Philosophy majors what done good

Here's a giant list of famous and accomplished people with philosophy degrees, just the thing to show the parental units when you choose your major. I want the comparable list of successful underwater basket-weaving majors. (via JoHo)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Jonathan Badger

But you could put together an equally impressive list of successful people who never went to university at all. How can we know that these people weren’t successful *despite* their philosophy degree?
rebdav

If you want to understand the world you do not need to study the philosophers or even the history of philosophy, but to learn philosophy is the bedrock of a liberal education and what distinguishes a tech school education for example medicine from higher universally applicable pursuits.

Nothing against being a MD but a person should learn how to view the world objectively and from outside themselves before they learn even a very fancy trade.

I shudder to think that many lawyers, politicians, civil servants, and judges never seriously studied philosophy on their way to the bar.
- satn
  
  Ehh, every science degree is based on being able to think objectively via the scientific method.
  
  Me thinks the philosiphy major needs to go back to school.
praymont

Thanks for linking to my list. Obviously, any such list is open to criticism. E.g., probably some of the people on the list succeeded in their careers due to connections or to other factors that had little to do with their philosophy education, and I like to think that some of those people chose to major in philosophy because they were already pretty bright and motivated before stepping foot in a philosophy class. Nevertheless, philosophy majors tend to do very well on the GRE, and it’s harder to write off a general trend like that by attributing the results to these other factors. Also, a lot of discussions on this topic labour under the assumption that unless courses develop skills that are peculiar to one career (or a narrow range of careers), they develop no career-relevant skills at all. I understand that students are under pressure to major in something that’s more obviously career-related, but I hope this doesn’t blind them to the benefits of a double major that includes philosophy or of completing a minor in that field.
Tritty

check out Prescott College. it specializes in under water basket weaving and it cranks out some pretty efficient oxygen using weavers
Anonymous

I feel certain I’ve heard Robert A. Heinlein refer to underwater basket weaving, but can’t find a link. Was it in “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel”? There was a lot about useful & useless education in that.
Anonymous

Only one name you need to know from the list:
BRUCE LEE
the r kelly

Is this really the economy to encourage people to take on debt to pursue a degree with very little practical use? Outside of top programs, it is not a worthwhile degree for all but the very few who probably should have been in a top program anyway.

Instead of underwater basket-weaving, how about we compare philosophy with, say, learning a trade? Or something that is actually in demand.

-Sincerely,

English BA,
Unemployed graduating-JD.
- djn
  
  The economy isn’t going to stay bad forever, though – by the time they’re done, it might be looking better. (Or not – it is a gamble.)
- BuzzCoastin
  
  Great, just what we needed, another lawyer.
MadLogician

John Scalzi was a philosophy major and has said in his blog that he has benefited from it in his career.
- MadLogician
  
  Here’s the reference for my above post:
  http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/03/24/reader-request-week-2010-3-how-i-think/
Anonymous

I remember seeing s comedian who said he “majored in Philosophy and Communication” and his father complained “Why? So you can wonder out loud??”
The Lizardman

I have a BA with honors in philosophy & left my doctoral program in order to (successfully) pursue a full time entertainment career….but I probably wouldn’t use me as an example to calm most parents.
- bklynchris
  
  Not a bad choice. I am acquainted with a soft spoken American who rcvd his MA in Philosophy from Oxford.
  
  He won an Emmy writing for Jon Stewart his FIRST season!
  
  Jesus….his first freaking season. head shaking in disbelief……
Anonymous

Philosophy. No practical use?

I’d send three-quarters of my colleagues back to school for the Logic 101 course alone.

-Respectfully.
penguinchris

I don’t think it really matters what you major in, so long as you take it seriously and have the drive to succeed. You will do well no matter what. I think the arguments in the article make a lot of sense, too – understanding how to make philosophical arguments could be a useful skill that would translate to a lot of other situations.

However, the reason we science majors make fun of humanities students, especially philosophy majors and certain other majors, is that most people aren’t going to get any real-life benefit from that degree. For most people it really is useless. Oh, it will shape their thoughts and will help them think in certain ways, yes (as I already described) – but very little they do in life later would not have been served better by a different major.

That’s not to say that a science degree is necessarily the ticket either… I have a BS and an MS and still can’t find a job. At least if I had a humanities degree I could work retail, as that’s expected (had to get that jab in) – no one will even hire me to bag groceries or serve coffee, presumably because there’s no reason I should be trying for those jobs considering my education.
- davidasposted
  
  What would be really awesome is if folks with university degrees spent less time sniping across the disciplines as if they were discrete enclaves and spend a little more time facilitating truly interdisciplinary research and cultivating cheerful respect for their peers, no matter whether they are BSc, BA, MEng, PhD, LLB, etc.
Anonymous

It’s nice to see that Philosophy is getting some good press. Regarding r kelly’s statements, however, I think that some clarification needs to be made. Philosophy is valuable instrumentally. The critical reasoning and careful attention to argumentation that is learned by studying philosophy gives students an edge against all other disciplines. The very link that we’re commenting on points us in the direction of data that illustrates that students with a background in philosophy do better on standardized tests (the GRE, GMAT, LSAT, etc.) than non-philosophy students.
Philosophy is arguably the best preparation for Law-School as well, and many programs offer classes geared toward students who are intending to go to law-school (e.g. “the philosophy of law”, “political philosophy”, etc.)
It is also worth noting that the claim here is not, at least as I read it, that one ought to totally abandon all other pursuits and study only philosophy. I read the link as suggesting that given the rich history of philosophy (indeed *all* of the natural sciences stem from philosophy) and the instrumental value, the recent attacks on Philosophy as a discipline are misguided (see UNLV’s latest budget cuts). As a second major or a minor, philosophy is greatly valuable. A career in professional philosophy is difficult, and you’re not going to be a billionaire, but let’s not pretend that the careful study of argument and reason has “very little practical use”.

