O.K., now that I’ve had a looksee at what you major in, could you tell us what job field you plan on applying this degree to, and what such a job might pay? If you don’t plan on using this degree to get a job, could you tell us what your career goals are after you leave school?
As part of my liberal arts degree, I took four college level philosophy and a couple theology courses. My wife, however, majored in philosophy.
It was a core requirement, but I also took a couple electives because I found the topic fascinating. I think it was and is, an important part of living a full life, for both me and my wife.
As I said, my wife graduated college with a philosophy degree, and she found it interesting, challenging, and not too useful in day to day work. She went on to get a law degree and her career is in law, so a degree was necessary, but philosophy in particular wasn’t a huge help. Much of the usefulness of a degree is in what career you plan. If you’re planning on being an academic in philosophy, I would imagine a degree in the same would be incredibly useful. If you’re going into law, shopkeeping, office work, or dentistry, it’s likely not much use.
I’ve found philosophy, as a part of life, to be an integral part of living a happy, fully realized life, and utterly useless in the working world. It is not a waste of time at all, although I can see people who have no interest in analyzing their life or dealing with larger issues would have no use for it, which is a shame for them.
But philosophy as a career is something different. There simply isn’t much call for it in the working world outside of academics, and I don’t think a degree is viewed well by the people who make hiring decisions. While it is clearly a benefit to helping have a well-rounded life, I don’t think it’s necessary for a job.
Hope that helps.
I totally agree with this, though I do not agree with the specifics of what would happen if everyone studied philosophy. I’d even go a step farther: the fact that the wisdom gained from philosophy isn’t precisely defined is a good thing, helping to balance out the number-and-statistic-obsessed approach to knowledge that we encounter elsewhere.
That sounds interesting! Do you remember what kind of philosophy you did in the courses you took? Can you elaborate on what you mean by saying that it is part of living a full life?
Well, here it is actually quite popular to do a law conversion course and then become a lawyer. Lots of people also go into finance, marketing and journalism. But again, it is quite different from America. I think I kind of get the picture why there are these differences, but that would be too long-winded a discussion…
As a non-philosopher, I feel like I have all the necessary qualifications to respond to this OP.
Philosophy, much like poetry, is one of those things that may help make life worth living, but I would not expect or advise anyone to try make a living doing it.
Also, at parties, philosophers and poets only start to become interesting after about 6 drinks.
I’ll let my nephew know. He graduated 5 years ago with a degree in Philosophy. For a while he wrote term papers for a living. Then he taught English in China for 3 months before being deported (long story). He has done some acting, and waited tables as well.
I’ve heard things like this, but it doesn’t jive with what my philosophy classes were about. What do you mean “analyzing their life” or “dealing with larger issues?” I think I have a pretty good understanding of my life. I’m not sure what “larger issues” I could deal with that would make my life fuller and richer. I mean no disrespect to **Hamlet **here, just trying to get concrete, which seems to never happen in discussions of philosophy. Things like other posters bring up, like “this is the study of ideas” is also incredibly vague and unhelpful. If philosophy is the reason we have democracy and public libraries, then I’m all for it. I’m not sure, however, that’s what is usually meant by the term.
I certainly would love a field of study debating “freedom,” but do we really need to spend time debating truth, existence and reality?
Yes. It’s how you get the hot & smart girl to sleep with you.
I read through about half the posts in this thread so far, and I thought perhaps I should first get down what I want to write in response to the OP upfront, before getting lost in other’s posts.
So:
- I have no formal education in philosophy, but have tried to read up on some issues that interest me in the past few years, and tried to get at least some general-purpose roadmap overview.
1a. I’m a physicist, and I’m very interested in foundational issues in quantum mechanics, and those are simply typically tackled better and with greater care in the philosophical than in the physics literature. There’s also been a certain recognition that scientists trying to talk about fundamental issues, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology etc., frequently end up making a fool out of themselves due to failing to appreciate the depth of a field they are insufficiently familiar with, and thus, thinking they know more than they do. I wanted to try my best to avoid this.
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I think that it’s generally undervalued as a degree, that is, it probably gives you worse job chances than might be fair given the skills learned obtaining the degree. Personally, from what little philosophy I studied, I think it’s not an easy subject, and really mastering it takes a certain degree of intellectual versatility that’s useful for more ‘real world’ applications, too.
