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I think some philosophy is useful and enlightening, but I'd like to see a more thorough advocacy of it (not necessarily in this article, but maybe a link). Thi

• franksvalli 5y ago
  I got a philosophy degree 10+ years ago and have been yearning to go back ever since and at least get a graduate degree, even though I know employment prospects are dismal in academia. Definitely loved my time studying philosophy and found it super worthwhile.
  • cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    When I retire from my FAANG job I intend on going back and getting the philosophy degree I didn't finish because I took off to join the .com frenzy... 25 years ago.
• srcreigh 5y ago
  Let me chime in. I shouldn't, considering I only got a minor in philosophy alongside a major in computer science, and graduated less than five years ago, but here we go. The core question of philosophy is: how to appreciate life? What is our responsibility? How should we act? These are vital questions. Everybody engages with them in some way. Everybody learns philosophy in some way, the vast majority of learnings have no explicit connection to any religion or philosophical writings. Real life teaches you philosophy. This list, and the philosophy curriculum, has issues. For one, it's not the best way to learn critical thinking. It's better to learn math proofs. Truth tables, contra-positive, breaking things out into cases, induction. For two, western philosophy rarely provides actual answers. It asks more paralyzing questions than provides answers. Don't get me wrong, there are many beautiful things in many of the books - what I'm saying is that they don't equip you to recognize their value.. none of them give you the full picture. If you read these books, you will find that very few books will claim to present the full and complete truth. That's because they don't. They are incomplete. I believe true philosophy is more psychological, pragmatic, and spiritual than most of the philosophy curriculum would teach you. What are thoughts? What is productive vs not productive uses of time? etc. After I graduated with my minor in philosophy I read a book called Be Here Now. It discusses common aspects of many spiritual traditions. I also read some of the books in the bibliography of Be Here Now -- Tao Te Ching, some Hindu/yoga books, some Christian books. Today I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian. In Orthodoxy we understand Wisdom to be another way of talking about Christ. That's philosophy after all - philo sophia - love of wisdom. I can attest that the orthodox church has the fullness of truth and all the answers to any questions I have. It is the true philosophy.
  • kozd 5y ago
    > "all the answers to any questions I have" Either you don't have many questions or you're content with answers that are sufficient rather than sufficient and necessary.
    • srcreigh 5y ago
      You are right, my friend. A terrifying part of orthodoxy is that so many things in life are a distraction, and only a few things are necessary. Of course, that involves learning different ways to recognize when a question is worth answering (or even asking) and when it isn't. On the level of thinking and pure logic, nothing in orthodoxy is necessary. Part of the joy is learning to incorporate and trust other sources of information in addition to the empirical and logical. The two main ones being the conscience, and advice from a friend. Once you incorporate these other sources of information, it is terrifying how necessary some answers become.
  • cutler 5y ago
    Philosophy encompasses much more than the personal subset. Mark and Hegel dealt with the forces of history, for example. Wittgenstein with how language frames the boundaries of knowledge. Orthodoxy is a comforting narrowing of options. The very opposite of true philosophical enquiry.
    • srcreigh 5y ago
      Much respect my friend. You are inspiring me to learn more about those ideas. :-) I recently bought The Art of the Metaobject Protocol for nighttime reading, I may have to add a good Hegel or Wittgenstein book to that pile now. Cheers.
• bobthechef 5y ago
  > I guess what rubs me slightly the wrong way about this list is it seems focused on "who said what, and when" and not necessarily what's true. There is some merit to this observation. Frederick Wilhelmsen[0] criticized Great Books for this reason, that not only was it selective and culturally restricted, but that it tends to degenerate into a he-said-she-said sort of relativism and leave it at that with no real finality to the whole thing. (Some will likely counter that philosophy isn't about the truth but considering "ideas", but that's nonsense. If we consider ideas, it is only because we are trying to determine if they're true and no other reason.) Incidentally, it did not escape my notice that medieval philosophy appears nowhere on this list. This is preposterous. To venture from the ancients to the moderns while skipping over Scholasticism is lunacy. I don't necessarily blame the author. There may be a general ignorance and silence about the medieval period at may universities. [0] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/09/great-books-enemies-wisdom-frederick-wilhelmsen.html https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/09/great-books-e...
