Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department?
nautil.us
nautil.us
Education has two related yet distinct purposes. The first is to endow us with specific domain knowledge and reasoning. The second is to endow us with general reasoning and critical thinking skills.
The value of natural language philosophy - not formal logic and other mathematically adjacent subfields - is that it teaches us to be as rigorous as possible when reasoning in natural language.
Given that so much of our lives and the events of history and society unfold in natural language and that it is in natural language that we do much of our critical thinking and reasoning, it's important that we hold ourselves to as high a standard as is reasonably possible when talking (either to ourselves or others) as when performing mathematical calculations.
It's often said that one of the benefits of studying math is that it improves critical thinking skills. I believe this to be true, but I also believe that if our primary concern is improving our day to day critical thinking skills, then we would be better served studying natural language philosphy than mathematics, because on a day to day basis we tend to think and reason and debate and engage with one another in natural language.
I agree. For this reason, my favorite philosopher has always been Wittgenstein. I also have an affection for the existentialists, but language games demonstrate that philosophy can be eminently practical and relevant despite the pejorative connotations of the term, "philosophizing."
That said, I really don't think philosophy should be its own major in most schools. It would be better, in my opinion, to teach philosophy as we teach arithmetic and language, rather than a focused degree.
Let me clarify: I think people should be able to become philosophers, just like they can become mathematicians. But I’d advocate for changing the undergraduate curriculum - move proof-based mathematics into a targeted graduate degree, and emphasize computational mathematics like calculus and (linear) algebra, but make them core components of a much more generalized degree. Add in language and logic studies that borrow significantly from philosophy.
With very few exceptions, you’re not doing research mathematics (i.e. being a mathematician) without significant graduate study. Similarly, for majors like philosophy that are “watered down” until graduate or postgraduate work, I don’t think they should be eligible for targeted degrees at the undergraduate level. This would have the added benefit of 1) delaying time to major decision for college-aged students and 2) keeping their options open for eligibility to targeted graduate degrees later on, by limiting the number of prerequisites. You don’t need undergraduate number theory to do well in an early graduate number theory course. The 300 and 400 level philosophy courses you take in an undergrad setting will mostly not have value on paper, so in my opinion we should shift them to the degree that has value on paper.
But at this point I’m pontificating about the education system, not philosophy in particular :)
Like programming, writing proofs is a skill that takes practice to get good at. If you were to suggest that we shouldn't teach programming until graduate-level CS courses, you would be laughed out of the room. I think the best mathematicians in history started learning how to prove things as children. How about we start there, instead?
No it wouldn't. Most math PhDs require six or so courses before the research - you can begin with analysis or abstract algebra for proofs. The current system does have unnecessary redundancy.
> Like programming, writing proofs is a skill that takes practice to get good at. If you were to suggest that we shouldn't teach programming until graduate-level CS courses, you would be laughed out of the room.
Programming is more comparable to the computational mathematics that I've already mentioned should be in undergrad; more to the point, a lot of computer science theory need not be taught in undergrad either. Computer science theory is much closer to proof-base mathematics.
> I think the best mathematicians in history started learning how to prove things as children.
Approximately no one is one of the best mathematicians in history. That's an attractive idea, but I think it's more realistic to assume they were extraordinarily precocious than that proofs are easier to digest at a younger age. I could point to people who mastered computational mathematics at a young age too (like Einstein, at 14), but that doesn't say anything about which is easier to learn. I'm talking about which is more widely applicable for practical work.
Here's my take on the purpose of math courses in college: any college graduate should be able to teach themselves something "like" calculus or linear algebra upon graduation. So you should teach calculus and especially linear algebra in such a way that a student who has never seen e.g. graph theory can pick that up a bit of graph theory their own using the thinking skills they acquired by studying linear algebra or calculus. Ditto for dynamic programming or combinatorics or basic probability or...
So if you're not teaching proofs, wth are you teaching all semester? A few conceptual underpinnings that take about a week to explain, and then a whole bunch of crap Mathematica can do for you anyways.
