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It sounds like I'm one of a number of philosophy major who reads this site (and who works as a software engineer), and I'd like to second that philosophy can be
by akeefer 19y ago
It sounds like I'm one of a number of philosophy major who reads this site (and who works as a software engineer), and I'd like to second that philosophy can be a great major as long as you don't plan on being a philosophy professor (which, for most people, isn't an option). You can kind of take what you want from the major, so if all you want is to bullshit people that's what you might end up learning.
As for myself, I learned a lot about how to carefully construct arguments, how to make my arguments clearly so that people who disagreed with me could easily point out why they disagreed, how to critically analyze and (civilly) disagree with someone else, how to care more about getting to the right answer eventually than about being right in the moment, and how to be willing to change my mind when someone did make a well-reasoned criticism of my argument.
I studied mainly the ethics and political philosophy, rather than the more logic/cognitive science side of things, but I've still found it incredibly useful to my work as a software engineer. The process of breaking a complex argument down into appropriately sized chunks that say enough to be meaningful but little enough to be clear and (hopefully) self-evidently correct is incredibly similar to the skill of breaking a complex program down into parts that are large enough to do something useful but small enough to be correct.
- jksmith 19y agoWay back in the 80's I doubled in CS and Philosophy. I had a philosophy professor who was a noted expert in symbolic logic. After my last course with him, Dr Aycock was hired by an AI company to do pure research. He left behind a tenured position to go into the private sector. He probably spent the next few years pecking on a Symbolics keyboard. Philosophy was very important to me because it showed me how thinkers over thousands of years have struggled with corner cases, figured them out, integrated them into routine thinking, then moved onto the next set of corner cases. Read David Hume for a mind expanding experience. He is surely is one of the most brilliant minds of record that humanity has ever produced. With regard to philosophy's influence on the hard sciences, Immanuel Kant plays a fundamental role in undergraduate study, as well as Descartes. It's said that he discovered Cartesian coordinates during his "Meditations."
- jksmith 19y agoLegend has it that as Descartes had exhausted himself meditating on the notion of "thinking and being" one day, he saw a fly on the wall in the room he had cloistered himself in. It occurred to him that he could map the position of that fly on the wall in two-dimensional space, and graphing was born. And guess what database methodology will supercede the relational model?
- speedwagon 19y agoI agree that this is incredibly useful, and the only way to learn proper reasoning and argumentation is to practice it. That being said, I studied history and learned those exact same things. I have nothing against philosophy, but there are other disciplines that will teach you to reason equally well. Some will also teach you other things (languages, research skills, etc.) that philosophy doesn't teach. If someone is specifically interested in the questions philosophy grapples with, that's a good reason to study it. But there are other (and I'm personal inclined to say better) ways to learn argumentation. History won't get you laid, though.