Why not? He can do whatever he wants with his money. He's spent $100M on a yacht already[1].
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.
There's a big emphasis towards donating for professional schools. (Medical in the case of JHU) Also - it's a huge donation for just a department, rather than a building or school.
True, but if your country gives you tax breaks for donations, by giving you're depriving other tax payers of your money. You're saying that what you're donating to is more worthwhile than the average government spending, which may not be true for some "charities". (By the way, this argument is not originally mine but was in an interesting comedy on BBC Radio 4 yesterday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09ply4y)
Couldn’t one flip the equation by saying that allowing certain tax deductions is a form of government spending? The government has decided it is OK with non-centralized (you and I can pick) funding to certain classes of organizations, which is as much a part of the tax code (Or was) as the tax rate itself. I find it difficult to place a kinda of moral burden on the tax payer when this is entirely government policy.
There is a danger in overreliance on private donations, which is that they are rarely targeted well. People tend to rarely donate millions to regabilititation efforts for middle-aged Sex offenders. Conversely, as just one example, there is an immorally well-funded charity for stray cats in my country, mostly financed from inheritances by lonely widows.
A more accurate way of looking at this is that the government is incentivizing a desirable behavior by matching a portion of any money a person contributes to the common good. You have to give up some of your own after-tax wealth to get the govt to kick in 20-30%. Since an individual is mostly putting their own money into the charity, they will want to maximize their good feelings by chosing a charity that adds a lot to the common good. And this is especially true for people who make large gifts.
...At least for the US tax system(where this gift was made)
That's the theory, ut in practice most people give not to charities for others but to schools/clubs/churches they are a member of, so it's a form of nongoverbmental State/Local taxes.
>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.
A positive addition, sure. But when accounting for opportunity cost (not getting a degree in something more valuable) then I think the balance shifts in favour of graduating in something else.
I have a philosophy degree with a CS minor... it has served me well so in my career and I think it's absolutely a killer combination whether you do it as Phil major/CS minor or CS major/Phil minor or even double major.
In what context, and a plus over what other degrees? I don't agree that it's a plus unless the candidate has double majored in a relevant degree, or did a philosophy BSc. and a relevant MSc afterwards.
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.
Only the first 1 out of 4 years of a CS/EE degree is relevant to most professional software "engineer" degrees. That's why Mathematicians and Physicists have O problem joining the field.
You can learn programming as a hobby as well as you can learn philosophy as a hobby, as long as you have foundational critical thinking skills
Agreed. I think critical thinking in philosophy is useful, but you have to keep in mind the critical thinking skills learned in a typical engineering degree:
advanced math classes
more advanced math classes
applying mathematics to engineering problems
programming
learning to take general math concepts and apply to large intermixed problems
working solo and on teams
*4 years of living in a library studying, doing homework, and doing more studying
Totally agree. I went to philosophy section of university myself (although, I didn't go up to a degree, it was mostly for my own interest) and later recruited a developer who attended too.
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".
But I studied CS and never studied philosophy, and I also prefer to write my thoughts down and not do things via calls. I also like to think of myself as a critical thinker skilled in logic (whether I am or not is hard to say in the absence of an objective definition and test).
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.
Oh yeah, totally, I'm not saying thinking on paper is something that can't be achieved without studying philosophy, just that it's something all philosophy students are trained to do. Certainly, a willing and rigorous individual will get there anyway :) You also probably find the same skill in other domains specialized in written rational thinking, like History or law.
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)
You can make that case for education in any field. A philosophy degree with a strong GPA from a highly ranked school can get your foot in the door in many career paths.
I think the "highly ranked school" is what matters in that case, not that the degree is in philosophy in particular. If you graduate with a 3.9 from Harvard, your specific degree doesn't matter for many lucrative fields, and you'll have access to connections for the interviews.
Yep, of course. And there's definitely a lower bar of a school pedigree than Harvard to get into a great company or great postgrad or whatever. I guess the general point is, a philosphy degree is really not a big handicap IF you're very bright and/or hard working and on a good trajectory. Unless you want to go into HFT or intern at NASA.
There are places in this world for departments of philosophy and degrees in philosophy to exist, and a prestigious research institution like Johns Hopkins is probably one of those places.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Philosophy is a great example of something that’s definitely helpful, just tough to lay out concrete benefits. You can give it a lot of ham-fisted examples (philosophy helps with maths), but at the end of the day philosophy is about life itself.
Philosophy today is one of the most undervalued discipline. It doesn't yield any return on investment immediately and is mostly confusing at the beginning, so people don't tend to have interest in it.
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.
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.