> computational mathematics like calculus and (linear) algebra.. move proof-based mathematics into a targeted graduate degree
Memorizing symbolic calculations and/or understanding (how to use) numerical algorithms do not endow students with the skills required to learn new mathematics. Proof-based calculus and algebra courses do teach those skills.
The recent post on HN about PID control comes to mind. I'd expect someone with a bit of practice at writing proofs to be able to teach themselves why PID controllers work and avoid pitfalls. But I would not expect your average human-meat-based-derivative-and-integral-calculator to be able to understand the same.
To put it in terms of a folk saying about fishing: if you teach a man to calculate, he can perform a specific calculation. If you teach a man how to write proofs, he can learn any calculation he might need throughout his lifetime.
Ideally computational mathematics teaches more than just the simple "what" - it should address at least one of the "how" or "why", but it doesn't necessarily need to address all three. I also disagree that the point of the education should be for students to be capable of teaching themselves novel mathematics (and to be honest, I'm pessimistic most graduating math undergrads could do that simply because they made it through something like Rudin).
A philosopher should explain to all the natural-language-as-code people why their endeavor is much, much harder than they think it is. If a philosopher isn't available, a lawyer would probably be qualified as well.
Point being, I feel like I'm getting some of those benefits just writing code and talking about it on a regular basis.
We use natural language to express abstractions formed over a very complex world, so it's guaranteed that when talking we'll be imprecise in some way, but the goal is to try to reduce this imprecision.
The lawyers are busy explaining to the "smart contracts" people that trying to translate contract law into code is going to produce a whole lot more comedy than it is practical value.
Second, because it illuminates good ways of life.
Third, because of the reason you mentioned.
This is also why we should be skeptical of "meta-ideologies." Ideologies derived from Postmodernism often make something akin to a claim of transcendence, attempting to lean on the ability of Postmodern analysis to deconstruct anything expressed in language. Marxian philosophy attempts to be such a meta-ideology, claiming that, in a constantly changing world, only the analysis of things in the process of change is valid, and attempting to formulate its own system of logic that takes such transformation into account from its foundation.
I think Science, done honestly, is okay as a meta-ideology, as it's subordinate to logic, mathematics, and empirical data. The honest conduct of science will eventually expose charlatans. Capitalism as ideology, as apparently subscribed to by some Libertarians, fails to be anything more than a (rather good) method of regulating an economy, so falls far short of being a meta-ideology. Evolution, attempting to become a meta-ideology as Daniel Dennett's "universal acid," is interesting as a meta-ideology, but I'm not sure it's quite ready. I wonder if Marxian philosophy could be reformulated to ditch its historical dialectic nonsense and its utopian nonsense, taking up evolution by natural selection as its analytical foundation instead?
Philosophy has been a victim of its own success. By creating science and organizing our relationship with religion, it has pushed itself out of the public arena.
People get a math education so that they can’t be fooled by an otherwise reasonable-sounding proof that 1=2. I don’t know if philosophy is the answer, but people need to get a reasoning education as well so that they aren’t susceptible to a “proof” that [politician] is “fake news.”
Less good at the GRE Quantitative Reasoning than all the science disciplines (and economics) but better than the rest of the arts and humanities subjects (and better than accounting, which is slightly worrying).
See http://dailynous.com/value-of-philosophy/charts-and-graphs/
Also: https://www.salon.com/2013/07/01/be_employable_study_philoso...
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-philosophy-majors-...
(I may be biased on this though: I have a BA and MA in Philosophy.)
As a philosophy major you should be the first to point out this doesn't imply causation.
Nah, I'd rather just go nuclear on causation, with the assistance of Hume...
"...experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable... It is allowed on all hands that there is no known connexion between the sensible qualities and the secret powers; and consequently, that the mind is not led to form such a conclusion concerning their constant and regular conjunction, by anything which it knows of their nature."
