I’m a Math and Finance Major. I am taking all required Major courses and have room for one class to fulfill a liberal studies requirement. I found two that both fulfill the same requirements, but I can’t decide which would be better, i.e. more informative and educational and hopefully enjoyable. They are:
They both sound great, and I might well wind up taking both, but I just wanted to hear some experienced voices on what would be more useful. And any other random college advice you have, I accept graciously and thankfully.
I would probably try to find out about the professors who teach each of the classes, and if any of them are particularly interesting, informative, boring, hard, or whatever. You might find out that the professor for one of those classes is really cool and the other is a total tool. Or if one guy teaches them both, just go with whatever fits into your schedule best.
Logic and Logic Notation is a course in basic symbolic logic, right? If you want to go to grad school in math or finance, something like that can only help. Argument Analysis will likely be a more generalist course (and perhaps aimed at people who can’t quite keep up with symbolic logic), but there is a chance that it could be more interesting. The professor matters more for the second one.
Almost everything offered by the Philosophy Department is going to be useless in your career or day to day life. The only factor you should really consider is which class you think would be most enjoyable.
I took a number of philosophy classes in college and have found them to be enormously helpful in my career. (Sorry, treis.) They’re helpful for a couple of reasons, including the connection between philosophy and the law (I’m a lawyer) and the way it encourages you to approach issues from a number of perspectives.
That said, I agree with Justin Credible that the real issue is who the professors are. I took a number of really boring-sounding classes with awesome professors, and I loved those classes. I took a couple cool-sounding classes with terrible professors, and wanted to gnaw my left arm off during class.
I’d talk to other students and find out about the profs. As a last resort, you can use one of those “rate your professors” websites. I view those with a grain of salt, because it seems to attract the lunatic fringe. (As a sidenote, my mom’s a professor, and the comments about her on one of those websites are pretty accurate, I think. Except for the handful of nutjobs who go off on how mean she is for not giving them A’s when they didn’t show up to class ever, do any homework, and failed the test. As I said, the lunatic fringe.)
What year are you? I took a course in symbolic logic during my sophomore year at the same time as starting proof writing for my math courses. The SL class and my intro to proofs class paralleled each other really well, but there were some confusing points when I got notation mixed up. Overall, I’d say the logic course helped me out in my math major more than the argument course did. I was lucky, though, that they were both taught by the same professor who happened to be a really good professor. As with all classes, that makes a difference.