On The Importance of Attacks and Refutations

To claim that a philosophy is not good because it has been refuted is like claiming that the soccer game was pointless because neither team scored a goal. The major philosophies have been attacked and refuted several times. But the attacks have actually strengthened these philosophies, enabling them to dominate our culture and politics. Philosophical criticism makes a philosophy relevant by placing it in the historical context. The worst thing that can happen to a philosophy is neglect by other schools. For instance, the twentieth century philosophy of Existentialism became popular in the 1960s when Jean-Paul Sartre was at the peak of his career and was being attacked by many other philosophers. But after the 1980s, the philosophers started ignoring Sartre and that pushed Existentialism into oblivion.