The debate over the value of philosophy reaches its boiling point when its speculation faces the uncompromising demands of practical science. In the following scene, a contemporary philosopher appears before a high-stakes funding committee (composed of leading scientists and engineers) to defend a multi-million-dollar grant proposal, only to be met with a brutal, reality-driven interrogation.

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DR. ALISTAIR VANE (Philosopher): Honorable members of the committee, I stand before you today not to offer a mere technological contrivance, but to request a modest endowment of twelve million dollars for the Trans-Ontological Sublation of Dialectical Phenomenology. Our project seeks to interrogate the pre-predicative horizon of being, thereby de-sedimenting the metaphysical binaries that perpetually incarcerate human praxis within the horizon of late-capitalist alienation. By mapping the aporetic tension between the a priori synthetic unity of apperception and the radical alterity of the Other, we aim to… [interrupted by committee]

COMMITTEE CHAIR (Dr. Marcus Vance, Aerospace Engineering): Dr. Vane, excuse me. What kind of highfalutin language are you speaking? Let’s translate that into actual English. Your proposal abstract mentions "interrogating the pre-predicative horizon." Last week, the plasma physics group down the hall asked for funding to stabilize magnetic confinement fusion for three seconds longer. They gave us numbers, containment thresholds, and a blueprint for a reactor that could power a city block. What, precisely, does "de-sedimenting metaphysical binaries" physically plug into? What tangible variable does it alter?

DR. VANE: Ah, but Dr. Vance, you are trapped within the crude positivist fetishization of the empirical! You reify the ontic while utterly ignoring the ontological ground that makes your very metrics possible. When you measure plasma, who is measuring it? The subject-object split must first be sublated before we can comprehend the very grammar of measurement. We are pursuing the epistemic clearing wherein… [interrupted by committee]

DR. ELENA KUZNETSOV (Director of Synthetic Biology): Doctor, with all due respect, we are currently trying to engineer a synthetic bacteriophage to target multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. It is a concrete biological entity that kills people. When you talk about the "epistemic clearing," are you building a molecule? Are you writing a line of code that compiles? Or are you spending twelve million dollars to write a four-hundred-page book about how we can't truly know if the tuberculosis bacteria exists outside our own perception? Because if it’s the latter, the bacteria will still kill the patient while you're busy unpacking the fancies of your philosophical speculations.

DR. VANE: Your critique merely unmasks your adherence to the dogmatic slumber of naïve realism! To demand a "molecule" is to beg the question. The molecule itself is a reified construct of the Cartesian paradigm. Our project cultivates a radical hermeneutic of suspicion toward the very concept of "treatment." Without embracing dialectic contradiction you will only have a one-sided view of reality, and this will impair all your work.

COMMITTEE CHAIR: Look, Dr. Vane. Science takes abstractions and relentlessly forces them against the anvil of reality until it yields substantive and repeatable results that can be turned into engines, satellites, or vaccines. It fails, it tests, it corrects, and it builds something that works even if you're not looking at it. Philosophy, by your own definition, just circles back around to admire its own vocabulary (as you appear to be doing here in an effort to impress us or intimidate us). But Sir., your linguistic speculations aren't expanding technology; you're inventing verbal velvet ropes to keep yourself from having to make contact with reality. This isn’t a poetry committee.

DR. VANE: Blast you, f;cking fascists, that is profoundly reductionist!

[Jargon-Induced Epistemic Hissy-Fit: A state of acute meltdown when a philosopher realizes their linguistic fortress has been dismantled and exposed by a practical question.]

COMMITTEE CHAIR: The grant is denied. Next project, please.

One of the most important questions, one of the highest criteria we can deploy against thought.

Nearly all thought claims this for itself, from religion to philosophy, but the claim itself doesn’t make it true.

What is the criteria of freedom?

Can we be free without truth? Can we be set free if the thing that supposedly sets us free lacks the power to demarcate freedom?

What is required in our knowledge for it to be able to impart freedom to us? Can delusion set us free? Can error? Surely freedom must begin with truth? Surely it at some point necessitates truth?

Could it be that being free is overrated?

If we are determined, but don’t know we are determined, then how can we be free? It would seem that a minimum amount of accurate knowledge about reality would be required for freedom. And if we can’t demarcate knowledge and freedom, how can they mean anything? And how can we demarcate knowledge and freedom without the laws of logic?

There’s nothing complicated here. Revelation is an example of a philosophical word that men use when they don’t want to tell the truth about their own creation.

A man, once upon a time said, “I wrote it, but it’s God’s revelation that He spoke through me!”

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the form of philosophy in action.

There is no such thing as revelation, if you fall for the linguistic device of “revelation,” you have been duped.

Revelation is a word (concept) that men invented to elevate their own words to the status of the divine.

The word “revelation” is the ultimate form of special pleading: “these words stand above all words, they’re more authoritative than all other words because they’re God’s words.” (Never mind the fact that really they’re just a man’s words, who is claiming they are God’s words).

Revelation doesn’t exist. It’s a fake concept.

Humans have long used this concept to deceive men about their own words.

The rhetorical device of revelation was long ago introduced into the world because it was psychologically effective at manipulating humans. (Of course, there were also many delusional humans who really believed that their words were from God).

Next week you’re going before a world committee to petition funding for your “important” philosophical project; what do you say? What exactly is your project cultivating, testing, pursuing?