Live data from Hacker News

Why I Majored in Philosophy Despite Everyone Telling Me Not To (2013)

mic.com

11–20 of 219 posts

Re: Why I Majored in Philosophy Despite Everyone Telling Me Not To (2013)

#11

I'm going to reproduce a reddit post I made recently that I think is relevant: Analytic philosophy has made my mind a razor. It forged in me the confidence and mental discipline to learn anything, and I'm now dominating the tech scene despite having little in the way of formal coursework. I was lucky to choose one of the few disciplines that can be fruitfully studied at Brown. As any student of a rigorous discipline,…

Comments like that are lost on Reddit. Reddit isn't about discourse, it's about upvotes. The whole "just find good small subreddits" also doesn't work unless you subscribe to their specific early-stage cults mentality. And each sub has one.

Re: Why I Majored in Philosophy Despite Everyone Telling Me Not To (2013)

#12

An interesting list of some famous people with philosophy degrees: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1k1qSRoDpuOeDVkYm10bTg3V3l...

The one that stood out to me most was Jean-Paul Sartre. Wouldn't it make sense for a philosopher to have a philosophy degree?

Re: Why I Majored in Philosophy Despite Everyone Telling Me Not To (2013)

#13

I'm going to reproduce a reddit post I made recently that I think is relevant: Analytic philosophy has made my mind a razor. It forged in me the confidence and mental discipline to learn anything, and I'm now dominating the tech scene despite having little in the way of formal coursework. I was lucky to choose one of the few disciplines that can be fruitfully studied at Brown. As any student of a rigorous discipline,…

Question -- you say that you are a person who is able to learn in solitude. Would you have been able to pursue your dive into Philosophy without the environment that Brown offered you?

I ask this for a few reasons.

1) I have a fairly strong interest in the discipline, but have found rigorous self guided study to be a challenge, beyond cursory readings of the classics and a smattering of modern theorists like Singer.

2) I feel that a fortunate circumstance today that the fastest growing, lucrative profession is programming, which now has a wealth of online resources for new entrants to get started and become proficient. Many other technical disciplines require prohibitively expensive lab equipment to learn the craft. I wonder if philosophy is a discipline within the humanities that is more difficult to cultivate in a self-directed fashion than others.

Re: Why I Majored in Philosophy Despite Everyone Telling Me Not To (2013)

#14
Well, to the tune of $60,000 dollars/year, I wonder how much longer people are going to "become a more whole human being". There are cheap conjectures and ideologies, and then there are the really expensive ones!

What about pulling your own weight and produce something that other people would be willing to pay for? That may make sense too, no?

Re: Why I Majored in Philosophy Despite Everyone Telling Me Not To (2013)

#15
post #11

I'm going to reproduce a reddit post I made recently that I think is relevant: Analytic philosophy has made my mind a razor. It forged in me the confidence and mental discipline to learn anything, and I'm now dominating the tech scene despite having little in the way of formal coursework. I was lucky to choose one of the few disciplines that can be fruitfully studied at Brown. As any student of a rigorous discipline,…

Comments like that are lost on Reddit. Reddit isn't about discourse, it's about upvotes. The whole "just find good small subreddits" also doesn't work unless you subscribe to their specific early-stage cults mentality. And each sub has one.

That has been my experience, unfortunately.

Re: Why I Majored in Philosophy Despite Everyone Telling Me Not To (2013)

#16

I'm going to reproduce a reddit post I made recently that I think is relevant: Analytic philosophy has made my mind a razor. It forged in me the confidence and mental discipline to learn anything, and I'm now dominating the tech scene despite having little in the way of formal coursework. I was lucky to choose one of the few disciplines that can be fruitfully studied at Brown. As any student of a rigorous discipline,…

Question -- you say that you are a person who is able to learn in solitude. Would you have been able to pursue your dive into Philosophy without the environment that Brown offered you? I ask this for a few reasons. 1) I have a fairly strong interest in the discipline, but have found rigorous self guided study to be a challenge, beyond cursory readings of the classics and a smattering of modern theorists like Singer.…

I'm not the guy you're asking, but I've spent some time 'in solitude' studying without an academic institution. I'd read philosophy books whenever I have down time. Consciously replacing entertainment with books works as well.

Philosophy to me is less about studying philosophy itself as a topic but encountering different people's various personal philosophies about things. Kierkegaard's "The Present Age" and Glenn Gould's perspective on anxiety helped me a lot.

