Not much. But then degrees are not for anything, except the sordid matter of getting jobs. What is philosophy useful for? What is useful? One has to philosophise just to answer the question.
The pragmatic conclusion is got from what universities provide, those bodies having to respond to demand. They provide popular (in the best sense of the word) courses in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, which is what ‘leaders’ of society, whether actual politicians or not, often find useful subjects to master. Now what all of these three subjects have in common is the contribution of history; and together they often achieve a more fruitful understanding of history, in a more dynamic way, than actual history courses do. The politics of any one state at any one time is always formed by its past. Economics, itself a powerful factor in politics, is always based on the experience of the past. Philosophers have undoubtedly influenced the past, even if they don’t, much, now.
And that, imv, is the clue. There are those who say that philosophy is dead. The evidence imv is seen all around us, in the nihilism of modern art, whether visual, musical or literary; and philosophy, or now, it’s absence, has always been a formative factor in art, even in popular novels. One might say that visual art came to a halt with, say, Picasso’s Guernica, music with, say, Stockhausen’s Kontakte, or perhaps Schoenberg’s Gurre-lieder, and literature with some similarly significant works in whatever language and genre one is considering. Two world wars of course had something to do with it. My own view is that Sartre consummated philosophy, and nobody will ever gainsay him. But if philosophers really now have nothing to say, they are like everyone else, except perhaps hopeful Marxists, or the biologists who say “Doom, doom!”
Though they both may be wrong, of course.
