I have taken two philosophy courses. For the most part it was a good exercise in logic in following a chain of reasoning so long as certain basic assumptions were first accepted as true. Unfortunately for me, I had a hard time accepting those (apparently self evident) assumptions…especially as they varied from philosopher to philosopher.
While interesting to a degree for the mental gymnastics involved in philosophy, I found the biological and physical sciences more to my liking, and majored/minored in them.
I have a friend with a degree in philosophy; while it has been personally enlightening, he has been unable to have a white collar job that utilizes his degree.
Question for the UK posters: I grok that the time at university in the UK is three years vs. the US four year regimen but I’m curious as to how the high schools prepare one for that. Are high schools in the US more academically rigorous (IOW: do they teach what would be required for students at a US university in the first or second year of university)?
Chronos: Seconding the WTF above. Just because you don’t like (or don’t really grasp the particulars) of a certain field in no way makes that field useless.
Honestly (and I apologize in advance for this), my opinion of philosophy is that it’s a generic tool for learning about the world that’s been vastly, ridiculously overpowered by the scientific method and modern math and science. The only spheres in which philosophy is still viable to any degree are vague, fuzzy ones— ethics, forays into metaphysics, theology, etc.— where philosophy doesn’t even offer any real answers. What used to be considered the domain of philosophy has been gradually but totally superseded by modern fields; now that we have neuroscience, linguistics, chemistry, geology, math, physics, etc., there’s not much left that philosophy is for. And I don’t mean practical applications here; my own field is theoretical math, but I find it a far superior platform for learning about the universe, logic, etc. than philosophy. Why would I care what philosophers say about, for example, logic, when there are gigantic math books on the matter that go into far more detail with far more precision and validity? I’m interested in linguists; why should i be interested in what philosophers have to say about it, rather than reading about neuroscience experiments in cognitive linguistics or government and binding theory?
To answer your specific questions:
Just the standard treatment of philosophy you’d get as a math major in undergrad.
Useful as in getting a job? Well, no more or less useful than any other liberal arts degree. (You’re certainly not going to use anything you’ve learned directly in a standard office job, but that would be true of virtually any major.) I have no idea what the academic market for philosophers is.
It’s not a complete waste of time, but it is a vastly inferior way of attempting to learn and understand compared to math and science. (Again, my apologies.) It also doesn’t produce anything of aesthetic or artistic value, unlike music, visual art, dance, etc. You could argue that intellectual discussions themselves have intrinsic value; I’d agree with you, but I’d still claim that the ones in philosophy are totally outclassed by the ones in science. For one thing, there’s a definite idea of correct and incorrect in the latter.
If you think there’s value in philosophy (and hopefully you do; if not, you might want to reconsider your program), then as a theoretical mathematician, how would philosophy be useful to me? Again, I’m not referring exclusively to practical applications here. I care deeply about learning and understanding new things, making discoveries, following logical and rational arguments, etc.; but I’ve never found anything like that in philosophy to bother with.
I think of philosophy as trying to understand big concepts without any tools beyond rational argument and no means to evaluate the validity or even soundness of those arguments. In math, for example, we do everything from scratch as well, but there’s a definite (and paramount) idea of what constitutes a valid proof. There isn’t anything like that in philosophy. In science, whether theoretical or experimental, it ultimately comes down to mathematical arguments (as far they go) or the results of reproduceable experiments. What makes a philosophical argument good or bad? Why should I not be dismayed by, for example, the Sokal affair? Again, in scientific fields, we have a version of quality control. What’s the equivalent in philosophy?
I think you’re confusing analytic philosophy with continental philosophy, or philosophy with postmodern literary criticism (or all of the above).
In the US and Britain, most philosophers are what are called “analytic philosophers.” These guys value tight logic and clear, succinct language. The Sokal affair wasn’t aimed at analytic philosophy. It was aimed at lit crit and continental philosophy–which values, well, things other than tight logic and clear succinct language.
In analytic philosophy, there are very clear standards for validity (basically the same ones you are probably familiar with in math) and as for soundness, we all agree that if you’re starting with true premises and your argument is valid then your argument is sound as well of course. But whereas in math you get to actually just stipulate your premises, philosophers are burdened with having premises that are always open to question. You can stipulate a premise in Philosophy, but this is always provisional, “for the sake of argument.” If all the people involved in the conversation agree with the premise, then it may never be argued… but some guy or gal could always come along and question it someday. I take it in math this would not be how things could go, since it’s not necessary to “dispute” any assumptions of a mathematical model–you just go build your own model.
