More undergraduates are majoring in philosophy | Hacker News Reader

More undergraduates are majoring in philosophy

nytimes.com

35 pointsgrotius50 comments

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.

Way 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."

Legend 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?

I 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.

I'm not sure what to think. On the one hand it's great that students are realizing they don't need to take something that seems pragmatic in college/university, but on the other, I wonder if they're really learning anything useful other than how to bullshit.

Well, if they're doing it right, they're learning how to make arguments based upon evidence, and evaluate the arguments of others (which will also hopefully based upon evidence). Not all schools/depts./profs. do this, however; I understand your concern.

I don't know if the curriculum has changed, but when I got my Philosophy degree form Princeton in '92, there was an enormous grounding in formal logic, and not nearly so much grounding in bullshitting as in some other liberal arts degrees.

At the risk of offending people, at the time, the best departments to learn bullshitting were the deparments that weren't actually philosophy, but were grounded in 20th century continental philosophy (a.k.a. "critical theory") such as English and anthropology.

I know you can only comment on your experience at your own school, but just so nobody generalizes: I've taken many English courses at my college, several of which incorporated critical theory, and wouldn't describe them as bullshit at all. Equating critical theory with bullshit is probably a common pitfall for students and professors alike though; like philosophy more generally, critical theory does a lot of telling you how little you know, without necessarily giving you a new means to know. In my personal experience, writing off critical theory or postmodernism as bullshit is usually due to frustration with the complexity rather than a reasoned critique, but it's up to the individual to judge their own motives.

There are some merits in 20th century continental philosophy (Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, et alia), and some of the derivative works that circulate as critical theory have merit as well. But most of what circulates in the critical theory world (or at least what circulated as of 15 years ago) is deliberately obfuscatory and has virtually no value. It seemed to be an endemic issue that by treating truth value and value judgements as fundamentally problematic, the tools for distinguishing valuable work from useless nonsense got thrown out as well.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of crap in every academic field, but at least in most fields, sensible practitioners left themselves the traditional tools for identifying the crap and forming a consensus about what was valuable.

After 4 years in college for a CS major, I count only two classes as having been worth my time:

Intro to Philosophy

General Psychology

And I mean that both from a knowledge-for-knowledge sake point of view, and a pragmatic view.

In contrast, it was the courses I took related to my major which were utter bullshit.

I had a similar experience in undergrad EE, an excercise in pragmatic uselessness.

oh, wow. You must have gone to a really shitty school. You either are too kool for skool, or maybe really smart enough you probably should have skiped school alltogether.

within philosophy's "core areas" (epistemology/metaphysics/ethics) and popular subtopics (philosophy of mind/science), there's a lot of really great work (and really smart people) to learn from. You see many intricate, well-thought-out arguments, conversation with other fields, and in ethics you have the "applied" versions and political philosophy. outside of those, it's a little more of a crapshoot. philosophy of language is dropping off the radar, and logic is branching off into a field of its own. further out, intelligent and rigorous work in, say, aesthetics or ancient philosophy is uncommon.

"I wonder if they're really learning anything useful other than how to bullshit."

Your formulation concedes, of course, that being able to bullshit is, indeed, a useful skill. I would go farther to say that the ability to bullshit well should not be mis-underestimated.

though in that direction, studying law and especially rhetoric (under communication) would be much better

...and thus, the students in the article majoring in Philosophy with the intention of later attending law school.

hmmm. i didn't know law was a graduate topic O.o

I'm not even all that old (32) and even I recall at least two previous cycles where "philosophy was fashionable again" and newspapers wrote about it after which philosophy was pretty much ignored for a few years.

And I'm willing to bet that in five years or so there will be yet another one.

Frankly, at least as an American, I'll take a few more well-schooled philosophy grads who ask tough questions over technically brilliant bio-weapons researchers who do what they're told by Uncle Sam.

(I know that's a false dichotomy, but it has a nice ring, doesn't it? :-))

I'll take a few more brilliant bio-weapons researchers who do what they're told by Uncle Sam over a few more brilliant bio-weapons researchers who _don't_ do what they're told by Uncle Sam.