A rough summary is available as a YouTube video:
Or in more modern terms: we didn't discover anything inherent in nature, we invented models for prediction. Which are very useful, but don't tell anything about how the world 'really is'.
And, to be very explicit: this includes probability theory. You can prove that a series of observations from the past follows some pattern that matches the definition of probabilistic causality. But you can't prove that the events in the future will continue to fit that same pattern. So again you cannot prove anything about how the world 'really is'.
Whereas the rest of us are easily able to prove to our full satisfaction that atoms didn't exist, asbestos was safe, white flour no different than brown... etc, etc. It's not just possible for there to be too much certainty in the world, it's common - which is what that Billionaire knew thanks to courses in Philosophy, and exploited to earn his stash 'o cash.
Incidentally Buddhists think that any proof of individuality is false or tainted, too. Best lump them in there too. (Descartes had to please the church, we can't know his private opinion, just his published works with necessary nods to the church.)
His entire philosophy was flawed right from the start. But it usually is. That's why so many philosophy texts take the first chapter (or volume) refuting philosophers who came before them.
Peter Unger's book "Ignorance" (Oxford University Press, 1975) is probably the best modern defence of extreme skepticism.
Also, Unger is pretty fun to read.
The idea that accountants are good at math is nonsense. Accountants aren't taught any more math than marketing majors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ0uPkG-pr4
A few notes from the above:
* the beginning of astronomy == plato's school
* the scientific method as falsification == Popper
* quantum theory / relativity / Heisenberg == positivism (If I don't see it (e.g. electron orbitals) it doesn't exist) (* e.g. complementarity)
* Einstein claimed that his reading of Schopenhauer was crucial to thinking about time, space, etc...
in essence, you are doing philosophy when you're re-evaluating your methodology and using a evolving reflective feedback loops to change your thinking.
This is to say that advances in science are often preceded or co-created by a period of philosophy, which it becomes possible express the new scientific ideas, at which point, the philosophy recedes into the background (e.g. no longer is seen an 'philosophy') because it has already been 'accepted'.
If you consider at the the fundamental problems involving physics these days, there is much philosophical activity there as well, but we don't know yet what will come out of it because it hasn't been 'solved' yet, compared to previous big jumps in scientific understanding.
Whenever a subfield of philosophy got to the point that it had sufficiently many interesting theories to occupy several people fulltime, it got its own name (for practical reasons) and, after some time, was considered to be its own.
By insisting that all philosophy provide empirical evidence, you've misunderstood what philosophy actually does, and assumed the epistemology of empiricism - which has a number of flaws and contradictions (that any philosophical rationalist would be happy to point out).
Reasoning - using logic to form conclusions, inferences, judgements - is a process defined, taught, and professionally applied by philosophers. So, teach students philosophy and some other 'control subject'. They learn logic, rhetoric, and how to follow complex chains of complex thought.
It seems to be a difficult claim to make, that this experiment would some somehow not show an improvement in critical reasoning - however you operationalize it.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-knowledge-externalis... [2]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/#OpeUniAna...
The other thing is that you've made a dichotomy out of a quantitative problem: how much better are philosophers at it than anyone else? A little? A lot? Is it a skill that persists after graduation? Better at certain types of problems, maybe worse at others?
In any other context, on any other topic, a philosopher would never dare to make hand-wavey statements about how obvious and straightforward it is that X leads to Y. Only when it comes to their own field of study and its value do philosophers become sloppy and claim the value of their field is self-evident and frankly beyond discussion, or they try to turn it into an irrelevant meta-discussion about the nature of evidence. That's the irony I was pointing out. If you boast about being rigorous, be rigorous even when it doesn't suit your purposes.
You're also conflating rigor with empiricism. It is possible to be rigorous and be a rationalist, a phenomenologist, a theologin, or an empiricist.
If you read closely, you'll see that I didn't criticize philosophy, only the tendency of philosophers to make empirical statements about the practical value of their discipline without the empirical proof to back it up.
if I understood you correctly, you state that one must have empirical evidence to back up their position. If someone claims something without giving empirical evidence, their claim should be refuted (or at least ignored).
