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Comment by _csoo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

"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

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.

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