Religion is a oversimplification of philosophy doctrines. Imagine Moses trying to communicate with regular folk his views on the world in a way that Socrates did. It was much more efficient to translate it to a set of stories that impose specific behavior.
The closest religion to philosophy (I can think of) is Buddhism, it is basically a guide to learn about self and the world.
I don't agree, maybe you have have a oversimplified view of religion, do you believe religion only consists of regular folks? Where would you put St. Thomas and his Summa Theologica
> Religion is a oversimplification of philosophy doctrines.
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.
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
Philosophy gets a bad rep for the same reason psychology and sociology and applied macroeconomics do: because there is no way to clearly distinguish right ideas from wrong ones, so the field is flooded with junk.
Not sure I would lump economics and psychology in there. Economics tries to explain some observable phenomenon which arises from human behavior which we don't fully understand. Psychology again, tries to understand human behavior. In theory, if we measured the correct things and the measurements were accurate, we'd be able to make accurate predictions based on those measurements in both fields. The problem is that we aren't able to do that currently.
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.
Ok, I will say something. Economics had a problem in that it is partially descriptive, as you say, but it is also partially normative: it wants to say how things should be. Then it gets the two parts confused a lot, leading to homo economicus stuff.
Behavioral economics is more relevant to both the fields you describe.
In Misbehaving, Richard Thaler describes a meeting of psychologists where he describes the best current thinking of economists as to what a "rational" person would do if the government were to give a payment to all citizens as an economic stimulus. I don't remember the details, but it involves the recognition that a citizen would have to pay the money back (as taxes) at some point, and that the citizen would have descendants in perpetuity---as a result, the economic stimulus would fail because the citizen would lock the payment into a 0-risk savings account. He had to have another economist at the meeting reassure everyone that that was indeed the current best economic thinking in order to stop them from laughing at him.
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.
Philosophy, for the most part, isn't flooded with junk. (I'll refrain from comments about the rest.) In fact, I'm not sure what philosophical junk would be.
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.
If at the end of the day, you've got a world to live in with problems to solve, it does not suffice to say "oh, gee... there are lots of interesting ways to look at the world." You have to do something more than just catalogue esoteric thought. And there's a lot of junk philosophy that poses questions and says "this is interesting", even if, for all practical purposes, it is definitely not interesting. (Like P-Zombies, the Ship of Theseus, free will, etc. It's all junk philosophy.)
P-zombies are a bit overblown in my opinion, too, but that arises from the AI question: what is the moral, ethical, and ultimately legal status of a general AI? Does an entity that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a person have any rights a real person is bound to respect?
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.
>Does an entity that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a person have any rights a real person is bound to respect?
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.
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.
Agreed. In my anecdotal experience, imprecise language and simple logical mistakes made in conversation is a pretty frequent source of miscommunication and minor interpersonal conflict. But I can't really tell people to speak more precisely or consider the logical implications of their speech without sounding like a prick
> ...it teaches us to be as rigorous as possible when reasoning in natural language.
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.
It sounds to me like you're philosophizing about code then, which is a fine thing to philosophize about.
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.
> If a philosopher isn't available, a lawyer would probably be qualified as well.
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.
In my view philosophy is important in and of itself, because these are natural questions about our existence which many brilliant people have thought about and written on for centuries. And these are very worth reading.
> 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.
And what if someone wants to become a philosopher? That's like saying we shouldn't teach match as a major because every kid gets taught arithmetic. Well, some people want to do more with math than arithmetic.
Frankly, I disagree that mathematics should be its own degree at the undergraduate level as well.
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 :)
If you don't teach proof-based mathematics at the undergraduate level then aspiring mathematicians would have to take those courses at the graduate level. This would cause advanced degrees to take considerably longer to obtain.
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?
> If you don't teach proof-based mathematics at the undergraduate level then aspiring mathematicians would have to take those courses at the graduate level. This would cause advanced degrees to take considerably longer to obtain.
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.
The parent mentioned children, and I mentioned a (very talented) 14 year old. You're talking about 19-22 year olds; I have no reservations about that age bracket tackling proofs, but that's not really the point.
The difference between mathematics and philosophy here is that an undergraduate math degree is considered as the most appropriate training for middle school math educators, whereas there is no obvious career path an undergraduate degree in philosophy leads to.
That's a good point. But if that's the case, undergraduate mathematics does not need to introduce abstract algebra, topology, linear algebra, analysis, or any of the other higher level courses. In fact, they could finish out at calculus.
I think there are overlooked advantages for middle and high school teachers to be conversant with higher levels of math than they’ll ever directly teach to young people
Your philosophy towards mathematics education is interesting. If you don't mind me asking a direct question: what's the point?