However, your claim that empirical evidence is required to make a position valid, is itself not backed up by any empirical evidence.
I can even give counter-evidence, e.g., mathematics works very well without empirical evidence, so it doesn't seem to be required to gain valid knowledge. (just to back up my philosophical argument with empirical evidence)
It's possible, of course, that Miller is mistaken about the origin of his critical thinking ability (or just got lucky, and there's no ability to credit), however on balance this seems like a strong piece of anecdata in favour of the hypothesis.
I'm interested what would constitute empirical evidence for/against the claim "philosophy helps improve critical thinking". Are there accepted standardised measures of this?
Yes I would, if it seemed to me that an awful lot of people who had studied carpentry were mediocre carpenters, while many who hadn't studied carpentry were excellent carpenters. I would start to question the usefulness of carpentry study.
I don't think we should accept that the study of philosophy improves critical thinking just because that is "one of the aims" of philosophy as a discipline. (One of the aims of homeopathic medicine is to cure disease, after all.) I certainly accept that you'd have a very hard time going through a philosophy program without ever thinking critically, but I'd say the same thing about a student in a comparative literature program.
I also think it's very hard to teach philosophy well, and that a poorly taught philosophy course can easily detract from critical thinking rather than bolster it. I took my share of philosophy courses as an undergrad, and a good half of them were glorified history classes with strong implications that certain viewpoints were "wrong" and others were "right." I suppose you could say those courses were not really philosophy courses if they were taught that way, but then I would say it's unfair to say that philosophy education improves critical thinking if you will only admit examples where it does so.
Well that's not really the point, is it? The point is that on average the person who studied carpentry is better than someone who hadn't studied it at all.
> I don't think we should accept that the study of philosophy improves critical thinking just because that is "one of the aims" of philosophy as a discipline. (One of the aims of homeopathic medicine is to cure disease, after all.) I certainly accept that you'd have a very hard time going through a philosophy program without ever thinking critically, but I'd say the same thing about a student in a comparative literature program.
That's actually rather insulting, you do realise that don't you? It's insulting in three different ways going by the way you've worded it. First, you've compared philosophy to something that is widely regarded as a pseudoscience (which is ironic considering that philosophy is that _very_ discipline that attempts to rigorously demarcate science from pseudoscience[0]). Second, this isn't something I'm making up–this is _central_ to what philosophy is methodologically about and has been since its inception. Third, It's more than likely you'd _fail_ a philosophy program if you didn't demonstrate critical thinking skills by the end of it. I've tutored philosophy students so I've witnessed first-hand the process whereby one tries to show a young person the difference between mere opinion and reasoned argument. With other disciplines (depending on the level) it's sort of assumed that one already has critical thinking skills or that at least they'll develop along the way. A core remit of philosophy is to think about what it means to think critically and therefore by bringing attention and awareness to this the student ought to develop that faculty.
> I also think it's very hard to teach philosophy well, and that a poorly taught philosophy course can easily detract from critical thinking rather than bolster it. I took my share of philosophy courses as an undergrad, and a good half of them were glorified history classes with strong implications that certain viewpoints were "wrong" and others were "right." I suppose you could say those courses were not really philosophy courses if they were taught that way, but then I would say it's unfair to say that philosophy education improves critical thinking if you will only admit examples where it does so.
I'm sorry your experience was sub-par. Certainly what I am pointing out to you is an ideal. I freely admit that it is always possible to not reach this ideal but then that's just normal human failings.
---
Having said that, there is a reference to an quasi-empirical study and meta-analysis here but I think the results are inconclusive[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem
[1] http://dailynous.com/2015/10/22/does-philosophy-improve-crit...
