Frank Kogan

but what i'm giving is a negative reason -- why people feel alarmed by giving up on the centraloty of philsopsoph -- rather than a positive reason: what people think they're actually getting FROM philosophy

an old-fashioned answer for the latter would be that it allowed you to sharpen your mind in debate and intricate discussion about things which WEREN'T in daily political play, before going out into the concil chamber por courtroom to do verbal battle with your foes -- with the handy savant who taught the nobleman's son persuading him as a teen not to go clubbing all night and hawking all day but instead to study rhetoric and the classics, by impressing on him (maybe invoking plato), that disinterested logical speculation was nobler and deeper and more important than all local pressing political or legal concerns

the result would of course be a grown-up nobleman with all kinds of excellent
courtroom and council chamber skeez, who felt he partly owed his gift to time spent at the disinterested logical speculation-face as a child: even though actually, in practical terms, this had been a kind of feint by an employee to keep his boss's unruly kid in line

(there's a nice version of this in PRINCE CASPIAN -- the book if not the film -- where doctor cornelius manages to teach caspian stuff by appealing to his sense of the deep past and the deep future, via philososphy)

in other words: the apparent claims of the immediate important now may NOT as unproblematic as they seem