I adore philosophy. I love the vast sweep of its history, and the intricate depth of the thoughts it has helped develop. I admire the search for truth in all its forms.
The “philosophic method” is different from the Scientific Method, in that it operates largely from simile and analogy. “As below, so above.” “The Part is Connected to the Whole.” etc. It’s an attempt to learn about truth from the very notion of ideas, words, thoughts, and forms themselves.
It has led to an appalling barrage of utter nonsense. But it has also led to ideals such as democracy, human rights, moral values, and even the Scientific Method.
It should be studied, at an introductory level, by any person who has an intention of becoming well-educated. Its history is the history of thought itself.
During college, I spent my junior year in the UK. In my not so humble opinion, British, European and Japanese graduates of secondary school operate at a higher level than graduates of US high schools, at least when comparing college bound students. US colleges tend to teach more intensively though: in the UK you might have 1 big test in a course at the end of an entire year for example. In the US, most colleges will have midterms and the problem sets will be graded more carefully. So, methinks the US college graduate has an edge.
What’s your impression of the Korean system? In Japan students supposedly work very hard in high school and slack off in college: the latter is sometimes called a 2nd childhood.
I liked the philosophy courses I took in college. It suffers a bit since its one of those fields (anthropology is another) where all the directly useful bits have been spun out into their own areas, so what’s left is the not (directly) useful bits. Natural philosophy became science, logic has largely been subsumed as part of mathematics and comp-sci, ethics is at least partially subsumed by theology, etc.
But even with what’s left, I enjoy it. Like literature or art, just because its not useful doesn’t mean you don’t get anything out of it or don’t enjoy it.
Trying to make a career out of it is probably a serious up-hill climb though. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue it, but you should probably keep a plan-B at the back of your mind.
In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Secondary School is a year longer than usual in the US system and in the final year is much like a freshman year at University. In Scotland it is similar to the US in that it is a year shorter and most degrees are four years.
My experience having completed the first five years of UK Secondary School, Senior Year of High School and first year of college in the US and then a Degree course in the UK (They tried to send me to Viet-Nam and I declined) is that the final year of UK secondary is equivalent broadly to a Freshman year in the US.
Amateur Philosopher here - multiple extension courses through Open University and Oxford University - and independently widely read.
Doing Philosophy makes one think carefully about whatever particular subject one is discussing- making one realise that most people discussing a subject do not question the validity of the assumptions of that subject about the world.
My interests are Moral Philosophy (I used to be a Clinical Nurse in Mental Health) and Philosophy of the subjects surrounding consciousness and Freedom of the Will, especially as it relates to Mental Health.
I have always found it useful, but the best definition I cam across was by an eminebt neuro-scientist (I forget who- it was in a compendium) who stated that Philosophy was incredibly valuable for his and other fields as despite it frequently getting all of the proposed answers wrong, it was the best method to find out what the correct question to ask in the first place was!
Technically, the South Korean system is based on the Japanese system. What happens in reality is that it’s pretty much up to the student if they want to get a good education. Study hard, do the homework (such as it is; I’ll explain shortly why there isn’t much homework from school), and don’t miss too many days of school and they will have an advantage over their peers. So long as they don’t miss too many days of school, they will be socially promoted to the next grade, even with horrific grades. South Korean society, generally, considers the schools to not provide a good enough education so there is a parallel system of hagweon (cram schools) for every subject plus a few things the parents want their children to learn. Besides all of the foregoing, secondary schools are in two tracks: there are the academic high schools and then there are the “trade high schools” (for want of a better term. Academic high schools are supposed to prepare their students for university; trade high schools are supposed to prepare their students for life in whichever trade is listed in the school name; however, trade school graduates can apply to and enter university. Once the students are at university, the 2nd childhood syndrome does rear its head. There’s also the issue, not present in Japan, that male students must perform national service, usually in the military.
Do you meant that there are 13 years of schooling from the first year of elementary school to the last year of high school? Very many places in the US divide their schools into elementary, middle school or junior high school, and high school or senior high school: elementary->middle->high or elementary->junior high->senior high. Elementary will have six grades and the other two will have three grades each. But that’s really for convenience/logistics/funding. Primary education is generally first through eighth grades and secondary education is ninth through twelfth grades. At least that’s the way it appeared on every college application I had to complete in my life.
Aside: What do you mean they tried to send you to Vietnam? Who’s they and how could you decline? To fend off anyone else’s argument: there’s no judgment here; just curiosity.
England has schools that start with Reception’ at 4 and have an additional seven years primary and seven years to A Levels that are university admission level. Scotland has seven primary and six secondary from age 5.