My comparisons weren't meant to be insulting—they were meant to clearly show why a field intending to do something doesn't mean we should assume it succeeds. And, even if it does succeed, we can't assume it's uniquely successful. I'm sure you'd agree that homeopathy doesn't succeed at its central goal, and that comparative literature also succeeds at teaching critical thinking skills. The claim is that more people should study philosophy, not that more people should study one of several fields in the liberal arts. I really don't feel it's insulting to question this.
For what it's worth, I'm in the pro-philosophy camp, so maybe that will help put my questioning into perspective.
As for your third point, I myself said you'd have a "very hard time going through a philosophy program without thinking critically," so we're in agreement in that you'd fail if you could not thinking critically at all. That on its own doesn't do anything to imply that the philosophy program teaches critical thinking, though. You'd fail a programming exam if you couldn't program, but the exam does not teach programming. I'm not even trying to split hairs here: philosophy certainly wouldn't be the only subject that, in practice, failed to teach its own requirements.
Which is what brought me to my final point about education. It's basically impossible to argue about what philosophy should do in an ideal world, because we all agree that everything should be great and ideally confers as many benefits as possible. I think that, in practice, philosophy education is a very mixed bag, and that this is very relevant when recommending to people that they pursue philosophy education. You could say the same about many subjects, but I think philosophy is somewhat unique in that the benefits are quite elusive without the right education to confer them.
Empiricism, as a method, became important because Bacon wanted to replace Aristotle's logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baconian_method. That took about 2000 years to happen, just to give you a sense of scale. And it's what helped spur the scientific revolution so it's also why we've got our little laptops and Facebook today.
The scientific revolution and scientific method are a branch off of a long, long conversation about the world, the nature of it, and how we should understand it.
Now, that's not to say there's not a lot of silly, useless garbage being put out under the guise of "philosophy". That's definitely the case. The challenge is identifying productive or useful parts and using them in a coherent manner.
For the HN audience, much of the power and usefulness of RDBMSs is derived from the relational model and the relational algebra it sits on [1].
The world is not divided up into stuff we believe because we have empirical evidence for it and stuff we don't because we don't. For instance, the animal that jumps on my lap and purrs is called a cat. Would you say that I know its a cat because of empirical evidence? Would you say that I know that it is called 'cat' because of empirical evidence?
Philosophy is a discipline. Discipline can be divided into how and what. _How_ are the methods. Hence, a title like 'Discourse on the Method'[0]. So part of the business of philosophy is to train your mind to be able to manipulate certain thinky-stuff in a reliable way†. Like learning to ride a bike. You don't need empirical evidence that philosophy does this. That's one of its raison(s?) d'etre! One can learn these mental habits in other disciplines, sure–but philosophy is especially concerned about them methodologically speaking. Secondly the _What_. This is what people mean when they ask the question, What is philosophy about? or What is it for? That is trickier … :) but I like the Wilfrid Sellar's answer,
“The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”
Of course, the devil is in the details!
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59/59-h/59-h.htm
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/
† examples: learning to spot your own cognitive biases, learning about logical fallacies, reading the works of great thinkers to see how their minds worked, practising mulling concepts over in a measured way oneself in solitude and in dialogue, and so on
I hope that's a joke. Lest you ignore all those that laid the foundations of western thinking like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
Socrates was the one of the first people to infer the validity of one's thinking by following the thinking to it's natural conclusion by asking questions. This is inline with (and probably inspired) verifying a scientific theory by making predictions and verifying them.
Plato talked the theory of forms. That everything can be classified, abstracted, and reasoned about. The first is inline with classes (in OOPS), and the last part with functional programming.
Aristotle took Plato's classification idea, and was the first known person to classify animals and plants. Oh, only that allowed the rest of science to startup.
Btw, Socrates taught Plato who taught Aristotle.
I am not a philosophy major, so I am sure what I covered is just a bit of what they did (and taught others).
It is very necessary to know and understand how we came to think in a certain way today (because it is not natural), visit the foundations of the knowledge we have today, to understand the world when the tools we know and use are too specialized to use.
* What is evidence?