Re: Why I Majored in Philosophy Despite Everyone Telling Me Not To (2013)

#17

I'm going to reproduce a reddit post I made recently that I think is relevant: Analytic philosophy has made my mind a razor. It forged in me the confidence and mental discipline to learn anything, and I'm now dominating the tech scene despite having little in the way of formal coursework. I was lucky to choose one of the few disciplines that can be fruitfully studied at Brown. As any student of a rigorous discipline,…

I'm not a big fan of analytic philosophy, quite the opposite. Continental philosophy is much more my speed (though there are plenty of parts of even that that I have big problems with).

I consider analytic philosophy to be a blight upon philosophy in general. It started off dominating universities in mainly English speaking countries, but has moved on to gain control over many others. It's even started to co-opt philosophers traditionally considered to be in the Continental tradition, such as Nietzsche and now even Heidegger (who used to be absolutely despised as analytics, but now is seen by some as almost one of them).

As a result many if not most philosophy students now see all of philosophy through an Analytic lens. They usually come out of their training thinking Analytic philosophy is the only "true" or "serious" way to do philosophy, and even when they encounter Continental thinkers, they view them effectively as being Analytics, usually completely missing the point.

It's not clear how much non-Analytic philosophy will still be taught in another 50 years, perhaps not very much. I think that will be very sad.

As someone famous once said, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Many Analytics seem not to have learned that lesson. To be fair, neither have many famous Continentals (a certain degree of arrogance and myopia seems too often to be a prerequisite for fame in philosophy), but at least they're not taking over the world with their rather narrow perspective. I'd like it just as little, for example, if everyone who got a philosophy degree was a Heideggerian.

That said, I don't want to come off as saying that I consider training in analytic philosophy to be useless. Training in logic especially (which many analytics consider a prerequisite for doing any kind of philosophy) can certainly help to "make your mind like a razor". I'd just be careful that all that probably exclusively analytic training doesn't make your mind like a hammer and everything you see like a nail. There are other ways of looking at the world (and of doing philosophy). Some of them might even be just as valid and useful.

Re: Why I Majored in Philosophy Despite Everyone Telling Me Not To (2013)

#18

I'm going to reproduce a reddit post I made recently that I think is relevant: Analytic philosophy has made my mind a razor. It forged in me the confidence and mental discipline to learn anything, and I'm now dominating the tech scene despite having little in the way of formal coursework. I was lucky to choose one of the few disciplines that can be fruitfully studied at Brown. As any student of a rigorous discipline,…

    Analytic philosophy has made my mind a razor. [...]
Formal mathematical training (graduate) will do that to you too. I often find myself thinking with abstract algebra ideas (groups, vectors, vector spaces, commutation relations, etc).

Re: Why I Majored in Philosophy Despite Everyone Telling Me Not To (2013)

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it does or it doesn't is itself a philosophical question. If you are interested in that question, you are interested in philosophy. The same goes for a lot of other questions that people might not at first blush consider philosophical questions, such as most any questions containing the word "should". I've found it interesting to see what extreme negative reactions a lot of people have to the very idea of stu…

Well, I think some part of the negative reactions stem from the fact that the scope of philosophy is incredibly narrow these days, and largely limited to speculative analyses. For example, experiments that detect electro-chemical impulses in the brain and compare them during various moods would classically have been squarely in the center of a philosopher's work. But today, they are part of biology, or psychology, or…

[deleted]

Re: Why I Majored in Philosophy Despite Everyone Telling Me Not To (2013)

#20

> For some of us philosophy majors, we are just genuinely curious about some notions in life that are often taken for granted. For instance, is our ability to have rational thought just a product of our brainwaves, the interaction of different neurotransmitters? Or is there something more going on, something "supernatural" that allowed humans the capacity for rational dialogue? What a shame a philosophy education con…

Whether it does or it doesn't is itself a philosophical question. If you are interested in that question, you are interested in philosophy. The same goes for a lot of other questions that people might not at first blush consider philosophical questions, such as most any questions containing the word "should". I've found it interesting to see what extreme negative reactions a lot of people have to the very idea of stu…

I've been enjoying these comments, particularly the ones by pmoriarty. I'm not really adding anything meaningful here: I used to have a negative reaction to philosophy. Somewhere in the past few years as I was getting into my mid-30s, I've been finding myself studying it more.

I will say though, I'm approaching philosophy from Eastern studies. It's my understanding that a philosophy degree in an American university is heavily focused on Western philosophy. I know nearly nothing about Western philosophy (that is, nothing more than the average Joe on the street).

However, whenever I read something written by people who are trained in philosophy, I marvel at the clarity of the writing, even if I don't always agree with them.

Post reply on HN