Wow, more people are down on philosophy than I would have expected!
My BA, MA and now my PhD has been/is in politics and IR. One of my biggest issues is I can never stop thinking, so I love philosophy and theory and all that.
The biggest skill you can probably learn is how to relate high level thought processes to every day actions and whatnot. If you're trying to pursuade someone how philosophy is useful, it's about critical thinking/engagement, logic and reasoning etc (is has already been said). You have tonnes of transferable skills, mainly to do with communication and argument, being able to look at a situation, analyse it and work out the best path forward. You're a problem solver.
People get intimidated by the idea of philosophy because people immediately think of greek men in sheets or tweed jackets in stuffy rooms and assume people who do philosophy don't live in the same world as 'the rest of us', and that their heads are in the clouds.
In the end though it's just another random degree most people won't use directly.
If you ask me (which you're not, but meh ) the biggest shame of it all is that people's first question when looking at degrees now are 'what career can I do with it?' Not enough people learn for the love of learning any more, and when the system we have changes once again, like it has done in the past so many times, there will be a lot of people who wont even be at square one
Quote from An Introduction to Philosophy:
"Knowledge of the lowest kind" says Herbert Spencer "is un-unified knowledge; Science is partially-unified knowledge; Philosophy is completely unified knowledge" Science, he argues means merely the family of the Sciences - stands for nothing more than the sum of knowledge formed of their contributions. Philosophy is the fusion of these contributions into a whole; it is knowledge of the greater generality.
Me:
I guess it comes down to whether you have a view of philosophy as something that is part of existence or something that embraces all existence - kind of like some people think about religion?
I'd argue understanding of the methods and framework on which knowledge is constructed, rather than the knowledge itself. Philosophy as I understand it is not intended to give you knowledge at all, but ways to examine, study, understand and test knowledge. Science, and many other studies, are the actual knowledge itself.
Or to try and describe it another way, an art course doesn't teach you how to draw a particular picture, or understand it, but to create your own. That'd be philosophy. Art history on the other hand will teach you about individual paintings, their background, and how they have been analysed and understood. That'd be science.
Let's not turn this into another religion thread, we've had enough of those recently.
I'm not down on the philosophy major. Far from it. My own background is very heavily weighted toward liberal arts. I went to a very small liberal arts college and majored in English language and literature. If I had it to do again, philosophy probably would've been the call.
That said, I also graduated with a liberal arts degree and then had to figure out what to do with it. And I can tell you that very few hiring staffers are going to look at a liberal arts degree and say to themselves, "now here's a guy with a well-developed set of critical thinking tools." You need to sell that yourself. Some people succeed. Others don't.
I've often said of the English major that it prepares you for everything AND nothing. No organization doesn't want an employee who's good at oral and written communication, skilled in identifying and elaborating on themes, and capable of high-level abstract thinking. But none of those things are explicitly stated in "English major" the way that skill with computers is explicitly stated by "information technology major." You, as the liberal arts major, have to make that pitch.
Pointing to examples of philosophy majors who have gotten hired, even over people with other, seemingly more relevant majors, doesn't prove causality. There could be lots of reasons for a hire. The philosophy major could even be in the mix. But that doesn't mean that experience is going to carry over reliably to other hiring situations. For every bachelor in philosophy we could point to who got a job at least tangentially related to that skillset, we could point to a fair few more who didn't.
That's not to discourage people from going that route. I think it just means you have to do a better job of selling (and therefore clarifying in your own mind) what you want to do and how you're qualified to do it.
Bear in mind, also, that the higher the degree (whether in philosophy or something else) the higher the esteem. So someone may well hire a doctorate in philosophy for a project management job (for instance) over someone with a bachelor's degree and actual experience managing projects. I'm not sure that bias makes sense. But I think it's still there.
We can say that philosophy embraces all other things. But on a practical level, what does that actually mean? Do you need to have studied ethics to make appropriate choices? Do you need to have taken logic to make rational decisions? Do you need to have questioned existence to get up and go to work every day?
I'm a counselor by profession now. And my interest in philosophy was actually a big part of how I ended up here. But when I graduated from undergrad, and the world didn't instantly embrace and reward my brilliance, I started realizing that I needed to operationalize all those abstract skill sets. Counseling, to me, is philosophy made useful. You're still addressing these questions of identity, meaning, and purpose. But you have additional tools that can provide answers (albeit less metaphysical answers).
I'm not down on philosophy. Just be prepared for the world not to herald your arrival as a thinker and compensate you accordingly. It's no picnic out there right now.
Agreed. I was actually getting at what you said, in that the skills are there but you have to sell them. That's half the point of the interview. That being said, if you've done it right you should have no problem selling yourself and those skills, precicely because you've developed the skills to see you have said skills.
The method itself is, and could only ever be, a result of philosophy. Also, don't forget that democracy predates many forms of government and existed long before science- props to the Ancient Greeks, yo.
If the scientific method was just empiricism there would be no need for a distinguished term, and there wouldn't be an entire subset of philosophy known as the philosophy of science. It has drawn from multiple epistemologies over the years, of which positivism was probably the lumpiest stool.
But that doesn't negate the fact that the 'scientific method' (as opposed to what? The irrational headless chicken method?) is usually conflated with positivism and epistemology
Indeed it's important to acknowledge that as well as being intellectual behemoths we are also incredibly suave, sexy, witty, daring, compassionate, and bad-ass. To focus on only one of those things would be doing us a serious disservice.
I'm speaking of Political Philosophy. Regardless of who came up with it, Democracy is, and always will be, something from Political Philosophy. Under the definition given, it somehow removes it from Political Philosophy into something else entirely.