
More undergraduates are majoring in philosophy - grotius
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/education/06philosophy.html?em&ex=1207627200&en=cf253583648590d5&ei=5070
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akeefer
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.

~~~
jksmith
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."

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jksmith
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?

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omouse
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.

~~~
phaedrus
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.

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

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mtts
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.

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rml
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? :-))

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hugh
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.

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derefr
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 ;)

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ardit33
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.

~~~
akeefer
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.

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joshvf
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.

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

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

~~~
jimbokun
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...](http://woodmoorvillage.typepad.com/zendo/2005/02/bullshit_artist.html)

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Tichy
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?

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justindz
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.

~~~
Tichy
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.

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danohuiginn
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.

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

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

~~~
donal
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?).

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

~~~
jimbokun
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.)

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

~~~
aswanson
What if you are not interested in math?

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eru
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.)

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

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

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

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andreyf
Submarine alert ;)

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LPTS
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.

~~~
cia_plant
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?"

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LPTS
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?

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cia_plant
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.