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Most people don’t realize it, but we’re steeped in philosophy. Our system of government is the result of centuries of philosophical dispute, our justice system likewise; the shaping and guiding function on society by philosophy is widely underappreciated. Art movements often have a philosophical component, and even the sciences are greatly influenced by the currents of contemporary philosophical thought, though most scientists today would happily claim otherwise.
Of course, I also don’t believe that science and philosophy can in any way be cleanly demarcated, they’re part of the same structure; those who tout science’s superiority to philosophy as a method of inquiry upon the world seem to forget that science sprouted from philosophy, precisely from the refinement of methods for empirical inquiry, which are only a part of the purview of philosophy.
In a sense, modern science and philosophy as a whole don’t have the same goals, and scientists trying to evaluate philosophy using their standards of successful inquiry are using the wrong instruments. Science is interested in a different kind of knowledge, let’s call it empirical for want of a better term, while philosophy is more broadly engaged in analysis, in evaluating and unpacking the content of certain positions. Scientific knowledge is aimed at reduction, while in philosophy, expansion can be a worthwhile result, opening up new viewpoints on old questions.
This I think is at the root of the often heard ‘philosophy produces no results’-canard: the results philosophy produces are not the results scientists expect, not the simple uncovering of factual statements about the world. Rather, a new way to view an old dispute may be a very interesting philosophical result, while it’s ‘all talk’ from the scientist’s POV. Scientists say, “all A’s are B”, philosophers say “you can believe X and Y, but only if you accept V and W”—an analysis of the consistency and prerequisites of a position, rather than an assessment of its factual applicability in the world.
In a sense, philosophy provides the grounds for more specialized methods of inquiry to take over; in order to even be able to start doing science, numerous philosophical issues must be settled—one has to decide against rationalism, hold that empirical methods uncover truths of an actually existing outside world, etc. In a sense, scientists complaining about the lack of results and fuzziness of discourse in philosophy are sitting on the branches of a tree, where they find the juciest fruits, and wondering why one ever would need a tree in the first place—starting with the fruits would have fully sufficed!
- I think I probably partly answered that in the rambling above, but again, my concept of philosophy is one of analysis and examination of the prerequisites of certain widely held, intuitive, or ‘obvious’ beliefs and thoughts about the world and humans in it.
Philosophers, in their daily work, probably do much the same things theoretical physicists do: read papers, stare off into space, occasionally scribble things down furiously.
What amazed me when I looked at that site were the jobs being offered in minor institutions that I wouldn’t expect to teach philosophy at all.
All of the listings are for professors…but not just at 4-year universities.
There were lots of jobs offered to teach philosophy at 2-year technical colleges. And also at community colleges where (reading between the lines) the entire focus of the institution seems to be on helping disadvantaged kids get out of the ghetto.
I’ve always considered philosophy and engineering to be complementary. Imagine a nice, shiny stone resting at your feet. Philosophy will suggest whether you should bother picking it up, and engineering will suggest how far you can throw it 
Well, specifically, I was thinking of the claim by one philosopher that there could not be an eighth planet, because there were seven planets, seven apertures into the human skull, and seven metals. Clearly, he’s reasoning along the lines of “above/below,” or by analogy.
(Googling this, I find it attributed to Hegel, but with some doubts. It may not have been something he actually wrote.)
ETA: Just wanted to shout-out my favorite modern philosopher, Jonathan Glover. His book “What Sort Of People Should There Be?” had a huge moral and epistemological influence on me.
Where philosophy has come up in my life has been in the area surrounding the arguments and debates, both within and outside of academia, in various fields. Ground-rules discussions. Mostly rules about what you can and cannot assert without first arguing for its merits, what I call the “You Can’t Just Say That” game.
In various academic departments, some viewpoints or perspectives are established already as jumping-off points; you’re allowed to refer to the concepts from those viewpoints with a wave-of-the-hand and immediately proceed onward to whatever it was you wanted to say, without first having to develop, buttress, or defend your use of those concepts. OTHER viewpoints or perspectives, on the other hand, don’t enjoy that kind of favor, so you can’t jump off from them but instead first have to build your jumping-off platform in the first chunk of your presentation or the first handful of pages (or chapters) of what you’re writing.
