Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The revenge of the philosophy majors

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 292 posts

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#231

Post by skirmish »

evantbyrne wrote: post #199
Wissenschafter wrote: post #114

I have an undergrad in Philosophy. Our required math classes were formal logic, which we shared with the comp sci. majors. Those classes basically taught me how to program. I am now a senior engineer at a F500 and I just have a BA in Phil. It is a highly underrated degree, and going forward with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed f…

Philosophy of science went hard and was hands down the most valuable course in my education. It's very strange that they don't force everyone to take at least some philosophy in university. Can you imagine living in a world where the average person not only thought about what they believed, but were also equipped to ask themselves hard questions about the nature of belief itself?

Marxist-Leninist Philosophy was a required course for all undergrads in my time studying in USSR. Strangely enough, the professors made it into an overview course on history of philosophy, which was quite enjoyable, with just some mention of Marxism-Leninism in the last lecture.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#233

Post by scoofy »

skirmish wrote: post #231
evantbyrne wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philosophy of science went hard and was hands down the most valuable course in my education. It's very strange that they don't force everyone to take at least some philosophy in university. Can you imagine living in a world where the average person not only thought about what they believed, but were also equipped to ask themselves hard questions about the nature of belief itself?

Marxist-Leninist Philosophy was a required course for all undergrads in my time studying in USSR. Strangely enough, the professors made it into an overview course on history of philosophy, which was quite enjoyable, with just some mention of Marxism-Leninism in the last lecture.

Without getting into a big fight, Marxist-Leninist Philosophy is not, like, general philosophy in the conceptual sense.

The idea that you need to be familiar with Hegel as a prerequisite means you’re looking at graduate level classes if we’re taking it seriously.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#234

Post by [deleted] »

scoofy wrote: post #233
skirmish wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marxist-Leninist Philosophy was a required course for all undergrads in my time studying in USSR. Strangely enough, the professors made it into an overview course on history of philosophy, which was quite enjoyable, with just some mention of Marxism-Leninism in the last lecture.

Without getting into a big fight, Marxist-Leninist Philosophy is not, like, general philosophy in the conceptual sense. The idea that you need to be familiar with Hegel as a prerequisite means you’re looking at graduate level classes if we’re taking it seriously.

[deleted]

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#235

Post by [deleted] »

dgs_sgd wrote: post #177
Wissenschafter wrote: post #114

I have an undergrad in Philosophy. Our required math classes were formal logic, which we shared with the comp sci. majors. Those classes basically taught me how to program. I am now a senior engineer at a F500 and I just have a BA in Phil. It is a highly underrated degree, and going forward with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed f…

Hypothetically if universities were a place for knowledge and truth instead of vocational training then would it really matter what my major was? Why would Philosophy still be a better major than say, English or Physics? In that world, you should still pursue whatever interests you most because critical thinking is fostered regardless of major.

[deleted]

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#236

Post by DiscourseFan »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #206
wcfrobert wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the _idea_ of reading continental philosophy, and then I opened up Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Here is a random sentence from a random page verbatim: "Spirit contains this actuality here because the extremes whose unity it is just as immediately each have the determination to be for itself its own actuality. Their unity is subverted into aloof aspects, each of which is for the other an actual object exclu…

Yeah I've mostly come around to the idea that Hegel is a Bad Influence and German philosophy should have just stopped at Kant :-) If I recall "Spirit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and makes it sound more mystical than it probably is. And Hegel was obsessed with trying to find out how apparent contradictions really... weren't? So Gemini actually did a great "translation" of this paragraph into something peop…

No, Hegel was attempting to figure out the problematic of the gap between universal knowledge (of specific categories) and individual substance (of particular things) by recasting the resolution of this problematic in social development, that the way in which Science resolved the “truth” of our own understanding of the gap between our individual experience and our place in the world (most basically, perhaps, between our beliefs and so-called “objective reality”), was a historical process that could be observed in both the development of the Idea and its concretization in society, and this process is called “Spirit.” That the resolution of this problem would lead to absolute knowledge, because the individual would then be identified with the universal, means that social development is dependent on the assumption of such knowledge, but one which is always missing something extra or excessive to it, some exception to the universal which also expands and deepens it. Hegel claims that this has always been happening, but what is unique about our era is that we are actually consciously aware of this process—-but he was the first person to demonstrate it explicitly, whereas, for him, it was only implicit before in thinker such as Kant.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#237

Post by grantcas »

em500 wrote: post #19

This article seems high on vibes, low on metrics. > While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for…

[dead]

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#238

Post by viccis »

wk_end wrote: post #111
viccis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics. >how to clarify your thoughts, say what you mean in precise terms, and make clear arguments This is a little generous. Analytic philosophy often comes across as people using heinous amounts of ink to argue whether a hot dog is technically a taco all while pretending that only a fool would even consider what it tastes li…

> I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics. I don't think this is true at all. To start with, there's roughly 2000 years between the earliest known philosophers and the analytic-continental split. Plenty of philosophy majors can and do get really into the ancients or medieval philosophers or whatever and complete their degrees without doing much more than a cur…

The average American philosophy undergrad gets very little of any philosopher pre-Russell other than a very skewed review of Aristotle. I have no idea about Canada, and there are some exceptions in the US, but average philosophy undergrad will get a very cursory skimming of pre-analytic thought, with basically none I've ever met having read Kant's first Critique, much less Hegel or any 20th century continental philosopher. Instead they are mostly moved into the only things analytics care about: logic and ethics. The former because they are always temporarily embarrassed mathematicians and the latter because teaching students the sophistry needed to morally justify building bombs for Raytheon that kill thousands of poor people is the bread and butter that keeps American philosophy departments funded. About metaphysics, ontology, etc., they care not at all. Those fields tend to try their best at ambitious answers to unanswerable questions whereas the analytics strive for unusable answers to banal questions.

td;dr: I think you give Anglo philosophy students FAR too much credit. In my experience they aren't well read at all and their departments are staffed by professors who aren't well read.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#239

Post by com »

scoofy wrote: post #233
skirmish wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marxist-Leninist Philosophy was a required course for all undergrads in my time studying in USSR. Strangely enough, the professors made it into an overview course on history of philosophy, which was quite enjoyable, with just some mention of Marxism-Leninism in the last lecture.

Without getting into a big fight, Marxist-Leninist Philosophy is not, like, general philosophy in the conceptual sense. The idea that you need to be familiar with Hegel as a prerequisite means you’re looking at graduate level classes if we’re taking it seriously.

Just to add to your “no big fight” observation:

What in some countries is grad studies, is in other places undergrad, and in a personal high point, high school extension studies. In contemporary rich country education systems, it’s not just grade inflation, it’s very low expectations of the student population’s capabilities, in my opinion.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#240

Post by saghm »

Wissenschafter wrote: post #114

I have an undergrad in Philosophy. Our required math classes were formal logic, which we shared with the comp sci. majors. Those classes basically taught me how to program. I am now a senior engineer at a F500 and I just have a BA in Phil. It is a highly underrated degree, and going forward with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed f…

> with knowledge specialization becoming unnecessary, and eventually unfeasible due to the triviality of AI making it not needed for a human being to study a hyper-niche subject for 4-8 years

Do you have any particular reason to believe that this is a likely outcome, other than assuming that you can tell the difference between an exponential curve and a logistical one before the inflection point? I've heard a lot of people make predictions like yours over the past year or so but I've yet to hear any basis for it that doesn't end up being essentially just a hunch that there can't possibly be any diminishing returns before then.

Post reply on HN