  • srcreigh 5y ago
    Agree. I sort of understand why though - we live in a religious plurality. Secular themes are the safe area. You say Scholasticism, I say the Eastern ancient Holy Fathers, another person would say Buddhist teachings, another Hindu teachings and yoga. In a way, the major accomplishment of today's philosophy curriculum is showing that it is not sufficient. I'm sort of okay with this :-)
  • User23 5y ago
    > There may be a general ignorance and silence about the medieval period at may universities. Or an outright hostility toward Christian philosophy. St. Augustine[1] is conspicuously absent there as well and he’s certainly not medieval. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/
    • myWindoonn 5y ago
      Well, most of the claims and structures of that period have been discredited. We do talk about them a little, but mostly in the same way as the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers: They were wrong, and it's interesting to examine how they were wrong.
• ruytlm 5y ago
  I got an undergraduate degree in philosophy more than 10 years ago, and I would say it was absolutely worthwhile, and that it has improved my life substantially. Sure, I didn't get a job from a philosophy degree, but that's not really the point; it helped me better understand myself and the world around me, so that all my experiences have been richer. That said, I'm similarly opposed to a 'who said what, and when' approach to philosophy; I don't care who said it, I care if it's an interesting or valuable idea. I think the 'who said what' approach largely exists because when taught at the tertiary level, something is expected to be assessed, and it's kind of hard to objectively assess whether someone understands philosophy - far easier to test their recollection of who said what.
  • beaconstudios 5y ago
    I think it's also useful to know which philosophers addressed which subject. Knowing that Nietzsche wrote about existentialism and his projections on the secularisation of the West is important, and many people's entry to that are his quotes about the abyss and the death of God. If you're wanting to dive deeper into one of these topics, you would know to read his works or the works of philosophers who followed or preceded in his tradition.
• planet-and-halo 5y ago
  Not exactly what you're looking for, but I started in Philosophy and could have minored, but I finished my degree in History. Quick thoughts: 1. I gave my siblings the advice after I was done to double major in something you love and something that will guarantee you employment. I graduated with not the most financially rewarding degrees, and while I ultimately taught myself programming and have made a pretty good career out of it, I wish I'd paired my humanities with compsci or business off the bat to make the whole job thing easier. 2. That said, I am very happy I studied those topics. They gave me a perspective that I don't think I would have gotten in a more nuts-and-bolts field. The name "humanities" is right on point: it's the study of what it means and what it's like to be a human being. And while I've been bitterly disappointed by the corruption of the field (which is the main reason I'm not a college professor now), I still think it's tremendously useful to have learned these things. David Foster Wallace's famous graduation speech has a line I particularly like, where he says something to the effect of "in the trenches of everyday life, it's little clichés that will kill you." All of this "obvious" wisdom that seems sort of hokey and unscientific often contains deep and terrible truths about life and what it means to be a person. And having a guidebook for that journey is a damned useful thing, and I feel bad for anyone who doesn't have one. This stuff won't solve all your problems, but it might help you with some of them. Chances are that of all the human beings who have ever lived, one of the great writers or thinkers or historical figures has dealt with something akin to what you will. We aren't all that different from one another. You can get some pretty good ideas out there for free. So I'm very grateful to have access to and a background in those things.
  • fghfghfghfghfgh 5y ago
    How has it been corrupted?
    • planet-and-halo 5y ago
      That isn't a question I can answer in a short post, but a couple quick hits: 1. Education is a business now, and responds to business incentives. 2. The postgrad environment is a mess, in part because of #1, in part because of its own internal issues, and in part because of fundamental supply and demand. 3. The topics have all been deeply politicized.
• deleted 5y ago
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• yakubin 5y ago
  > I guess what rubs me slightly the wrong way about this list is it seems focused on "who said what, and when" and not necessarily what's true. Sounds like philosophy to me. This trait is shared by scholastics and postmodernists alike.
• petters 5y ago
  > I guess what rubs me slightly the wrong way about this list is it seems focused on "who said what, and when" and not necessarily what's true. Right, I'm just glad we don't have that in math, which is closely related. There are so much better ways of thinking about calculus than Newton's and Leibniz' works.
• usgroup 5y ago
  Yup UG in analytical Phil, more than 10 years ago. Definitely worth doing. I think you can’t study Phil and not be significantly changed if you understand what you’re studying. You study things like the Munchhausen trilemma, Bertrand’s watch, Grue, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, para-logics, Kantian epistemology, Quine and so on. I literally can’t think how you can understand these things and end up not a different person.
