Why Philosophy Matters: What 'Philosophy' Means and What the Research Says It Does

Start herePhilosophy's oldest meaning is simply a love of knowing. Yet one of its most famous lines says the unexamined life is not worth living. So is philosophy a pastime for the curious, or a way to live?

Philosophy can sound like the least practical subject there is. Yet its oldest meaning is close to everyday life: a love of knowing, followed by asking questions. This page looks at where the word comes from and the famous stories about it. Then it looks at what research says philosophy does for the people who practise it.

011. A simple example

Suppose a friend says that everyone is selfish deep down. You could agree, or argue back. Or you could ask two questions. What would count as an unselfish act? And what would change your mind?

Asking those questions out loud, with another person, is close to philosophy as Socrates described it. The rest of this page shows why.

022. What the word means

The English word came through Old French and Latin from the Greek philosophia. That word comes from philosophos, a “lover of wisdom”.

In the standard dictionary of ancient Greek, the first meaning of philosophia is “love of knowledge”, its pursuit, and speculation. A second meaning is the “systematic, methodical treatment” of a subject. The entry’s first examples for that sense are from Isocrates and Plato.

Our reading: “love of wisdom” is a fair reading of the word’s parts. In use, the word also meant loving and pursuing knowledge.

033. Did Pythagoras invent the word?

A famous story says he did. The Roman writer Cicero tells it in his Tusculan Disputations, citing Heraclides of Pontus, “a pupil of Plato”.

In the story, Leon, the ruler of Phlius, asks Pythagoras what art he practises. Pythagoras answers that he knows no art, but is a philosopher. Then he compares life to the great games, where people come for different reasons:

• some come for glory;
• some come to buy and sell;
• and the best come only to watch, out of curiosity.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy treats this as a later story, for three main reasons:

• It is first found in Heraclides, in Plato’s school, more than a century after Pythagoras died.
• It appeared in a dialogue, not in a history or a biography.
• Its picture of a philosopher, someone between ignorance and knowledge, is “thoroughly Platonic”.

The scholar Walter Burkert argued in 1960 that it could not belong to the historical Pythagoras. Not everyone agrees. In 2005 the scholar Christoph Riedweg defended part of the story, and the entry’s author, Carl Huffman, has replied.

Can't confirm We can’t confirm that Pythagoras coined the word, and the evidence leans against it. The story is late, and its idea of a philosopher is Plato’s.

044. Socrates and the examined life

A famous line about why philosophy matters comes from Plato’s Apology. It is Plato’s version of the speech Socrates gave in his own defence at his trial.

In Benjamin Jowett’s translation, Socrates says that daily talk about virtue, “examining myself and others”, is “the greatest good of man”. Then comes the famous line: “the unexamined life is not worth living”.

Our reading: the examined life, as Socrates describes it, is a daily practice. It happens in talk, and it includes other people.

Holds up The line is genuine, as Plato reports it, and its setting makes it a call to shared, daily questioning. More famous lines are checked on our page of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle quotes.

055. What the research says

Does it make people better thinkers?

A 2024 review by Michael Prinzing and Michael Vazquez found that philosophers, on average, are better at logical reasoning, more reflective and more open-minded than non-philosophers. But it found “an absence of evidence” that studying philosophy caused those differences. Their early evidence suggested some differences might come from the training and others from selection: who chooses philosophy in the first place.

In 2025 the same two authors published a larger study. It used records from over half a million US undergraduates.

• Students with stronger verbal skills, who were also more curious and open-minded, were more likely to study philosophy.
• After allowing for those starting differences, philosophy majors still outperformed all other majors. They did so on verbal and logical reasoning tests (GRE and LSAT scores the students reported themselves) and on a self-report measure of habits of mind.

The authors call this “the strongest evidence to date” that studying philosophy makes people better thinkers. They also name a limit: the SAT scores they adjust for may not fully capture earlier differences in logical reasoning. It is one team’s analysis of US records, not a randomised trial.

Partly The claim that studying philosophy makes you a better thinker now has some support. That support is recent, comes from one team and US records, and is not experimental.

Philosophy for children: two trials that disagree

Philosophy for Children, or P4C, has pupils discuss philosophical questions in groups. The aim is to make children more willing and able to ask questions, build arguments and reason together. Two trials in English primary schools tested it.

The first trial, reported in 2015. It ran in 48 schools, randomly assigned school by school. Pupils in Years 4 and 5 had about one P4C lesson a week for a year. They made about two months’ extra progress in reading and maths. The evaluators rated the findings’ security as moderate. The report notes the comparison group started with slightly better scores, so results were given as progress from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2.

The second trial, reported in 2021. It was larger: 75 schools used P4C and 123 did not, with pupils in Year 6. It found no evidence that P4C improved reading or maths. Not every school delivered it fully. Two years after the start, 35 of the 75 schools were not running P4C at the expected level, and six had not run it at all. The funder says this could have affected the results. It also found no evidence of better social and communication skills on the pupil survey. The funder rates its main result 5 out of 5 for security.

Teachers liked it in both. In the first, teachers and pupils reported more confidence to speak and better listening. In the second, teachers felt pupils respected others’ opinions more.

Still argued Does philosophy for children raise test scores? The two trials disagree, and we lean against the claim. The second trial was larger and its main result is rated more secure, though many of its schools did not deliver the programme fully. Teachers’ views are impressions, not test results. The funder still says schools using P4C for reasons other than test results should not be discouraged.

What helps thinking in general

A 2015 review drew on 341 effect sizes from studies of teaching critical thinking. The average gain was 0.30 standard deviations: real, but modest. Three things helped: chances for dialogue, real-world problems and examples, and mentoring.

Our reading: those three are close to what Socrates described, and what P4C tries to do. Talk, real questions, and someone who pushes back. Our page on critical thinking in the age of AI looks at this research in more detail.

066. How to practise philosophy

• Turn a belief into a question. Discuss it with someone who sees it differently.
• Use a real problem. Pick something from your own week, not an abstract puzzle.
• Ask what would change your mind. Do it before you argue, not after.
• Find someone who pushes back. A reading partner who pushes back is close to what the research calls mentoring.
• Learn a few tools. Our pages on mental models from philosophy and logical fallacies are a good place to start.

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How we checked this · Last checked October 2026

• We read Cicero's Tusculan Disputations and Plato's Apology in Project Gutenberg, the Greek dictionary entry on Perseus, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Pythagoras.
• For the 2025 philosophy-majors study we read the open-access article, including its note that the test scores and habits-of-mind measure were self-reported; for the 2024 review, the abstract.
• For the two trials of philosophy for children we read the 2015 evaluation report, the 2021 NFER summary and the funder's project pages. We lean against a test-score gain because the second trial was larger and rated more secure, though 35 of its 75 schools were not running it at the expected level; the first trial's comparison group started with slightly better scores.

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