By Godwin Sogolo
The Useless Disciplines, By Godwin Sogolo
Continued from yesterday
History teaches us to remember and learn from the past as a guide to the future. Literature cultivates empathy by enabling us to inhabit lives beyond our own. Philosophy trains the mind to reason clearly, detect fallacies, and question assumptions; linguistics and languages foster effective communication; the arts promote and preserve imagination, identity, and the emotional truths that statistics cannot capture. Religion, in turn, attends to the spiritual dimension of human existence.
The more profound truth is that even the sciences themselves owe a debt to the so-called useless disciplines. Logic, as a branch of philosophy, underlies mathematics and computer science; ethics provide guidance to medicine and medical research while political philosophy helps in shaping constitutional democracy. Is it not true that linguistics enriches communication technologies? That is why the boundary between “useful” and “useless” is not only misleading, but utterly false.
No doubt, Nigeria urgently needs doctors, engineers, agronomists, innovators, and entrepreneurs. But it also requires citizens who can think critically, leaders capable of sound judgment, and institutions guided by humane values. Technical competence without moral intelligence can become a dangerous form of efficiency. Indeed, the disciplines so often dismissed as “useless” are those upon which we depend to ensure that society itself does not collapse.
The earliest investigators of nature – Aristotle, Pythagoras, Democritus, and others – asked questions about motion, matter, causation, number, and change. They sought rational explanations for natural phenomena rather than relying solely on myth or superstition. This shift from mythic explanation to reasoned inquiry was one of philosophy’s greatest gifts to science. It established the principle that the world is intelligible and can be investigated through thought and observation.
Furthermore, the very methods of science owe much to philosophy. What counts as evidence? How do we distinguish knowledge from opinion? Can observation alone yield truth, or must hypotheses guide inquiry? These were the philosophical questions asked by Francis Bacon and others who first emphasised empirical observation and induction, thereby helping to shape experimental science.
Philosophy continues to equip humanity to question, reason, classify, test, and reflect. Logic has been foundational to the development of computing, while ethics guides the responsible application of technological innovation. Language on, on the other hand, enables the communication and dissemination of discovery; history preserves collective memory; literature enlarges the scope of human imagination. It is, therefore, wrong to claim that science and technology stand apart from the humanities. They rest, in part, upon the foundations built by the humanities themselves.
Even the most advanced developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) draw, not only on science and technology – algorithms, data structures, and software engineering – but also on the humanities, especially philosophy and the study of language. AI, in particular, owes a profound debt to philosophical inquiry, which for centuries has posed foundational questions: What is intelligence? What is reasoning? What distinguishes mind from matter? What is knowledge? It was Aristotle who developed formal logic, a precursor to computational reasoning, while Alan Turing famously asked whether machines can think.
To neglect the humanities, especially philosophy, is to forget the intellectual roots of modern civilisation itself. Nigeria and other developing societies can draw an important lesson from this history. True, all nations need engineers, doctors, and programmers; but they also need philosophers, historians, writers, and ethicists who help define wise purposes for technical power. A society may acquire machines rapidly yet remain poor in judgment.
Two examples may serve to illustrate the cost of neglecting the so-called “useless” disciplines in a society. The first is the United States of America, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, with some of the finest minds across both the sciences and the humanities. Yet, at a critical moment, its political machinery faltered, producing leadership that has left the nation visibly unsettled, with strains evident in its institutional fabric – even in an era characterised by remarkable scientific and technological achievement, such as renewed journeys to the moon.
The second example is Nigeria, a country richly endowed with both natural and human resources. For decades, its scientists, innovators, and scholars in the humanities have been sought after across the world. Yet, despite this abundance, the nation continues to grapple with deep social and institutional challenges. Here too, the humanities appear not to have sufficiently shaped the moral and civic foundations required to hold society together, and, as it were, things seem to be falling apart.
Ultimately, the issue is not whether some disciplines are “useful” and others “useless,” but how a balanced educational system might integrate practical competence with critical and intellectual depth. It is in this equilibrium that the true promise of university education resides.
Concluded.
Sogolo is an Emeritus Professor who has taught and conducted research in Philosophy for over five decades – first at the University of Ibadan and currently at the National Open University of Nigeria. He also served as a member of the Editorial Board of The Guardian Newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s.
In this article