  • vehemenz 5y ago
    I second this opinion. And the process continues long after graduating. I received my degree 13 years ago, and my positions have shifted dramatically in some areas, thanks in part to journal access through my uni and libgen to be fair.
• yodsanklai 5y ago
  I like this quote from Bertrand Russell > Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good. That being said, it certainly not an argument to start a philosophy degree. Personally, I see philosophy a bit like sport. You don't need a sport degree to practice it, and you can do it at any level and get some satisfaction out of it.
• timClicks 5y ago
  I did an undergrad philosophy degree from over 10 years ago. My experience report is that I consistently rely on it. Philosophy gave me tools to evaluate others' claims and taught me that communication is inherently difficult. And because of that, it's not enough to be right - it's important to be persuasive. But there's a tension there. Persuasion is very close to manipulation. An unfortunate side-effect of philosophy is doubt. Lots of the beliefs that we hold without reflection are slippery, even incoherent. There's a riddle-like quality of attempting to define something like truth or identity and realizing that as one gets closer to that definition, the definition seems to slip away. It's true that professional philosophers can deal with topics which inherently abstract and irrelevant to the everyday. The same is true with all specialists. Yet the skills that philosophers bring to bear are incredibly relevant to every social interaction. The philosopher's role is to evaluate others' arguments and posit one's own. Lastly, one of the things that I enjoyed the most about philosophy is that touches many fields. While I would guess that the core of contemporary analysis are subjects such as Language, logic and cognition, it's surprising how many intellectual gaps there are in other parts of human thinking. Within those gaps, you'll find philosophers having a debate.
  • lemonberry 5y ago
    I graduated in 2006 with my degree in philosophy. When it comes up in conversation I always mention that I use it everyday. Because I do. I agree with the doubt part but I do think that being able to suspend that is crucial to being happy.
• tellersid 5y ago
  I am a life long lover of philosophy but the idea of spending $50k+ on a philosophy degree is utterly ridiculous to me. You have your whole life to read, study and think about philosophy. It is easy, it is enjoyable, all the material is readily available. I would almost view having a fresh recent philosophy degree as a huge negative in the 2020s. I would not hire someone with a recent philosophy degree almost point blank because IMO your decision making is highly suspect.
  • myWindoonn 5y ago
    On one hand, I agree with you. I've had no problem studying philosophy just with what's free on the Internet, and haven't bought philosophy books since high school. On the other hand, you should not be in charge of hiring anybody whatsoever, as you are biased against people based on their life experiences.
  • bmj 5y ago
    I think an undergraduate degree is vastly different than someone doing graduate work. (NB: I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy earned over 25 years ago.) I guess it also depends on the school -- if you have a degree from a program that is highly specialized, then, yeah, probably not worth it. But, if the program provides a good overview drawing from multiple sources, with a bit of specialization later in the degree, it may not be so utterly ridiculous.
  • vehemenz 5y ago
    Believe it or not, many people go to college for more than credential-seeking or vocation. Some people want to develop intellectually. Others are more or less set—either financially, or with the vocational skills they developed in high school—and would like to pursue philosophy with their career already lined up. A formal education in philosophy at a good R1 school is not comparable to light reading by an amateur. The process of discussion, argumentation, and mentorship is not something you figure out yourself. Even an undergraduate degree is a huge step toward a philosophical education. I'm not sure it can be replicated in a vacuum. And it's certainly not easy (first time I've heard that).
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• dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Plato is, by far, the best philosopher of all time. I don't say that lightly and am open to arguments. But Plato doesn't lay out "the truth." He presents beautiful dialogues that allows the reader to consider, agree, disagree or digress. Try reading the Parmenides. Here, the impossibility of unity is presented alongside the impossibility of difference. It shows the limits of language and maybe thought— or read the symposium for radical ideas about the nature of love. Or, hell, read Xenophon's Socratic dialogues. He was more radical than Plato, though they were both students of Socrates. Xenophon turned into a mercenary and defeated the king of Persia. Then wrote extremely practical dialogues about getting rich. Philosophy isn't about truth. It's about the love of wisdom and, ultimately, wisdom is about living a better life. Philosophy includes material that cannot be expressed with words. Finally, Pythagoras—who coined the word philosophy. He wrote nothing out of principle and yet his worldview is arguably the most transformatively modern. Newton, Copernicus, Kepler and Gallelio all credited Pythagoras for their findings. He seemed to believe that the world was made of math and that the natural harmonies of mathematics would manifest in the harmonies of the cosmos. This idea is still resonant in the sciences — like in the groundbreaking discovery of harmonic peaks in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Pythagoreans conducted the first empirical test of a mathematical hypothesis (that bronze chimes in ratios of 1:2 and 2:3 would sound consonant). When you read about groundbreaking wisdom that is over 2000 years old, it gives perspective on how we might build a society that similarly endures.
