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The revenge of the philosophy majors

nytimes.com

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Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#281

Post by NonHyloMorph »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #261
NonHyloMorph wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your argument exactly? You establish, that it is virtuous to not fall for the hybris that claiming knowledge beyond the scope of your domain is. (i.e. the virtuous physisit who does not mistake his encounter with some institutional courses in chemistry for a foundation to transgress against "the chemist" by pretending to grasp chemistry like the latter does) Now what is it exactly that you want to put forward…

"There is substance in philosophy, don't get me wrong, but just not that much of it"

The more the studies of substances progress the more that concept slips through our fingers

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#282

Post by jambalaya8 »

chasd00 wrote: post #70
c7b wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of a tangent, but it's fun to think about how much it takes to become a -er, -ian or -ist in a given field. Philosophy is probably one of the hardest, you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats. In history or physics you probably need to be faculty, in economics you need to have a PhD, in engineering you don't even need a degree but you need to be practicing,...

> you need to be seen as up there with the all-time greats when in school i hung out with a lot of architecture students. They were all told and taught that they will be the next Frank Lloyd Wright or a failure. Then they graduate and end up getting a job drawing construction documents for Taco Bell. Heh they're a pretty jaded bunch.

Was thinking about this the other day, though it seems they would need to be fairly shortsighted not to realise this before they chose it as a profession. Never the less, it is a stable income (til AI takes over the bulk of designing all of those franchise locations, anyway, or whatever). People respect the career.

Imagine not reading up on it after reading Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead", and deciding to major in architecture in college. I would have felt brutally misled.

Computer game programming probably felt like that to a lot of people in the 80s and 90s.

Honestly, can't think of many fields that would not feel disappointingly limited and too competitive for 'the good projects' now. :(

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#283

Post by antonvs »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #95
antonvs wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is only within the horizon of a presumed transparency - already inscribed by the metaphysics of immediacy - that the demand for “clarity” emerges as an unquestioned norm. Thus the Continental philosopher, precisely insofar as they decline this foreclosure of meaning, demonstrates beyond ambiguity that they are entirely capable of writing clearly, choosing instead, with impeccable lucidity, not to.

Insufficient semicolons, sentences too short.

I blame my father, who's a professional analytic philosopher.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#284

Post by metalspot »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #257
metalspot wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a modernist misconception. ancient religions are philosophical frameworks and the texts are internally coherent arguments for those frameworks. They are just expressed in language that modern audiences without formal training don't understand.

Which texts are internally coherent? The religion I grew up with certainly wasn't.

How would you know? Are you an expert in the language and culture that its texts were originally written in? Even an expert would qualify their interpretation by saying that it is only an educated guess. Look at how easy it is for humans to misunderstand each other, even in direct verbal communication, then extend that to the level of misunderstanding in email and text messages. Now tell me how well you think modern people actually understand the meaning of something written thousands of years ago.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#285

Post by applicative »

kazinator wrote: post #241
applicative wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The objections that one treatise makes to another will typically be of type violation, category mistake, nonsense - which is typical of compilers. I don't need to tell you which discipline invented the ideas of type and type error and was even largely organized around them in early and mid- 20th c, even across wildly different theoretical views.

Mathematics.

Type theory was invented by Bertrand Russell. He did have undergraduate math training. All of 20th c anglo american philosophy arises from this paper.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#286

Post by galkk »

kj4211cash wrote: post #265
galkk wrote: post #258

I am not trolling or anything, just have genuine question. What is the expected deliverable of philosophy degree and of its holders in 21st century? What do they produce. I can understand stem - the ones who have it presumably can do math, engineering, construction, even pure math I can to some extent understand. I can understand, to some extent, even memetic English language, women studies, dance etc. But what is ph…

I think this line of thinking is a bit dangerous. It reminds me when I used to teach in a Civil Engineering department and the other faculty members focused exclusively on how well our coursework prepared our students to become civil engineers. Of course, very few of our students actually did become civil engineers and those that did both required years of additional training and often didn't last long in the profess…

Honestly, I’m super tired of the trope “we at college teach to learn”

And that’s what I’m asking.

What is philosophy major? What he supposed to do. Is he philosopher? What does it mean?

Like I, with my cs major, at least in my country can go and teach cs in school, my diploma presumably allows me to do so. I can imagine that there are similar occupations for philosophy majors. But this is not the goal of the education, and I’m trying to understand what is the goal.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#287

Post by bdhe »

calf wrote: post #250
bdhe wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm struggling to find a counter argument in your response. You say it is a deeply prejudiced argument? Why? You say blinders? What are those? What is a philosophical statement? One tendency I've noticed is that people well versed in philosophy can communicate well. Just anecdotally. Not something I am seeing here in this response.

Why is refusal to carefully and patiently explain the wrongness of prestige theater, "physics envy"-type conversations an example of not being well-versed in philosophy?

Because it simply isn't. Philosophy isn't about wordy refusals (ironically the same complaint you try to levy) but about reasoning, knowledge, and abstract ideas. None of which come through in your comment, nor can come through refusing to engage in communication.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#288

Post by port11 »

baajoddd wrote: post #277
port11 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a mandatory philosophy course as part of high-school, and as lucky to pick a practical-yet-philosophical degree. You can easily pick up other skills, but it’s lovely to learn philosophy early on. I spent my 20s trying to become a Stoic and/or finding ways to practice a secular form o Taoism. I’m very, very grateful for these pursuits.

if you don’t mind my asking, what was your degree?

It’s officially titled Multimedia and there are lots of practical classes. But about half of it was Sociology, Anthropology, journalism-related stuff, theory of symbols, screenwriting, analysing media, etc. We also had a semester of counter-cultural reading, people such as Jaron Lanier and Lawrence Lessig.

Very conceptual and the theoretical bits were great to retain, even if they feel ‘useless’ when you’re young.

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#289

Post by [deleted] »

calf wrote: post #186
EoinB wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something to ponder... I have a PhD in mathematics and have worked in tech for more than 30 years as a programmer. I went to a Renaissance era university in Scotland which is required by law to require of me a broad education rather than something very specialised. Because I entered the science faculty, as an undergraduate, I had to balance that with something from the humanities and I chose Philosophy, naïvely think…

I was born a philosopher, people were telling me to study philosophy when I was in high school. But instead my formal education choices took a more circuitous route that included the fine arts, physics, electrical engineering, computer engineering, and eventually theoretical computer science. However even I can see that philosophy as a field is flawed and generic advice to tell students to go philosophy is incredibly…

[deleted]

Re: The revenge of the philosophy majors

#290

Post by rendx »

metalspot wrote: post #202
rendx wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think they're on opposite ends: philosophy teaches you autonomous experiential thinking, religion asks you to follow some third party authority.

this is a modernist misconception. ancient religions are philosophical frameworks and the texts are internally coherent arguments for those frameworks. They are just expressed in language that modern audiences without formal training don't understand.

I use "religion" to mean organized forms of spirituality, governed by "truths" you are supposed to "believe" in as member of the religion. Any such belief is a "third party truth": You do not know whether it is true or not. One may argue that this violates what "true" spirituality entails, which is experiental and not organized. For such spirituality, you can obviously read spiritual literature from whatever religion you please, like other philosophical works, but you read between the lines and don't follow some other person's interpretation (= third party authority).
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