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.
I think you and I mean different things by computational mathematics. Calculus isn't analysis, but it still has substantial rigor to it. You might not be able to develop calculus from scratch after studying it, like you could by working through real analysis, but that doesn't mean studying calculus has to be hollow and rote. For example, I find Spivak's Calculus to be a good compromise between full on analysis and the kind of formula memorization you're talking about.
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).
Econ should move that way too. Most Econ undergrad degrees are so watered down than Econ grad schools prefer Math and Physics majors who can actually do the work.
I concur with your last statement. Similar to mathematics, it make sure a very good second degree as well. Econ majors are a dime a dozen, but Econ/philosophy double majors are much more likely to Ben precise thinkers. Same benefit to precision when pairing it with CS.
The irony is that when philosophers make statements like these, they never provide any empirical evidence to back it up. Does philosophy really improve critical thinking and reasoning skills? We're told it does, based on nothing more than "that's what it feels like to me". Rigorous reasoning is worthless without facts to reason on.
This is the reason introducing mandatory programming in high school will likely cause more harm than good to the reputation of the field. (Don't judge a field of study by how it is taught.)
In this case that's not true though - the article is about someone who used critical thinking/reasoning skills to make a huge amount of money, and credits this in large part to his training in philosophy.
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?
People who study carpentry tend to be better carpenters than people who study accounting. One of the aims of philosophy as a discipline is to instil the discipline of critical thinking, that's the purported business of philosophy after all. Would you ask someone who had studied carpentry for empirical evidence that studying carpentry produces people more skilled in the carpentry than if they had not studied it?
> Would you ask someone who had studied carpentry for empirical evidence that studying carpentry produces people more skilled in the carpentry than if they had not studied it?
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.
> 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.
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.
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Having said that, there is a reference to an quasi-empirical study and meta-analysis here but I think the results are inconclusive[1].
Maybe I didn't make it clear, but my point on the carpentry thing was that it's not clear to me that the average philosophy student is much better at critical thinking than the average, say, history student. My response to the carpentry analogy was to say that if the benefits of carpentry education were equally anecdotal and unclear, I would absolutely question its usefulness.
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.
There's some evidence that philosophy majors score pretty high on the GMAT (for graduate admissions to business school) and on the LSAT (for law school), as well as pretty good on the GRE Verbal and GRE Analytical Writing tests.
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).
> There's some evidence that philosophy majors score pretty high on the GMAT (for graduate admissions to business school) and on the LSAT (for law school), as well as pretty good on the GRE Verbal and GRE Analytical Writing test
As a philosophy major you should be the first to point out this doesn't imply causation.
The guy who in the end just said "Fuck it, a Wizard (God) did it."? It's really interesting to see the logical hole he digs for himself in the book but then cops out in the end with a "Well, God is good so he wouldn't let something bad happen to us so we must exist."
He basically defined existence as thinking, then turned it into a tautology. And then it blew up in his face when he realized that he couldn't prove anything else was thinking. And in fact even if there wasn't some devil tricking him (ala brain in a box hooked to the Matrix), things like rocks and water could never exist.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_argument. You kind of have it backwards, he first concluded that he existed (I think therefore I am). Then because of that (and other arguments), he believed god exists and is good, so he wouldn’t deceive his senses.
Not really. That was just Socrates being Socrates and being all humble about his knowledge. Apart from him I don't remember any othe philosopher adopting that stance.
"This is the real problem. Philosophers can’t prove their own existence to themselves, how can they be expected to prove anything else?"
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.)
> 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."
Humes point is that we can't perceive causal relationships, even if we think we do. We can only perceive events, and then our mind constructs causal relationships on top of them. But these relationships are not inherent to the world, they are only in our minds.
Hume's point is much more fundamental: you can't know if the world is indeed governed by 'natural laws'. Maybe the sun will just not rise tomorrow, ignoring all of the causal relationships we think we 'discovered'. There is no way to prove it will.
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'.
They are very very closely related, and philosophers and Pearl cite each other on the topic of causation, but Hume and philosophers are usually concerned with a slightly different problem. Hume is concerned about the nature of the necessity between any cause and effect which seemed to be implied by our experience of events. Whereas Pearl (much less knowledgeable about Pearl) is interested in how we can model events to give us high confidence in the relation applying in a particular case while leaving the topic of necessity and the fundamental nature of causation to the side and assuming a much more vague /ad hoc notion of what causation is.
That is true in the absolute sense, but untrue in the relative sense of day to day life. If there is smoke, there must be fire - people know that. We apply causal reasoning in day to day life. It's probably a cultural thing, though, it does not appear spontaneously in the brain, it's learned.