* What does it mean for evidence to be empirical?
* What does "critical thinking" or "reasoning" mean?
* What is a fact?
Further (more meaty) questions to ask:
* Does your concept of evidence support the existence of a single truth?
* Can 2 people truly perceive the same fact in the same way? What does it mean to perceive a fact?
And the list goes on
How many actual philosophers have you communicated with on the matter?
People value unambiguous concise communication
I think we have some sort global identity crisis because of that. Religions are not sufficient enough and science doesn't even try to answer the question of "why?" but rather "how?". In result of that, we ended up with no ideology and no tools to build one for ourselves.
This is laughably ironic, because we really want some change in the way we live and think and yet, we don't turn back and evaluate what people came out with in the history.
edit: if you want to start with it: http://philosophizethis.org/category/episode/
Philosophy is asking way more subjective questions, like "what should we do, and why?". The answer will always vary by context and individual and there will never be a "right" answer.
Behavioral economics is more relevant to both the fields you describe.
He recalls telling the story to Some Fameous Economist and being told that (a) yes, that was the most rational thing to do in that situation, and (b) that it was indeed what everyone would do.
There may be schools of thought based on assumptions that are fundamentally alien to you, but making sense of them is the fun of philosophy.
Likewise, the question of free will has some downstream legal consequences. A pure practical, utilitarian answer might just be unpalatable.
In the end different philosophical systems have different behavioral results-a strong believer in divinely received morality will certainly come to different conclusions from an existential absurdist. Support charities? A Nietzschian might not thank you for that. A Randian might just think you a fool. There's probably a difference between Buddhist philosophy and that of Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann, but for the life of me, I can't see what it is.
Any entity that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a person is a person. That's what "is" means. Scientists figured this out. Programmers figured this out. Mathematicians figured this out. Philosophers? They don't want to figure things out. They want to drop names.
In the end, these are mostly solved problems, and if it weren't for people continuing to worship their own ignorance -- sorry -- "the mystery", then we'd be able to move past these and find some useful philosophy to talk about, rather than spinning up 1300 year old problems again and again.
I don't really draw such a strong distinction between religion and philosophy. I consider theology to be a school of philosophy that deals with certain metaphysical axioms and their implications.
If investment in philosophy helps people understand how most controversy is downstream from assumptions they don't know they're making, they might be able to de-escalate from thier religious fervor (a popular "religion" these days is an unhealthy political divisiveness), I welcome that investment.
Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge—so I should contend— belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy
The closest religion to philosophy (I can think of) is Buddhism, it is basically a guide to learn about self and the world.
Here is a theologian's thought on modern secularism, it is essentially a philosophical essay: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/02/the-metaphysics-...
No, it's not, though what most people are exposed to is, just as what most people exposed to philosophy by other means get is oversimplified. If you go beyond the surface, theology is no less deep than other philosophy.
>William H. “Bill” Miller III ... attributes “much” of his success ... to the “analytical training and habits of mind” his philosophical study at Johns Hopkins inculcated. The way he sees it, more students should have the chance for that intellectual stimulation.
In most other colleges and universities, I think it would be much more beneficial, to both students and teachers, for philosophy to become part of a common curriculum for everyone rather than remaining its own department with its own major.
Knowledge of philosophy is a kind of force multiplier. It can help you become a more thoughtful and ethical person no matter what you do. But if you do nothing apart from philosophy, well, zero multiplied by a force multiplier is still zero.
Disclaimer: Got a Ph.D. in philosophy. Currently running my own business.
And, yes, there are many such jobs: consulting (McKinsey, BCG,..), finance, politics (not just elected, but staff), journalism, etc.
I don't see how that would benefit anyone more than the current situation, where a degree program will typically require one or two philosophy classes. It seems to me that the only reason to simply not have the philosophy degree program would be if there weren't enough faculty to teach the classes.