Example (from Sociology): Marxist-derived concepts such as class struggle, class interests, adversarial relationship based on socioeconomic status, oppression on this basis, class consciousness, etc, are things you can refer to with a wave of the hand; everyone knows what the terms mean and it’s considered legitimate to treat these aspects of social situation and structure as established things. That everyone seeks maximum power, that maintaining power at the expense of others’ autonomy is both inevitable and necessary, is allowed to be taken for granted in explaining any specific phenomenae being studied. Feminism-derived concepts, on the other hand, enjoy no such authority. Referring to a social structure as “patriarchal” provokes requests to justify the use of the term, to first lay the foundation by providing evidence that a patriarchy does in fact exist and that social structures exhibiting certain features are “patriarchal” because of how those specific features operate. That power-aggrandizement is itself a patriarchal characteristic is not something one can simply reference in passing as one would the marxist-derived notions such as class consciousness, and instead it must be introduced anew, defended, then the specific example introduced, the ways in which it is a representative example defended, and so forth.
Example (from English Lit): Poststructuralism-derived concepts such as the discursive context, the text, the hegemony of language, the deterministic nature of one’s social location in culture and time, the construction of meaning, are the set of things you can refer to with the hand-wave; people making a case for a certain interpretation of a work can reference any of these ideas without having to introduce them or defend them and begin immediately to build upon them, or can reference any of these ideas as full explanation and defense of any assertion that can be made to appear to be derived from them. Different formulations, such as hermeneutics, which do not privilege language in the same way and theorize about meaning and reading and text from an interactionist perspective, don’t have that same authority, though, and if you try to analyze a work using terms or ideas from these alternative formulations, you find that instead you must first introduce and defend your starting points.
I encounter the same YCJST-game problems in other contexts as well, especially politics and social causes.
Anyway, as you can see, it’s a quick trip into epistemology and sometimes metaphysics as well if you refuse to play YCJST by the rules they’re used to playing by. Making people back up and realize that certain terms they toss around as if they referred to something as unproblematic and bricklike in their self-evident “just-thereness” are actually dependent on axioms and premises, and that there’s nothing innately preordained about the set that they start with (and allow you to start with) as unchallenged beginning points and so on.
One thing that will become clear if you read the main movers and shakers in philosophical history is that one can’t slice philosophy into discrete debates so easily. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Karl Marx all had different views of what government should do. Living in a society based on Locke’s ideas is very different from living in a society based on Marx’s ideas. But why did they have different political philosophies? Because of their different overall philosophies. Hobbes believed that human beings naturally and inevitably seek their own interest and, in the absence of a strong ruler, war inevitably breaks out as a result. Locke believed in that humans have free will to choose a better approach to life, and that a government existed to protect rights, thereby enabling better choices. Marx believed that class identity shaped destiny, and that history was inevitably moving towards a certain type of society with a certain type of government.
Well, even in science, that quality control sometimes works less than perfectly, and thankfully, such lapses aren’t sufficient to condemn a whole discipline—otherwise, the Bogdanov affair would be as daming for physics as one might hold the Sokal affair to be for philosophy.
But the larger issue is that the Sokal affair really is one of the paradigm examples of not seeing eye to eye between disciplines due to the use of different tools, different focus, different methods, etc. Ultimately, Sokal misses the point in condemning Social Text because his article contained physical nonsense and nevertheless got published, because the factual content of the article isn’t necessarily what the editors were interested in.
Basically, to most of us, a text is a vehicle to transport certain statements, it’s in a sense transparent or intended to be so. What we ultimately care about is what it reveals—this, then, may stand up to factual examination, or fail to do so. But philosophers, a certain bent at least, have a different focus: for them, the object of interest is the text itself, with what it is about being somewhat secondary. This can be a very interesting subject of study: texts, in some way or another, do things with us or make us do things, provided they are understood; indeed, that a text does something with you may be considered as a sign that it was understood, or at least received—of course, an entirely unintelligible text may invoke a reaction of anger or disgust, for instance, in which case it’s received in a way different from deciphering its contents.