I was a short term green card holder and when my parents returned to the UK I was classified out of state and dropped out of university as I could not afford the tuition. I came in the nineties in the lottery and was classified 1A and would have been drafted. I returned to the UK instead.
Look, I think you are a bit misguided here. If you are claiming that my degree is a bullshit degree because we only do one subject, then you are committed to saying that almost every degree in Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, LSE and Imperial college are bullshit degrees. All of these are universities in the global top 50.
If you think that I don’t have enough of a ‘broad’ outlook to understand philosophy, then tell that to the head of the faculty here at Cambridge, to 90% percent of my lecturers, to around 50% of the faculty members of the top 20 philosophy departments in the world, etc., who also had a bachelor’s degree in pure philosophy.
And in any case, A levels in Britain are much more rigorous than the American high school curriculum. In fact, some of them are harder than the respective college board APs. So by the time you go into university you’ve already had a good share of ‘general education’.
I think you really are talking from a very misinformed perspective here.
My grandfather was a philosopher, for starters. I took one philosophy course in college. (I was a computer science major.) That course was on political philosophy: we read Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, Marx, Ayn Rand, and Nagel, if I recall correctly.
It was only after leaving college that I realized that my college education had omitted most of what would traditionally have been considered a true education, so I set about trying to educate myself. Since then I’ve dabbled in philosophy and read some of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Bertrand Russell, William James, C. S. Lewis, George Orwell, and some others. I’ve learned the most about philosophy from G. K. Chesterton, who was not a professional philosopher, but rather a journalist.
I haven’t looked into how philosophy majors fair on the job market in the US, much less in other countries. I’d hazard a guess that it’s not as useless as the truly useless majors like sociology, gender studies, etc…
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to view philosophy. Either it’s contending with the most important questions of human existence, or else it’s a bunch of meaningless noodling. Or to put it another way, one can take philosophy seriously, or one can choose not to. And I think both viewpoints are totally defensible. There are certainly some philosophers and some whole schools of thought which are very difficult to take seriously. And there are some philosophers whose work doesn’t seem very different from pure nonsense. (Heidegger comes to mind.) And even among individual philosophers or schools of thought that I tend to agree with, there’s a lot of pomposity.
Yet I agree with my buddy Chesterton, who said, “Men act from ideas; it might, therefore, be as well to discover which ideas.” Ideas have shaped the course of history. Ideas explain why life is very different in some parts of the world compared to others. The ideas that we’d generally call philosophy, as well as theology, have played a large role in that. The notion that only math and (physical) science have been really important is, as a plain matter of historical fact, false. Physical science itself is a result of certain philosophical and theological ideas.
Sure. I think philosophy gives people a richer and deeper sense of the meaning of things, even if that meaning isn’t always precisely well-defined like you’d find in pure mathematics.
For example- I studied philosophy (plus math and physics). One thing it has done for me is give me a clear sense that a lot of people who studied accounting or business have been trained in a worldview (a philosophy!) every bit as much as a homeschooled Tim Tebow type, or a guy out of a madrassa or Buddhist monastery. The difference is that they seem to be completely unaware of this fact, even while it informs half of what they say and most of what they do.
Of course not every business major turns out this oblivious. But I think if philosophy was taught to more Americans we would have less internal conflict. We’d have less aggressive Evangelicals, not much Tea Party, libertarians wouldn’t be taken seriuosly, there would be no Rand Pauls or Paul Brouns and so on. These and other unaware forces tend to be the drivers of the kind of phenomenon portrayed in that piece of music I linked, generating an unintentional horror story and suffering on a vast scale.
I studied philosophy and I’m doing all right. I have a 6 figure income and a hot, interesting girlfriend plus a nice place to live. You couldn’t put me on a pedestal above everyone else as some kind of prime example or anything, but if I ever become truly successful I’m likely to go into philanthropy or politics or community development, something like that, and not heroin and whoring &etc.
My uninformed, layman’s view is that a degree like this, where you study only philosophy, would be less helpful than an American-style education where you major in philosophy but take a variety of other courses as well. Because philosophy isn’t something you do for its own sake, but because of the light it sheds on other parts of life.
And this is a case in point: I think that scientists would benefit from taking at least a course or two in philosophy, including the philosophy of the science they study, for a look at the How and Why of what they’re doing. Just as “the unexamined life is not worth living,” the unexamined science is not worth doing.
I may be wrong about this—but to discuss whether and why I’m wrong would involve doing philosophy.
And, there’s nontrivial overlap between philosophy and theoretical mathematics.
