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I studied analytic philosophy, which is basically an education in how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments. IM
by keiferski 4mo ago
I studied analytic philosophy, which is basically an education in how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments. IMO there is no better preparation for any sort of writing-and-thinking job than studying analytic philosophy, although of course I am biased.
Not sure I’d recommend doing only a philosophy degree, but I highly recommend pairing it with something else more employable. CS and Philosophy seems like the best pairing for the direction tech is going.
- pragmatic 4mo agoCS degree? Employable?
- seydor 4mo agoDont you think that ANN research is upwards of philosophy in the ordo cognoscendi
- keiferski 4mo agoCan you rephrase that in simpler terms? I don’t understand what you’re asking.
- cmrdporcupine 4mo agoAnd I studied continental philosophy! Which is the opposite! Now I program to be less stochastic :) (Dropped out in my 3rd year to join the .com boom)
- keiferski 4mo agoAha, continental philosophy is definitely worth learning as well. I don’t share the disdain many analytic people have for continentals. However I don’t think it’ll make you better at writing clearly, unfortunately…
- antonvs 4mo agoIt is only within the horizon of a presumed transparency - already inscribed by the metaphysics of immediacy - that the demand for “clarity” emerges as an unquestioned norm. Thus the Continental philosopher, precisely insofar as they decline this foreclosure of meaning, demonstrates beyond ambiguity that they are entirely capable of writing clearly, choosing instead, with impeccable lucidity, not to.
- cmrdporcupine 4mo agoInsufficient semicolons, sentences too short.
- antonvs 4mo agoI blame my father, who's a professional analytic philosopher.
- cmrdporcupine 4mo agoMuch of the apparent obscurantism in continental philosophy is a product frankly of bad translations. That and much of it was meant to be read somewhat poetically not prescriptively. I am also not convinced that today's distracted and scattered brains are even capable of reading and digesting something like Kant or Hegel fully. I have a hard time slowing down and thinking at the slow but detailed pace the text requires. I used to read this stuff on the bus or plane before smart phones and even then it was hard to focus deeply enough. Also, now I old and just fall asleep.
- wcfrobert 4mo agoI like the _idea_ of reading continental philosophy, and then I opened up Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Here is a random sentence from a random page verbatim: "Spirit contains this actuality here because the extremes whose unity it is just as immediately each have the determination to be for itself its own actuality. Their unity is subverted into aloof aspects, each of which is for the other an actual object excluded from it. The unity thus emerges as a mediating middle which is excluded and distinguished from the departed actuality of the two aspects; thus it itself has an actual objectivity differentiated from its aspects, and it is for them, i.e., it is existent. The spiritual substance enters into existence, first while it has gained for its aspects the sort of self-consciousness which knows this pure self to be an actuality which is immediately in force, and therein it just as immediately knows that it is this actuality only through the alienating mediation. Through the former, the moments are refined into the self-knowing category and thereby are refined right up to the point that they are moments of spirit. Through the latter, spirit comes into existence as spirituality." wtf is Hegel saying?
- viccis 4mo agoI think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics. >how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments This is a little generous. Analytic philosophy often comes across as people using heinous amounts of ink to argue whether a hot dog is technically a taco all while pretending that only a fool would even consider what it tastes like.
- wk_end 4mo ago> I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics. I don't think this is true at all. To start with, there's roughly 2000 years between the earliest known philosophers and the analytic-continental split. Plenty of philosophy majors can and do get really into the ancients or medieval philosophers or whatever and complete their degrees without doing much more than a cursory read of the major thinkers post-Kant. And anecdotally, my own undergraduate degree was in philosophy, from one of the more prestigious schools in Anglo-Canada, and we had plenty of opportunities to dive into the continental stuff. Once you get to the graduate level and academia folks focused on Derrida or whatever are going to gravitate towards the universities that prioritize the schools of thought they're interested in, and those have always been on the continent for the continentals naturally. But for run-of-the-mill philosophy majors in the Anglosphere, IMO you should just assume they have a reasonably broad and just-deep-enough knowledge of the entire history of philosophy and make no particular assumptions about their interests.
- DiscourseFan 4mo agoI have to disagree here. The split is not incidental, and studying medieval/ancient philosophy naturally means that you are going to concern yourself with Ontology, which is expressely ignored by the “analytic” tradition. If you come to ancient philosophy through your typical post-quinian formal reasoning education, you are going to view such ontology with the weight of thousands of years of translation which you will not realize contains its own tradition and its own truth. You will be stuck in a very narrow, and, frankly, uncritical interpretation. It was Hegel’s fundamental insight (into Kant) that any epistemology fundamentally requires the enclosure of the problem of ontology; that, on account of the schema, the entire Critique of Pure Reason is such an enclosure—-but we cannot genuinely go beyond such an enclosure if we view everything from within it, ie “analytically.”
- fellowniusmonk 4mo agoI have one area of my education that I highly value but its very hard to explain without people importing a lot of assumptions. I like to call it critical listening but also its textual evaluation. In addition to some didactic instruction my Father gave me a short book on the principles of hermeneutics around 13. We went to different churches over the years growing up but I would bring my bible, take notes, and on the drive home from service he would ask me if anything unsubstantiated by the text was snuck in, anything against the text, etc. In the hundreds of sermons I took notes on over the years there were only 3 without obvious butchering of the text, statements directly contradicting the very text being examined, nightmarish hermenutical implications, outright fabrications, etc. The shear volume of evaluation I did against a static text was interesting. It helped me understand how to parse language, how to do evaluation, just a lot of stuff in a way that was more dynamic than something like debate club. It also helped me understand how self servingly imprecise people can be and the ways in which deceptive and misleading language is used.
- towledev 4mo agoTo my ear, that sounds very much like the GRE Verbal.
- fellowniusmonk 4mo agoI think that's a generally fair statement. I understand its historically pretty common to see a theology to law pipeline.
- zuzuleinen 4mo agoDo you remember the title of the book on principles of hermeneutics?
- calf 4mo agoBut then how is analytic philosophy a philosophy.
- jnwatson 4mo agoI graduated a long time ago with a degrees in CS and philosophy. I've never understand the hate for philosophy; I think more about my philosophy classes now than my CS classes.
- AdamN 4mo agoI did Philosophy and Physics - each of which I have fond memories of.
- satellite2 4mo agoWell sure if you want to actually be right. If you just care about looking right rhetoric might be a better fit.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]