I don't know; it seems like 'bio-weapons researchers" are the only people today capable of exercising the 2nd amendment as purposed, and therefore should really be well-trained in matters such as the difference between morality, ethicality, and legality ;)

Useless degree. Seriously, what happened with college preparing you for life? I think this country would be much better off if people start studying more concrete sciences. Doing biology, math, physics, bio-chem, computer science, accounting... so we have the talent of actually solving real world problems, energy, polution, less co-2 emissions, alternatives to oil, better design and architecting of towns, less sprawl, etc.

How is a society going to advance with a bunch of people majoring in b.s., All they would be able to do is complain about how pollution is wrong to society, yet being unable to do anything practical about it. How does a society advance with only people being able to talk the talk, but not walk the walk?

Studying Philosophy would be great if it is a minor, or a second major in school. Plus, you could learn a lot more by yourself, by reading books and such. While hard sciences are much more difficult to learn by yourself.

Before I went to college, I read a lot of philosophy, and I thought I was learning a lot. But there's a huge difference between reading Plato or Nietzche or Rawls or whatever else you like and having to write papers that critically analyze said works. For all its reputation as a haven for people who bullshit a lot, I've never had a paper more savagely ripped apart than by an analytic philosophy TA. It's an experience I never got in other departments, and it's something that everyone, especially know-it-all-type high school students, can really benefit from. Learning how to be wrong is an important life skill, and reading books just doesn't teach you that.

On the contrary: the hard sciences are easier to learn by yourself because it takes more self-deception to fool yourself into believing you understand something you really do not. When you do a math or physics exercise and get 20 for an answer, and the answer back of the textbook is 3, it takes a heroic amount of self-deception to convince yourself you understand the exercise.

Then again the hard sciences are less likely to be taught badly because falsehoods about the hard sciences are easier to detect, so if you are more worried about false teachers than about arriving at false understanding through self-study, it tends to make sense to reserve the more difficult-to-get-right subjects like philosophy for self-study under the theory that if you want a job done right you should do it yourself rather than trust a bureaucratic educational establishment to do it.

How is a society going to advance with a bunch of people majoring in b.s

How is society going to advance with a bunch of calculating automata without any taste for what is worth solving in the first place?

And just where is this advance taking us, by the way? Why?

I'm taking this as a very good sign. Seems for a while now that U.S. culture has gone heavily in the direction of anti-intellectualism. It would be nice for a swing in the other direction.

I'm not sure if Philosophy is the kind of intellectualism we're looking for...

Philosophy is a fantastic major, so long as you don't plan on being a professional philosopher.

Clerk: "Occupation?"

Comicus: "Standup Philosopher!"

Clerk: "What?"

Comicus: "Standup Philosopher! I coalesce the vapor of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension."

Clerk: "Oh - a Bullshit Artist!"

Comicus: "Hmmmmmm...."

Clerk: "Did you bullshit last week?"

Comicus: "No." Clerk: "Did you try to bullshit last week?"

Comicus: "Yes!"

http://woodmoorvillage.typepad.com/zendo/2005/02/bullshit_ar...

I am shocked by the people who allegedly switch from maths to philosophy. Seems to me that maths is the real philosophy. Usually whenever I pick up a philosophy book (rarely, I admit), there is a wrong assumption in the first paragraph and I can readily dismiss it as worthless.

Any philosophers the news.yc crowd could recommend?

Most philosophers start from a premise they want to be true and work it out until they have a proof, (sometimes) claim they did it the other way around and make use of one or more subjective statements in their proof. The subjective statements are usually true to some people and false to others and therefore arguments about a proof are almost always about one statement and evidence to support or refute its viability.

I was a CS major and a minor in philosophy. I think philosophy is a good major and a good minor. On the major side, if you're talented and ambitious you could have a degree in performing arts and succeed far better than a lazy or incompetent person with a CS degree.

