Why Study Philosophy?
- 1. Fascinating subject matter Philosophy seeks not simply knowledge, but deep understanding and wisdom. Philosophy is an activity people undertake when they seek to understand themselves, the world they live in, and the relations to the world and each other. ...
- 2. A wide variety of interesting courses taught by outstanding professors. ...
- 3. Skill development ...
- 4. Great preparation for any career or graduate study
What can I do with a philosophy degree?
What can you do with a degree in philosophy? Ask these former philosophy majors: 1 Robert Greenhill, President of Morgan Stanley 2 Dan Brownstein, Founder and Manager of a Hedge-fund 3 George Soros, Investor 4 Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com 5 Stephen Breyer and David Souter, Supreme Court Justices 6 Richard Riordan Mayor of Los Angeles 7 William Bennett, US Secretary of Education 8 Paul Martin, Jr., Prime Minister of Canada 9 Stone Phillips, Network Television Journalist 10 Studs Terkel, Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author 11 Alex Trebek, Host of an Iconic Game Show 12 Larry Sanger, Co-founder of Wikipedia 13 Ricky Gervais, Comedian/Actor/Producer 14 Ethan Coen, Academy-Award Winning Filmmaker 15 Jack Keane, Four-star General in the US Army 16 Steve Martin, Comedian/Actor 17 P.C. Chang and Charles Malik, Co-authors of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights 18 Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI 19 Claude Levi-Straus, Seminal Anthropologist
What are the skills required to become a philosophy professor?
develop good interpretive, comparative, argumentative, analytical, and descriptive writing skills that will allow you to communicate your ideas in a clear and powerful way. 4. Great preparation for any career or graduate study. Most students of philosophy don’t go on to become philosophy professors.
What is a philosophy professor?
Philosophy professors are dedicated teachers who are experts in their fields and who are genuinely interested in helping students to develop their understanding and skills. Our professors have won teaching awards and consistently earn high ratings on student evaluations. 3. Skill development.
What is the best defense against popular foolishness and falsehoods?
Philosophy’s critical skills also provide the best defense against popular foolishness and falsehoods, allows you to see through cultural and intellectual fads, protects you from the empty posturing of politicians and the inane prattling of media pundits and commentators, defends you from the slippery claims of advertisers and salespeople, and enables you to see right through silly opinions and everyday nonsense.
Is philosophy a practical field?
Far from being an abstract and useless field, philosophy is among the most practical courses of study. Taking philosophy courses imparts skills that will be useful not only in any career but also in your personal life.
Why is philosophy important?
This is both because philosophy touches so many subjects and , especially, because many of its methods can be used in any field. The study of philosophy helps us to enhance our ability to solve problems, our communication skills, our persuasive powers, and our writing skills. Below is a description of how philosophy helps us develop these various ...
How does philosophy help us?
The study of philosophy enhances a person's problem-solving capacities. It helps us to analyze concepts, definitions, arguments, and problems. It contributes to our capacity to organize ideas and issues, to deal with questions of value, and to extract what is essential from large quantities of information. It helps us, on the one hand, to distinguish fine and subtle differences between views and, on the other hand, to discover common ground between opposing positions. It also helps us to synthesize a variety of views or perspectives into one unified whole.
What is philosophy education?
Education in philosophy involves becoming aware of major figures and developments in the history of philosophy, learning up-to-date techniques and accepted answers to philosophical questions, and learning critical, interpretive, and evaluative skills that, in the overall scheme of things, may be considered to be of greatest value.
What can a person with a philosophy degree do?
They can do research on a variety of subjects. They can get information and organize it. They can write clearly and effectively.
What is philosophical thinking?
Philosophical thinking strongly emphasizes clear formulation of ideas and problems, selection of relevant data, and objective methods for assessing ideas and proposals. It also emphasizes development of a sense of the new directions suggested by new hypotheses and questions one encounters while doing research.
What is the use of philosophy?
The general uses of philosophy just described are obviously of great academic value. It should be clear that the study of philosophy has intrinsic rewards as an unlimited quest for understanding of important, challenging problems. But philosophy has further uses in deepening an education, both in college and in the many activities, professional and personal, that follow graduation. Two of these further uses are described below.
What is communication skills in philosophy?