Hume's idea is that you can only ever directly experience events co-occuring in time, but "causation" is not something you can actually ever see itself.
In practice, it is useful to predict when a given action is likely to achieve a particular result. Or I guess we can't know anything, because what is knowing really...
To show that studying philosophy causes improvement, at least we need to compare them with a control group whose average SAT scores before going to college are similar to philosophy majors. Otherwise, it could just be a selection bias (i.e., those who choose philosophy tend to score high on those measures like Verbal and Analytical Writing). Any such studies?
* 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.
I mentioned this below, but it's even more relevant here: one of the most interesting things I learned in college is that physics departments used to be called natural philosophy. If you're interested in the cyclic nature of philosophy and dogma and the tension between them, check out Kuhn. He invented the term "paradigm shift". And as you allude to, he argues that "true progress" is impossible without a breakdown and reimagining of the prevailing belief system, the social rut, that has captured people's immediate attention.
All the sciences gradually split off from philosophy: physics, biology, chemistry, sociology, psychology, ..., even theology.
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.
It is sometimes argued that one can find answers about philosophy in the even more abstract field of metaphilosophy–philosophy of/about philosophy. Given that the study of X is usually termed Xology let's call the study of philosophy philosophology. An ugly word, safe from thieves and brigands. Pirsig uses it in his Zen and the Art… reboot Lila–I came up with it independently recently if you're so inclined to believe me.
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”
† 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
Like all reasoning, philosophys logic (which is the base of math) ultimatly rest upon a foundation of axioms. These axioms are usually laid out and discussed in great lengths.
Fore example:
1. "To draw a straight line from any point to any point."
2. "To produce [extend] a finite straight line continuously in a straight line."
3. "To describe a circle with any centre and distance [radius]."
4. "That all right angles are equal to one another."
5. "That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles."
These are the euclidean axioms, on which a whole field of math by a navelchain of proofs draws its certainty.
One is of course free to doubt and question these axioms. This is science, so what does not kill it makes it stronger.
If one is a real philosopher, the same accurate reasoning and sound arguing is expected of you, no matter what subject one approaches. Linguistics and Law, Aesthetics and Mathematics, the Meaning of Life and the Meaningless of Life, all have to live beneath this sharp sword.
So if you can proof that one of this axioms is not fact, then all that you stated is right.If you can not proof these axioms wrong, the may be right, but have to live in the shadow of doubt for all eternity.
Thus not one of the arts, thus none of the applied sciences, thus - the first science.
Philosophy improves critical thinking and reasoning skills but it requires active engagement in philosophical literature and inquiry. I can tell by your understanding of philosophy as "feeling" based that you haven't done this -- and you're missing out on a valuable form of rational inquiry. No it's not scientific. But to sit back, arms-crossed ready to rebuke anything philosophical because it fails to satisfy the criterion of a different discipline is so contrary to a healthy, open-minded, rational way of living.
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)
I guess I'll have to throw away my MA in Philosophy then.
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.
Philosophers explore and debate the very meaning of the words 'evidence', 'empirical', 'reasoning', 'facts', and various methods of knowing - many of which insist upon empirical evidence (e.g. science, history) and many which do not (e.g. praxeology, law, international relations).
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).
You misunderstand. The point is that "philosophy improves critical reasoning" is an empirical statement and hence requires empirical evidence. That doesn't mean philosophical discussions themselves must be empirical in nature. But when they refer to evidence, they do.
You're going to run into problems attempting to operationalize a variable like 'critical reasoning', in order to demonstrate, scientifically, its empirical validity. In fact, you'll need the help of philosophers, who have been studying various ways of interpreting what critical reasoning actually means[1], and how to properly operationalize variables[2].
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.
Alchemists are trained in how matter behaves and how to manipulate it... turns out they're not any more competent at it than anyone else. It seems obvious that a student of philosophy who has been trained in logic and critical thinking will be better at it than others, but obviousness is not in itself evidence. Lots of things sound obvious but later turn out not to be true.
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.
The value of the philosophical disciplines of logic and epistemology to empiricism and science is as self evident as the value of algebra and numbers to mathematics in that you can't have one without the other. Empiricism and science depend upon logic, reason, and a particular method of obtaining knowledge.
You're also conflating rigor with empiricism. It is possible to be rigorous and be a rationalist, a phenomenologist, a theologin, or an empiricist.
Philosophy is important. The fact that you're even asking that question indicates a deep ignorance of the history of ideas and thought. It's also slightly absurd because empiricism is itself a philosophy.
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.
