> Does philosophy really improve critical thinking and reasoning skills? I hope that's a joke. Lest you ignore all those that laid the foundations of western t

> Does philosophy really improve critical thinking and reasoning skills? I hope that's a joke. Lest you ignore all those that laid the foundations of western thinking like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Socrates was the one of the first people to infer the validity of one's thinking by following the thinking to it's natural conclusion by asking questions. This is inline with (and probably inspired) verifying a scientific theory by making predictions and verifying them. Plato talked the theory of forms. That everything can be classified, abstracted, and reasoned about. The first is inline with classes (in OOPS), and the last part with functional programming. Aristotle took Plato's classification idea, and was the first known person to classify animals and plants. Oh, only that allowed the rest of science to startup. Btw, Socrates taught Plato who taught Aristotle. I am not a philosophy major, so I am sure what I covered is just a bit of what they did (and taught others). It is very necessary to know and understand how we came to think in a certain way today (because it is not natural), visit the foundations of the knowledge we have today, to understand the world when the tools we know and use are too specialized to use.