On the minor side, I understand your argument that mathematics is the "real" philosophy as it is more directly applicable to pure CS. However, math has nothing to do with human motivation, ethics or other such philosophical concerns which are very, very applicable to working for a company that happens to be doing CS ;-)

Plus, metaphysics is pretty damn fun.

My impression is that maths has everything to do with human motivation, ethics and so on, when you consider economics and evolution.

For example, with respect to ethics, it seems to me the only sensible way to look at them is the desired outcome, which you determine with maths. The rest is just arbitrary preferences of people, so discussing it is meaningless.

Given how many people here are philosophy majors (lots), it can't be an entirely bad thing.

And provided you treat it as 'figuring out how to argue rationally about difficult topics' rather than 'being able to namecheck dead philosophers', it's probably as useful as any other non-applied degree course.

It's also good for people who later work in Cognitive Science or Artificial Intelligence.

I'm just finishing up a course on the "Philosophy of Mind" and I can not agree more.

I took a class with the same title and it was fascinating. Unfortunately it didn't reach to far into the digital age, but it was just good to get a broad sense of the arguments before delving into any new writings on the subject.

I also think I learned more in my Philosophy classes than my Comp Sci classes, but then I dropped out of the CompSci program and majored in Philo, so I am probably biased.

I'd judge myself better off than a significant number of technical majors that just were trying to get a good job after graduation. I had the benefit of a Liberal Arts school too, so I also took a lot of CompSci classes (How many Philo majors do you know that took Digital Electronics and had to build up an simple computer on a breadboard?).

At Carnegie Mellon, Philosophy majors essentially do Computer Science with more of a theoretical bias.

Yep, I majored in Logic and Computation not quite two decades ago.

http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/undergraduate-bs.php

The thing that pulled me in was all the possible paths to graduation (see "Sample Curricula" on the linked page). CS and ECE basically had every course laid out from freshman to senior year, which seemed really constraining to someone not quite sure what I wanted to do yet. (I ended up in the natural language processing track, now the "Language and Information Technologies" track under the Sample Curricula.)

Why not just study math instead when you want to learn how to argue?

What if you are not interested in math?

That's a point.

(I could have figured it out on my own. It's just so far away from me that I did not think of it in the first place.)

Philosophy is a fantastic undergrad degree to apply to higher learning or practical work.

If it's philosophy for philosophy sake...well...have fun.

Better switch majors-- in a few years, the market's going to be glutted with philosophers!

Submarine alert ;)

I am a college dropout, but I completed all the philosophy parts of my degree requirement.

There is a divide in philosophy departments in the US. The divide is between continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. Programs strong in analytic philosophy are great. They will provide a strong grounding in formal logic. Continental programs, while they might have there own set of virtues, are full of bullshit.

This is only good news if analytic leaning philosophy departments are seeing the big half of the bump.

Is there actually a 'divide'? I was under the strong impression that analytic philosophy completely dominates American universities. Continental philosophy is mostly discussed in English Lit., Cultural Studies, etc.

For instance, Harvard has a 100% analytic faculty, MIT has a 100% analytic faculty, Princeton, Stanford, ...

Analytic philosophy seems boring and pedantic to me. For example, in one class we discussed Lewis' theory that "properties" are any subset of the set of all possible entities. So the property of being red is the mathematical set of all real and possible red things. This basically strikes me as "how many maths can dance on the head of a pin?"

Did they claim that that _is_, objectively, the property of being red, or did they claim that it is an isomorphic way of thinking about it? Isomorphisms can provide an alien way of thinking that forces the mind to ignore the contexts something usually occurs in and discard assumptions, so they can be extraordinarily useful.

Well, yeah, at the good schools there is analytic philosophy. But at local community college or state universities (where most people get degrees), it's a mix.

And dancing maths on the head of a pin, that could never be a useful skill to develop?

Ah, I never realized that. Thanks for the clarification.

I do think that analytic philosophy is a useful point of view. It just frustrated me that at my school, it was the only point of view offered.

There are a few U.S. universities doing good work in continental philosophy. And there are actual real, rational people who want to study there!

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