Communication Skills: Philosophy contributes uniquely to the development of expressive and communicative powers. It provides some of the basic tools of self-expression - for instance, skills in presenting ideas through well-constructed, systematic arguments - that other fields either do not use or use less extensively.
Why is philosophy important?
Philosophy is, moreover, essential in assessing the various standards of evidence used by other disciplines. Since all fields of knowledge employ reasoning and must set standards of evidence, logic and epistemology have a general bearing on all these fields.
How does philosophy help you?
It helps one to analyze concepts, definitions, arguments and problems. It contributes to one's capacity to organize ideas and issues, to deal with questions of value, and to extract what is essential from masses of information. It helps one both to distinguish fine differences between views and to discover common ground between opposing positions. And it helps one to synthesize a variety of views or perspectives into a unified whole.
How does philosophy contribute to the development of expressive and communicative powers?
It provides some of the basic tools of self-expression—for instance, skills in presenting ideas through well-constructed, systematic arguments —that other fields either do not use, or use less extensively. It helps one to express what is distinctive of one's view; enhances one's ability to explain difficult material; and helps one to eliminate ambiguities and vagueness from one's writing and speech.
What is philosophy in education?
Still another value of philosophy in education is its contribution to one's capacity to frame hypotheses, do research, and put problems into manageable form. Philosophical thinking strongly emphasizes clear formulation of ideas and problems, selection of relevant data, and objective methods for assessing ideas and proposals. It also emphasizes development of a sense of the new directions suggested by the hypotheses and questions one encounters in doing research. Philosophers regularly build on both the successes and failures of their predecessors. A person with philosophical training can readily learn to do the same in any field.
Is philosophy good for medical school?
Philosophy has proven itself to be good preparation for medical school. Critical reasoning is as important in medicine as it is in law, but the study and practice of medicine requires something else—expertise in grappling with the vast array of moral questions that now confront doctors, nurses, medical scientists, administrators, and government officials. These are, at their core, philosophy questions. David Silbersweig, a Harvard Medical School professor, makes a good case for philosophy (and all the liberal arts) as an essential part of a well-rounded medical education. As he says,
Is philosophy a good major?
Philosophy can yield immediate benefits for students planning postgraduate work. Philosophy students regularly outperform students from other disciplines on graduate school entrance exams, such as the LSAT and GRE. As law, medical, business, and other professional school faculty and admissions personnel have often said, philosophy is excellent preparation for the training and later careers of the professionals in question. In preparing to enter fields which have special requirements for postgraduate study, such as computer science, management, medicine, or public administration, choosing philosophy as a second major (or minor) alongside the specialized degree can be very useful.
Is philosophy a literary essay?
Writing is taught intensively in many philosophy courses, and many regularly assigned philosophical texts are unexcelled as literary essays. Philosophy teaches interpretive writing through its examination of challenging texts, comparative writing through emphasis on fairness to alternative positions, argumentative writing through developing students' ability to establish their own views, and descriptive writing through detailed portrayal of concrete examples: the anchors to which generalizations must be tied.
Why is it important to study philosophy?
… is that it will transform you. By turning your mind to the consideration of the most basic questions concerning reality, human existence, and God, you open yourself to a world of possibilities for understanding the world and our place in it. By exercising your mind in the disciplines ...
How does philosophy help you?
By exercising your mind in the disciplines of critical and logical thought, you gain the ability to imagine, debate, and clarify the nature of the good life. Philosophy encourages and empowers you to discover what really is true and good, and to distinguish it from what merely appears so. As Plato explained long ago, this is liberating.
What does Plato like to do?
Plato likens the philosopher to the navigator on a ship. To the uninitiated observer, the navigator appears to do nothing but stare upwards at the sky, doing none of the work necessary to make the ship move. In fact, without the navigator the ship will have no consistent direction.
What does Plato like to say about philosophy?
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”. Plato likens the philosopher to the navigator on a ship.
What is the purpose of majoring in philosophy?
By majoring in Philosophy, you will be embarking on a lifelong quest to understand and live the good life for human beings. More than this, however, many philosophers have claimed that philosophical activity is itself part of the good life.
Is philosophy a tool?
In other words, Philosophy not only can serve as a tool for other ends, but can also be a highly pleasurable and meaningful activity in its own right.