Philosophy ABD.
tylerkaraszewski

You could probably make a pretty long list of people who’ve been to prison but turned out successful, too. It doesn’t mean that’s a good choice of path to take in life.
Anonymous

It doesn’t seem the most of the people on the list had Philosophy as their main profession choice, but as complimentary to their on-going careers or previous major courses.
Anonymous

There’s an interesting debate emerging here about whether a philosophy major is worth pursuing. If only there were a discipline that helped us think clearly about what we should do and why.
wigg1es

Stephen Hawking says philosophy is dead. That’s good enough for me.
- Anonymous
  
  Stephen Hawking doesn’t know the intellectual history of his own discipline.
  
  http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/02/04/133363055/a-little-philosophy-is-a-dangerous-thing
  
  Philosophy ABD.
semiotix

The Economics department at my graduate institution had a big glitzy poster that showed all the famous people who had Econ degrees. Lionel Ritchie! Kareem Abdul-Jabbar! Philip Seymour Hoffman! Emeril! (I’m probably not remembering these correctly, but you get the idea. Celebrities.)

And of course, the one thing all these rich and famous people have in common is that they took their undergraduate econ degrees, put them in the bottom drawer of their desks, and proceeded to go into sports, music, acting, music, and all the other things where their real talents and interests would have made them money and fame whether or not they knew the difference between monopoly and monopsony. Not a single person on the “here’s why you should study economics!” was an economist.

Now, of course, people SHOULD study economics, whether or not they want to be economists or financiers or marketers or entrepreneurs. And people should study philosophy, too, if they want to. Beware the volunteer life-counselor who takes your transcript and jams it against the belt-sander of “practicality” or “usefulness.” Not because it’s a bad thing to be practical or useful, but because they’re never right in their assumptions about what’s going to lead to money, security, happiness.

I’ve been an admissions counselor, a student-affairs worker, and a college professor, and all three of those jobs have taught me the same lesson: no college student who wants to be in class X is wasting her time in class X. The corollary is that every student who takes class Y out of a sense of obligation or because it’s “practical” is wasting her time.
- Anonymous
  
  And of course, the one thing all these rich and famous people have in common is that they took their undergraduate econ degrees, put them in the bottom drawer of their desks, and proceeded to go into sports, music, acting, music, and all the other things where their real talents and interests would have made them money and fame whether or not they knew the difference between monopoly and monopsony.
  
  But not one of those sports, music, acting, showbiz people got screwed by crooked managers, or bad contracts, or bad-faith industry types. Their undergrad studies prepared them to be creative without going broke.
desiredusername

Consider, for instance, the soft skills that are amongst the factors of success (eg. communicating, interpreting etc). You may argue that this is a rather logarithmic curve that does little more than separate out the people with social issues but beyond that flattens out to “common sense” quickly. However, I think people who have been extensively engaged in critical thinking courses would probably agree that they have noticed a significant improvement in their soft skills, and therefore they would have a different experience than that of the great flatness of “common sense” theory of soft skills. Most likely this is the difference in views being presented in this forum.

Further, if you expand the empirical importance of engineering rigor and experience as ALL present in a task, simply because it MUST be present in a task, consider this recent NYT article about Google’s “people analytics” that reports the contrary.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html?_r=1&ref=business
Chentzilla

Is E. L. Doctorow a relative of yours?
Anonymous

Universities were never meant to be trade schools and, in spite of more recent attempts to turn them in to such, still aren’t. Any humanities degree program provides an opportunity to learn the same basic skills: critical thinking, logic, reading comprehension, source evaluation, argument construction, and writing. Very few people who study history or philosophy will become professional historians or philosophers, but the skills learned in those disciplines are valuable to just about any profession or occupation that requires either thinking or communicating, which is to say just about all of them.

A broad-based liberal arts education won’t give you the occupational skills to do any particular job: you need some kind of vocational training, apprenticeship, post-graduate work or on the job training in addition to that. but a liberal arts degree will make you a better economist, lawyer, doctor, plumber, or mechanic, if you take advantage of it.

Whether you actually need a 4-year undergraduate degree and whether it’s worth the time and money is another question, but the idea that you study philosophy to become a philosopher is incorrect.
gepinniw

They forgot to mention one other important philosophy major… ME! ;)
Jarrad

As an emergency medicine physician, I find my undergrad degree in philosophy the best training for medicine I ever received. Learning how to think critically, identify the fallacies that people commit in their arguments and in their lives, and being able to recognize some sense of the personal philosophy and background of my patients on an individual basis has been incredibly valuable. For those who say it has no real world benefit, I’m a doctor, and I use the training I got with my philosophy degree every single day. I have absolutely no regrets about my major, as it has lead to my leading a rich and fulfilling life.
Anonymous

But How many are honorary degree’s give to the famous person after the fact?
Anonymous

Oddly, no prominent scientists with an undergrad philosophy degree.

- double majored philosophy/science BA, MSc, PhD (science)(soon)