Not that I got very deep into mathematics but higher level math is all formal logic and proofs. There are mathematical theorems that are proven to be true/closed for many years by mathematicians before they find commercial/practical applications.
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].
You're changing the subject. The fact that it is possible to have a discussion (whether empirical or not) about the nature of evidence or of what constitutes a fact, and even that this might be a very fruitful thing to discuss, does not suddenly make a statement like "philosophy improves critical thinking" true and beyond questioning.
> Does philosophy really improve critical thinking and reasoning skills?
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.
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.
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?
Natural philosophy, rhetoric, statistics. There are a handful of skills that for some reason we don't teach and then society suffers through the impact the lack of them has on public debate.
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.
Natural language reasoning skills are more important than ever, since the relatively recent explosion of “firmware hacks” into people’s brains using natural language as an attack vector.
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.”
Why on earth is the entire last paragraph devoted to Lawrence Krauss’s musings on philosophy? It may represent a widespread attitude found among physicists, but not one many people with a background in both disciplines shares. In physics forums, the same dismissive attitude can also be found about pure math for which a use in physics has not yet been found.
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.
While laudable, it has some ego trip elements - he's not only thankful for the "mind discipline" his training endowed him with, but wants the department to bear his name. Really, a philosophy department named not after a famous local philosopher or distinguished scholar, but a wealthy financier that happened to study there? It a telling sign of our times.
Only a truly great scientist gets mentioned as contributing to the philosophy of science, or is characterized also as a logician on wikipedia.
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.
> 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.
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].
This is probably just me being nit picky but... Einstein didn’t invent relativity. It existed before he was born. He discovered it... and told other people about it... in a formal manner.
Newton discovered certain patterns that worked. He invented a theory, a way to speak about them. They are indeed an invention, though, because they aren't accurate at very small distances or relatively fast speeds. pun intended.
Nice! My opinion is that philosophy is the undervalued discipline in American life today.
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.
I believe that at least an introductory philosophy course should be required for all college students. (maybe high school, I don't know). Philosophy has a bad reputation because 1) it's seen as the most pretentious of fields and 2) getting a degree in it is not a quick path to making any money. But in my experience, most people who haven't taken a course don't really know what philosophy is about.
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!
Back in the seventies, physics was called natural philosophy. In college, it amazed me how many people study sciences without even asking or caring why. They don't know the limits of the knowledge they seek or of the tools (repeatable observations) in their belt because they never learned how to ask uncomfortable questions or learn formal logic. Most certainly some of this is by design as colleges evolved into little businesses obsessed with crafting financially successful students before well rounded ones. On the other hand, some is probably just a reflection of the rationalist zeitgeist—philosophy became supernatural. To me, it's sadly dogmatic. You stop asking existential questions when your peers stop challenging your belief system.
Anecdotally, the world of science really opened up for me in a way that counteracted the kind of blindness you're describing when I took a class on statistics in high school. It finally clicked for me both how much scientific knowledge can be trusted and, paradoxically, how much we still need to be careful about trusting it.
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.
Interesting to read all the responses in this thread observing incidental correlations between intellectual or practical accomplishments and philosophy. Famous scientists are sometimes interested in philosophy, philosophy majors score high on the GRE, etc.
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.
Many famous scientists were interested in philosophical questions like the nature of reality or "is God real?" and are only known as scientists because they had these ultimately philosophical concerns.
This is such a lame argument. Nobody is going to cure cancer or build a better tokamak because they attended a fancy wood-paneled lecture on God at Johns Hopkins.
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.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadI 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.
[1] https://www.superyachtfan.com/superyacht_utopia_dv.html
...At least for the US tax system(where this gift was made)
>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.
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.
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)
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.
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/
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSdHoNJu5fU
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).
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.
How many actual philosophers have you communicated with on the matter?
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.
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.
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.)
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:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HUti6vGctQM
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'.
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.
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
These are the euclidean axioms, on which a whole field of math by a navelchain of proofs draws its certainty. One is of course free to doubt and question these axioms. This is science, so what does not kill it makes it stronger.
If one is a real philosopher, the same accurate reasoning and sound arguing is expected of you, no matter what subject one approaches. Linguistics and Law, Aesthetics and Mathematics, the Meaning of Life and the Meaningless of Life, all have to live beneath this sharp sword.
So if you can proof that one of this axioms is not fact, then all that you stated is right.If you can not proof these axioms wrong, the may be right, but have to live in the shadow of doubt for all eternity.
Thus not one of the arts, thus none of the applied sciences, thus - the first science.
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)
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.
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.
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].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra
* 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
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.
People value unambiguous concise communication
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.”
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.
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
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.
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.
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?