present problems did not exist.

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My first reaction is that most present _philosophical_ problems did exist in the past. They are the
problems that arise from the human condition, just as much now as in the past. Clearly, grappling with
them is just as valuable now as it has ever been.

My second reaction is that you are probably referring to the application of philosophical positions to
other sorts of problems. Again, though, I would think that the majority of these other problems are
basically pretty similar now to what they were in the past. Human condition again.

So the third reaction is that you might mean the application of philosophical positions to problems that
arise from new technologies. While some of these are just variants on older problems (e.g.
euthanasia, abortion), others may be more genuinely new (e.g. human cloning, artificial intelligence).
As I say, these are a small sub-set of issues to which philosophy can be applied, so we can clearly
say that philosophy has a good deal of value today, even if it can't deal with these. However, I think
that these problems are susceptible to approaches drawn from the tradition.

As to reconstruction, I'm not sure what that would entail. In one sense, philosophy is continually
reconstructing itself — new movements (pragmatism, post-modernism to name a couple of the last
century) appear that reconstruct philosophy. On the other hand, they all take a philosophical
approach, so the broader subject is evolving within the area that it has always covered. Approaches
(as opposed to answers) developed in the past are often applicable to new problems.

Finally, those who reconstruct philosophy generally end up in all the textbooks. If you have an idea of
how to do it, go for it! But I suspect that actually reconstructing philosophy is a lot harder than
suggesting that it ought to be done.

Tim Sprod