Additionally, texts are tokens of the social and cultural environment in which they are created, and allow inferences about them, if indeed you believe in anything outside of the text at all. And so on.
This may not necessarily be of interest to you, or Alan Sokal, and I’m not saying it should be, but I think it’s not something nobody could be interested in. Thus I think a little more caution is needed before denigrating entire fields of human inquiry—when they seem obviously mistaken from an outside perspective, it may just be that this perspective does not afford you the necessary breadth of view to fully appreciate it. I mean, take math: to the uninitiated, it’s all just a bunch of scribbles. But that just says something about them, not about the math.
Just in case you’re interested, there’s a bunch of essays by mathematician Gabriel Stolzenberg about the Sokal affair that take a similar stance that what Sokal ultimately succeeded in exposing was mostly just his ignorance of postmodern philosophy.
Excellent post, Half Man Half Wit (I refer to #50).
A year or two ago I got involved in some interesting back-and-forth on the Atlantic site over this article. I believe the answer is “no”, and that Lawrence Krauss is being intentionally provocative – because if he truly believes this, his intellectual horizon is disappointingly shallow.
I’ll start with mentions/highlights/praise/whatever before answering the questions.
I am for the spirit of what Frylock, Itself, ITR champion,and Half Man Half Wit wrote even if some of it might be contradictory.
I think of myself as a pseduo-amateur philosopher.
- Have you had any significant contact with philosophy? Of what kind? By this I mean something more than knowing that it exists, or coming to know about general attitudes and beliefs about it. For example, have you taken a course in philosophy, read some books, went to conferences, had a philosopher among your family or friends?
+Mmm…probably not, given your definition. I think way too much and tend to be the one (if given the opportunity) to posit philosophical discussions but aside from that my contact with philosophy isn’t formal. Most of my exposure with philosophy has been from the internet (forums such as this, Quora, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, wikipedia and their derivatives, etc).
- Independently of (1), what do you think about philosophy as a degree? Do you think it’s useless to have it as a degree? If so, why? What have you heard or read about its usefulness? Do you think it is easy/hard? Why?
+Personally I don’t think a philosophy degree is useless. Professionally, since our damn world is run by greed, poor impulse control, self entitlement, and general stupidity, it is not practical to possess unless you are able to make a living off of it (namely, becoming a professor) and even then…
Easy/hard is relative. If you’re able to put the drive into it, you can do it (assuming you can finance it).
- What do you think about the usefulness of philosophy in general? Again, do you think it is a waste of time? Why? Should it get any funding? Why?
+“Life is a waste of time, and time is a waste of life. Get wasted all the time, and you’ll have the time of your life!” the magnificent Billy Connolly
Since we are speaking generally, it certainly can be useful if not just to have interesting conversations. Should it get funding? Probably, but I’m sure there are haters who say otherwise.
- What is your concept of philosophy? What do philosophers do, and how do they do it?
+Not being original here, but basically what the others I’ve mentioned above have. I quite like what Half Man Half Wit says about #3 that bleeds into #4.
I’ll steal dictionary.com’s definition and add my twist to what I think philosophy is: “the rational investigation of the truths and principles of x, y, or what have you”
It’s none of my business, but if philosophy interests you, do it and damn the consequences (if you can accept them that is)
I have a personal friend who is a Professor in Philosophy (now retired). He made a decent living all his adult life out of it, and doesn’t regret it one whit.
He instigated a program to teach “ethics” (really moral philosophy) to primary school students throughout our state, and has written books on the topic. This program now has thousands of volunteers and a state-wide infrastructure to train and support ethics volunteers (although he fell out with the mainstays of the program and is no longer directly associated with it). A philosopher (in another state) has been working full time for two years writing and updating the curricula for these classes, so she’s also got a full-time job out of his work. I am one of the volunteers teaching this course, so I’ve got something out of his work too, as have all the others I’ve met. And the kids love the classes, where their opinions are listened to (if not always agreed with).
All of which is to say that philosophy is not useless, is not a guaranteed path to poverty, can reach kids down to year 1 (!), and can make a real difference in today’s world.
Hey what’s the name of that program? I haven’t heard of programs like this, but would be interested in learning about them. The university where I work is possibly going to institute a grades 1-5 lab school for its education program, and this could be an interesting thing to include…