  • cutler 5y ago
    Marx is as relevant today as ever. Dialectical materialism gets to the root of what is driving the world over a precipice.
    • Koshkin 5y ago
      Somehow marxism has always seemed to me a shallow mix of Hegelian dialectic, Feuerbach's materialism, and Aristotelian categories.
      • cutler 5y ago
        Well, he was a student of Hegel's and described his work own work as "turning Hegel on his head". As for the other two it's conceivable these influences may have been formative during his student years.
• wayoutthere 5y ago
  Hi, got a philosophy degree 20 years ago. I had been a hacker as a teen so I just got a job in tech after I graduated. Later went on to get an MBA to move into the business side and I’m currently in a leadership role at a consulting firm around tech strategy, infra and software dev. I make better money than a software dev at a top tier tech company for what it’s worth. I think the degree was great. It basically teaches you how to argue a point, makes you a better writer, and forces you to at least temporarily accept viewpoints that you disagree with if only to try to disprove them. If you’re looking to philosophy to tell you what’s true, you’re going to be disappointed. The history of philosophy is a series of arguments. It is instructive to understand those arguments as the questions have been extensively explored, and you’ll almost certainly go further by reading arguments formulated over years rather than trying to think through the problem on your own. It’s sort of a shorthand in philosophy to simply refer to a set of arguments by the name of the person writing about them, which is why “who said what when” is important - more so than any other academic discipline, philosophy is a dialectic stretching back as far as the written word, and order is important to understanding. Nietzsche is a reaction to Kant and Hegel, and his arguments are far more coherent in that context. The way you apply these lessons throughout your life is basically how you cope. For a long time I felt trapped in a life I didn’t want, and I found a lot of solace in existentialism as a way to accept the circumstances without accepting an outcome. Nothing in Sartre or Camus tells you this explicitly and I’m pretty sure their experiences were more about life in Nazi-occupied France than being a closeted trans person, but they provide a starting point and a framework for thinking about problems.
• 0kl 5y ago
  I studied philosophy about ~7~ 9 years ago (edit: pandemic time). Similar to a lot of other commentators here I use it every day, and for everything. An general apology of philosophy would be something like: > Philosophy is the pursuit of the truth. That pursuit, and the development of mental tools and models to reach it, ends up spilling out into, and enriching, every other aspect of human thought and experience. Whether you end up questioning if there is any such truth (epistemology), attempting to determine a moral truth (ethics), or working out models of correct/truthful reasoning (logic), you end up building up a robust toolset and understanding of being human. Even the schools of thought that hold there isn’t an absolute truth have a little problem in that _that_ is a truth they are stating. The point being, if you are to be human, then you must act on things being more or less true (did that person do that thing? On a more fundamental level, does that chair exist? On an abstract level, does the money in your bank account exist?). If you accept that being able to evaluate the truth of things is fundamental to operating as a human, then philosophy is a necessary undertaking that everyone practices to some extent. It is, after all, just the love of wisdom. A few specific examples of how it has been _useful_ to me and my career are: 1) Using my studies of logic to ground my understanding of programming languages - everything boils down to to binary, see “The Mathematical Analysis of Logic” or “The Laws of Thought” 2) Applying abstract mental models directly to code (see Plato’s theory of the forms and object oriented programming) 3) Understanding ethical issues with anything I do and being able to articulate them to others so that we can move forward on a decision not based on just everyone’s feelings. 4) Seeing things from the other side and arguing people to my own by showing them inconsistencies in their arguments - or by changing my own mind by discovering my own inconsistencies And so on and so on. As for the final complaint about who said what being an issue - naming is useful. It’s important to identify the source of an idea if you’re going to discuss it with others and share common frameworks (see my references to Plato and Boole above). Beyond that - I don’t know much, or care, about their personal lives. * Note: idk about the whole student debt to study philosophy thing though. There are huge advantages to taking it while in university (discussion with peers, context from professors, immersion in thought), but I can’t recommend the experience of student debt for a degree with such a low signal (for employment) and such a low barrier to entry (I.e. you can do this outside of the university as well). Ultimately I did well, but only because the Seattle barista scene was too competitive and I had to find a fallback career.
