Anyway, I recently got into an argument about what is more important, maths or philosophy (I say argument, it was more me making a snarky comment during someone else's conversation). I came down in favour of maths, but a few years ago I had the same conversation (though that time it was actually more of an argument) and defended philosophy. I'm a bit of a view-point slut. But the reason I changed my mind was not really because a change in how I prioritised the fields, but more how I categorised them. For me maths has little to do with numbers really, that's numeracy. The way maths is taught is like teaching A-level English students how to spell as the core of the subject: it's useful, but it's not really the core of the subject. No, the core of maths is really logic, things which can be shown to be true and the implications that those things have on other things.
When I get a new formula or function I like to generalise by following through the procedures involved without using numbers. I feel this gives me a better understanding of what is actually happening to those numbers and why. So what does this have to do with philosophy? Well, ethics can really be seen as a series of formulas which balance different variables and give an answer of right or wrong. They are very generalised formulas in many respects, but even more so they are undefined in many ways. The greatest flaw of ethics is the inability to agree on what those variables should be. Should happiness be the ultimate goal, or a lack of suffering? Is self actualisation important or not? Should happiness be measured per individual or as society at large? These are all variables in the word formulas that make up ethics. If it were possible to completely define and quantify what is important it would likely be a simple task for a computer to tell you if an action is moral or not. Currently it is only possible to build on any chosen set of values and building from there. In this respect a lot of ethics is no better than theology. That's not to say the steps in these ways of thinking are illogical, for example utilitarianism is a good example of a whole system of thinking that has developed given a certain set of rules in a perfectly logical manner (it is similar to economic theory in this, and other respects), but rather that the systems developed are rather useless in the real world as without a consensus on the most fundamental aspects these systems of thought develop in different directions entirely, in a similar way to religious denominations, until the point that the systems of thought become so different they become completely incompatible with one another and then you're essentially left with a group of warring sects all fighting for their own point of view.
Of course ethics is only one branch of philosophy, but I feel that the development of schools of thought that I've described here should be transferable in principle with most other branches.
What I'm saying is that philosophy will forever be an incomplete attempt to use logic to build systems of thought with imaginary foundations. That's not to say it's not worthwhile, I believe philosophy is a very important field, just that it is nothing without logic. And logic must coexist with maths. In short philosophy is the study of reason, whereas maths is simply reason. So that is why I feel maths will forever be more the more important of the two.
That went a bit deeper than I anticipated and lacked my normal level of humour. Though where I wrote "warring sects" I struggled not to put a "warring sex" joke in. Wow, I really need to pack.
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