(unless you're arguing for a sort of common "humanities" degree, which I guess I would have to think about)
> Knowledge of philosophy is a kind of force multiplier. It can help you become a more thoughtful and ethical person no matter what you do. But if you do nothing apart from philosophy, well, zero multiplied by a force multiplier is still zero.
> Disclaimer: Got a Ph.D. in philosophy. Currently running my own business.
Did it seem to you that philosophy drew the kind of students (other than you, of course) who had no "force" to multiply, such that the philosophy degree program was a waste of time for them? I didn't take my study of philosophy as far as you did (I got a BA), but I bet you saw a lot of your fellow students go on to be successful professionals, as I saw.
From the point of view of students, it might be the same. From the point of view of the administration, not having to maintain a separate degree program and all the bureaucracy that comes with it frees up a lot of resources that could be better spent on other things. From the point of view of the importance of philosophy, I think it sends a better message to everyone when philosophy is officially "everywhere" than when it's confined to a tiny, chronically underfunded department known only to a select few who care about it.
> Did it seem to you that philosophy drew the kind of students (other than you, of course) who had no "force" to multiply, such that the philosophy degree program was a waste of time for them?
Fortunately, most people naturally have a range of interests.
But even if all you want to do is analyze a certain passage from Plato for the rest of your life, I wouldn't say that it's a total waste of time. That passage from Plato then becomes the force that you multiply, no matter how close to zero everyone else thinks its value is. There's a place for that kind of dedication in academia, and the true value of their work might not be apparent until centuries later. Humanity needs people like them. Our civilization can afford to subsidize them. Just not too many of them.
For 99.9% of people who have ever studied philosophy, I think the goal should be to use that knowledge to live a good life, make a difference in the world, and teach others to do the same. Focusing too much on an academic career distorts the picture.
It was a pleasant surprise to realize it was so much easier for us to write specs and discuss issues and possible solutions on github together. We were just more used to think on "paper" and to articulate our ideas by writing them, which allowed us to be really comfortable doing async work and to communicate complex ideas.
It was really appreciated, among all those "hum... I'll call you, it will be easier".
I learned logic, writing and debating skills from sites like Slashdot, Hacker News and other online forums. Might sound silly, but these sites host huge online written debates all day every day around the clock, for years on end, with real-time scoring and feedback based on what you write and not who you are. It's a pretty great gladiatorial training ground for philosophy.
A note about debating skills, though: from the second year (at least in my university), we were asked to try to explain why someone is right, rather than why they're wrong. I found this shocking at first, especially because teachers were making us study the authors they loved and then ask us to explain why they were right. It sounded like brainwashing, at first. But later I realized it was actually the best skill I learned there.
When you're discussing an author, a developer's work, almost any kind of work, really, you're basically taking 10 minutes of your attention to refute work that took maybe years, or even a life. Most likely, the objections you'll have will be superficial and author/creator will have figured them for a long time. Starting first by trying to understand the goal and the reasoning of author/creator allows to really take advantage of their creation. You may then refute it if you still have problems with it :) (but you'll almost always have a cool idea or two to take away, so it's not lost time)
If I were reviewing applications for a software engineering role, I would primarily prioritize computer science and electrical engineering degrees, then secondarily mathematics and physics degrees. Of the subset without a degree in STEM, I'd probably weight philosophy higher than some alternatives, but they still wouldn't have priority unless their professional experience was more impressive than other candidates.
I was initially a philosophy major during my undergrad (up to and including 300 and 400 level courses in Kant). I don't think philosophy degrees are a useful signal to compare against more targeted degrees. They can certainly teach logical and abstract thinking; however, at at the default level of effort I've observed, most students do not graduate a philosophy degree with significant enough critical thinking skills to overcome the sheer amount of domain knowledge they're missing by not having studied computer science. And it gets difficult to specify exactly what it would look like for a philosophy major to make up for the lack of computer science education by having superlative reasoning ability, if that's the case.
