Just as philosophy and science differ in their problems and methods, so do they correspondingly differ in the value or utility of the results they achieve. When, in the years I used to teach philosophy, a student would come up and say "This is all very interesting, but of what use is it?" I answered him by saying "Of no use at all -- in your sense of utility." I had learned from experience that the contemporary student has only one standard of utility in mind when he asks about the utility of knowledge -- that which is applicable to science, but not at all to philosophy.

The utility of science is technological or productive. It builds bridges and cures diseases. But scientific knowledge can also, of course, be used to bomb bridges and to scatter disease on the winds. Science gives us atomic or thermonuclear energy for constructive or destructive purposes, but it does not tell us whether to make peace or war, or how to govern a just and free society, or how men can become wise and happy after they have been made powerful and comfortable.

Philosophical knowledge produces absolutely nothing. But where science has a technological or productive utility, philosophy has a practical or moral utility. It cannot tell men how to make things, but it can direct them toward making a good rather than an evil use of them. It directs the conduct of the individual life and of society by the moral and political truths it is able to teach about war and peace, justice, liberty, and law, duty, virtue, and happiness.

When Bacon said "knowledge is power," he was thinking only of productive power, and hence only of scientific knowledge. Power without wisdom is a dangerous thing, since it can be used for good or evil; and the more power we have, the greater is the catastrophe we risk bringing upon ourselves by its misuse. That is our situation today, in a world dominated by science, from which philosophy has been effectively exiled.

This essay first appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, XIII April 1957.