• nonameiguess 5y ago
  No reading list will be the equivalent of an undergrad degree. I'll caveat that maybe it can do what she says and let you walk away with knowledge equivalent to some degree from some university, but knowledge is not all you get from the degree. I did get an undergrad Philosophy BA more than 10 years ago. Take my experiences with a grain of salt because I'm practically addicted to education in a way that probably goes strongly against the current in a place like this full of people who self-taught vocational skills (I did undergrad in Biology, Philosophy, and Applied Mathematics after originally starting in Studio Art but giving up, then did grad work in Public Policy, Finance, Computer Science, and Cybersecurity, so I am severely over-educated and love education). To be perfectly honest, I barely remember the "knowledge" of philosophy in terms of just memorizing the history of the western canon and who believed what. To me, the actual value in studying philosophy formally came from the practice. Reading the entire multi-century history of lines of thought. Seeing all the different angles that different thinkers approached a question from. Seeing a dialog in terms of one thinker directly responding to the arguments of another, and then again in the other direction. Much of that can't always be found in books and is better found in papers because that is how philosophers are publicly debating each other. To really internalize this, you need to not only read, but also write. Making my own arguments and having them publicly critiqued was tremendously valuable, especially when these were purely formal "take one side and give the best you can" and not married to my personal beliefs and ideologies such that I could not take criticism. Learn to see the flaws and the holes in human thinking, including your own. Studied right, philosophy can be incredibly humbling. It is quite different from studying the creation of software or physics where there have been so many wild successes and great leaps forward of human achievement. It is the exact opposite. You come to grips with what are very likely hard limits on human understanding. You see that the very best minds we have ever produced have been asking exactly the same questions for as long as we've had writing and we're no closer to having answers after at least 5000 years of this. A lot of people would see that and ask well, what's the point then? It's intellectual navel gazing that can never accomplish anything. But being intellectually humbled is itself an accomplishment. Learn to appreciate that the human mind is not almighty. On a similar note, study statistics, because done right, that will teach you much the same thing, how impressively we can estimate and come with good guesses, but hard limits on what we can ever really know. That said, is it worth spending a whole lot of money on getting this education and getting a philosophy degree when you could get a degree that will lead to an actual job? For most people, probably not. I think it's a great second major, but it should only be your only major if you're absolutely certain you want to get a PhD and become an academic philosopher, but good luck since there are only maybe a few thousand people in the world able to do that.
• jknoepfler 5y ago
  I got a degree in philosophy many years ago. I then got into and dropped out of a Ph.D program in same. I think there's enormous value in learning the history of thought, particularly from a critical angle. I don't think there is very much value in modern academic philosophy. To paint an overly general negative picture (please take with a grain of salt): First, some of the scholars I met along the way were absolute saints, and spending time reading and writing with them made the whole journey worthwhile. They modelled patient, intense curiosity and scholarship, and they left an indelible impression on the students who learned from them. For the most part, though, the field seems borderline intellectually bankrupt. The way modern academic philosophy functions is very odd. Researchers are stuck in tiny little pigeon-holes trying to churn out papers on the next fad in their discipline. There isn't a lot of critical reflection about whether topics are likely to be fruitful, or even what the goal of philosophical research is. The main "method" of analytic philosophy ("Conceptual Analysis") is at best a dull joke, at worst a weird mixture of hubris and narcissism... but that doesn't seem to bother anyone. The "philosophy of x" disciplines have some gems but tend on the whole to depend upon a very cartoonish or superficial understanding of 'x', and tend to lag way behind the disciplines they should be leading. They almost never contribute back to x. The field is at its best when it promotes deep reading, curiosity, patience, and intellectual humility. It does sometimes do this. Much of the time it promotes a mixture of artificial rigour, sophomoric egotism, and not a whole lot else. Like anything else in life it is what you make of it. For myself, the relationship I built with philosophical literature continues to be rewarding (even in my day job as an engineer). The mistakes I made along the way were my own. I think the best way to engage with philosophy in 2021 is to really give oneself time to read and go down a rabbit hole, and if one can, talk with people. I wouldn't read very much recent analytic philosophy, and would avoid the traditional "Epistemology/Metaphysics/Ethics/Logic/etc." structure like the plague.