Ideally you want a student who demonstrated that they put significant effort into their academic work, enough to intellectually grasp it, apply it and reason about it. If you have two students who appear to have put equal effort into their studies, I can't see why philosophy would be a plus. A philosophy degree will be a net negative for the professional functions of a software engineering role unless the applicant has spent significant time overcoming the lag in programming experience and computer science understanding.
In other words, I think people use philosophy degrees as a proxy for overall intelligence and reasoning ability, or maybe even academic effort. But I consider that to be a red herring - philosophy studies are useful, but they don't intrinsically encourage more effort and engagement than more relevant degrees do, and the skills they offer are far less relevant for the professional work of engineers (not irrelevant, just missing quite a lot). If a candidate demonstrates strong suitability for a software engineering role with a philosophy degree, they probably would have excelled with or without it because they had to be motivated enough to self-study computer science anyway. The philosophy major in particular doesn't encapsulate or confer that kind of motivation and engagement, so it's better to just look for a targeted degree.
Again, this isn't to say philosophy isn't useful - much of my dialectic style comes from Wittgenstein. It's just that on its own philosophy is like arithmetic: fundamentally useful and broadly applicable in everyday life, but not nearly enough to prepare one for a software engineering job.
I learned a lot under those conditions.
A fourth paragraph might talk about how any curriculum in financial engineering begins with an even bigger assumption than in physics that the big problems are already mostly understood, and that the rest is computation to fill in a few gaps. And yet this donor thinks the formal study of philosophy is important.
My understanding of what he is saying about philosophy and discipline has to do with developing the capability to handle a large problem analytically. This is different than the type of discipline where you break things down into small problems then work through them individually.
When Lawrence Krauss talks about philosophy, you get the impression that he thinks it is all people in coffee shops in black turtlenecks being awed by random thoughts rather than people doing anything formal or logically rigorous.
I took a few courses and I consider them among the most valuable parts of my college experience. You look at some of the oldest questions(and various answers) around, and use those to learn how to really form and analyze arguments objectively. I may be preaching to the choir here, but if you haven't studied any philosophy, try it out!
This is due to a teacher who actively pushed this kind of thinking instead of teaching us to blindly recite the mathematics behind calculating p-values, which certainly could have been an option. It might help to require a few lessons directly on epistemology for high school or college curricula, but in the end you can't teach kids who don't want to learn effectively with teachers who don't want to teach effectively.
That's often because they were pursuing some philosophical riddle which they were more concerned about than the theories that would later become their legacy.
Cantor and Godel wanted to find God, and in their search, provided much of the early work for Turing and computer science to develop.
Einstein similarly wanted to know the mind of God, and in doing so contributed to quantum mechanics and invented relativity.
Bell's explanation of his theorem in a 1985 BBC Radio interview includes an appeal to the debate between free-will and determinism when interpreting his results.
TL;DR — Important scientific and mathematical breakthroughs often come from a deep exploration of metaphysics, epistemology, free-will, and ontological truth.
That sounds very interesting. Is the radio interview (or a transcript) still available? I tried searching for it and found a possible match for a show on BBC Radio 3 in 1983 [1].
[1] http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/7c8c2aba48024a5e925d0aca69c57b21
It does not follow at all that studying philosophy helped cause those accomplishments.
The situation is similar to brain training games like Lumosity. They do not make you smarter in general, just better at that particular game. People who are already smart will do better.
Personally, my argument for philosophy is that I enjoy it.
The Institute for Advanced Study is perhaps best known as the academic home of Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel, after their immigration to the United States. ... founded in 1930 by American educator Abraham Flexner, together with philanthropists Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld.
Why not Johns Hopkins?
I was a little surprised that this was the largest donation to a Johns Hopkins humanities department. This may be wrong, but I think of Johns Hopkins as in the upper echelon of schools that tends to have massive endowments and wealthy alumni.
...At least for the US tax system(where this gift was made)
To back that up: I would rather work with a philosopher than an arbitrary "other degree" holder outside of the Math/CS preference. Particularly as the person grows in seniority, the education becomes more and more useful.