Carrie Fisher’s Private Philosophy Coach

It's a bit of a pity that this viewpoint is the case, although one may argue it's inevitable (e.g. over specialization in today's world, etc. A similar case can be made for literary criticism perhaps.

I found this excellent discussion from the Phisophy Bites podcast on the perennial "What is Philosophy" question very helpful: http://philosophybites.libsyn.com/edward_craig_what_is_philo... (if you have 12 minutes 41 minutes please consider listening to this). Here Edward Craig (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Craig_(philosopher)) argues that all people engage in philosophical thinking part of their lives, it's not the domain of philosophers. He mentions the lamentable fact that recently a lot of focus has been placed on explaining arguments, terms, etc. rather than the arguments themselves.

Interestingly while enrollment in many majors in liberal arts education is decreasing (e.g. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/06/05/analysis-find...) philosophy enrollement seems to be increasing (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/education/06philosophy.htm...).

Instead this is a story about when she was 20, didn't know anything about philosophy, didn't care, and basically just wanted to learn to be an interesting conversationalist. And for some unclear reason she decided that paying for a philosophy coach was the way to go. Nothing about what they actually discussed is in the article.

Skimpy article at best, one might suppose from this anecdote that she got something from the lessons.