Philosophy gave me tools to evaluate others' claims and taught me that communication is inherently difficult. And because of that, it's not enough to be right - it's important to be persuasive. But there's a tension there. Persuasion is very close to manipulation.

An unfortunate side-effect of philosophy is doubt. Lots of the beliefs that we hold without reflection are slippery, even incoherent. There's a riddle-like quality of attempting to define something like truth or identity and realizing that as one gets closer to that definition, the definition seems to slip away.

It's true that professional philosophers can deal with topics which inherently abstract and irrelevant to the everyday. The same is true with all specialists. Yet the skills that philosophers bring to bear are incredibly relevant to every social interaction. The philosopher's role is to evaluate others' arguments and posit one's own.

Lastly, one of the things that I enjoyed the most about philosophy is that touches many fields. While I would guess that the core of contemporary analysis are subjects such as Language, logic and cognition, it's surprising how many intellectual gaps there are in other parts of human thinking. Within those gaps, you'll find philosophers having a debate.

I agree with the doubt part but I do think that being able to suspend that is crucial to being happy.

But Plato doesn't lay out "the truth." He presents beautiful dialogues that allows the reader to consider, agree, disagree or digress. Try reading the Parmenides. Here, the impossibility of unity is presented alongside the impossibility of difference. It shows the limits of language and maybe thought— or read the symposium for radical ideas about the nature of love.

Or, hell, read Xenophon's Socratic dialogues. He was more radical than Plato, though they were both students of Socrates. Xenophon turned into a mercenary and defeated the king of Persia. Then wrote extremely practical dialogues about getting rich.

Philosophy isn't about truth. It's about the love of wisdom and, ultimately, wisdom is about living a better life. Philosophy includes material that cannot be expressed with words.

Finally, Pythagoras—who coined the word philosophy. He wrote nothing out of principle and yet his worldview is arguably the most transformatively modern. Newton, Copernicus, Kepler and Gallelio all credited Pythagoras for their findings. He seemed to believe that the world was made of math and that the natural harmonies of mathematics would manifest in the harmonies of the cosmos. This idea is still resonant in the sciences — like in the groundbreaking discovery of harmonic peaks in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Pythagoreans conducted the first empirical test of a mathematical hypothesis (that bronze chimes in ratios of 1:2 and 2:3 would sound consonant).

When you read about groundbreaking wisdom that is over 2000 years old, it gives perspective on how we might build a society that similarly endures.

Take almost any book on the list of the OP, read it with a friend, and you will probably disagree completely on at least a couple of the points made, or how they should be interpreted.

This is a thoroughly modern perspective. Historically, Aristotle was considered "The Philosopher". Plato has staged a resurgence in the discourse (in fact I'm partial to Plato myself), but you're over-stating his historical impact. Which is sort of ironic, when you're discussing historical impact.

Further Marx predicted that the first nations to fall to communism would be the most capitalist ones, but in fact the opposite occurred and the least capitalist countries fell to communism, meanwhile the capitalist countries have not.

That's just one example there are plenty of other others that can be provided, from how is theory of dialectical materialism was wrong on all counts when it came to any scientific power, to history.

In fact the most impressive part of Marx is how truly wrong he managed to be without actually being original as the majority of his work is derivative from Hiegel.

I wish I could better understand dialectic materialism in order to critique it. I can't get around not having a noetic reality that serves like chaotic attractors to materials. Spheres and triangles are just more real than material manifestations. Penrose and Popper proposed similar tripartite realities of, roughly, the material, the conscious and the mathematical.

Quick thoughts:

1. I gave my siblings the advice after I was done to double major in something you love and something that will guarantee you employment. I graduated with not the most financially rewarding degrees, and while I ultimately taught myself programming and have made a pretty good career out of it, I wish I'd paired my humanities with compsci or business off the bat to make the whole job thing easier.

2. That said, I am very happy I studied those topics. They gave me a perspective that I don't think I would have gotten in a more nuts-and-bolts field. The name "humanities" is right on point: it's the study of what it means and what it's like to be a human being. And while I've been bitterly disappointed by the corruption of the field (which is the main reason I'm not a college professor now), I still think it's tremendously useful to have learned these things. David Foster Wallace's famous graduation speech has a line I particularly like, where he says something to the effect of "in the trenches of everyday life, it's little clichés that will kill you." All of this "obvious" wisdom that seems sort of hokey and unscientific often contains deep and terrible truths about life and what it means to be a person. And having a guidebook for that journey is a damned useful thing, and I feel bad for anyone who doesn't have one. This stuff won't solve all your problems, but it might help you with some of them. Chances are that of all the human beings who have ever lived, one of the great writers or thinkers or historical figures has dealt with something akin to what you will. We aren't all that different from one another. You can get some pretty good ideas out there for free. So I'm very grateful to have access to and a background in those things.

1. Education is a business now, and responds to business incentives.

2. The postgrad environment is a mess, in part because of #1, in part because of its own internal issues, and in part because of fundamental supply and demand.

3. The topics have all been deeply politicized.

> Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

That being said, it certainly not an argument to start a philosophy degree.

Personally, I see philosophy a bit like sport. You don't need a sport degree to practice it, and you can do it at any level and get some satisfaction out of it.

Sure, I didn't get a job from a philosophy degree, but that's not really the point; it helped me better understand myself and the world around me, so that all my experiences have been richer.

That said, I'm similarly opposed to a 'who said what, and when' approach to philosophy; I don't care who said it, I care if it's an interesting or valuable idea.

I think the 'who said what' approach largely exists because when taught at the tertiary level, something is expected to be assessed, and it's kind of hard to objectively assess whether someone understands philosophy - far easier to test their recollection of who said what.

I think you can’t study Phil and not be significantly changed if you understand what you’re studying.

You study things like the Munchhausen trilemma, Bertrand’s watch, Grue, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, para-logics, Kantian epistemology, Quine and so on. I literally can’t think how you can understand these things and end up not a different person.

First, some of the scholars I met along the way were absolute saints, and spending time reading and writing with them made the whole journey worthwhile. They modelled patient, intense curiosity and scholarship, and they left an indelible impression on the students who learned from them.

For the most part, though, the field seems borderline intellectually bankrupt. The way modern academic philosophy functions is very odd. Researchers are stuck in tiny little pigeon-holes trying to churn out papers on the next fad in their discipline. There isn't a lot of critical reflection about whether topics are likely to be fruitful, or even what the goal of philosophical research is. The main "method" of analytic philosophy ("Conceptual Analysis") is at best a dull joke, at worst a weird mixture of hubris and narcissism... but that doesn't seem to bother anyone. The "philosophy of x" disciplines have some gems but tend on the whole to depend upon a very cartoonish or superficial understanding of 'x', and tend to lag way behind the disciplines they should be leading. They almost never contribute back to x.

The field is at its best when it promotes deep reading, curiosity, patience, and intellectual humility. It does sometimes do this. Much of the time it promotes a mixture of artificial rigour, sophomoric egotism, and not a whole lot else.

Like anything else in life it is what you make of it. For myself, the relationship I built with philosophical literature continues to be rewarding (even in my day job as an engineer). The mistakes I made along the way were my own.

I think the best way to engage with philosophy in 2021 is to really give oneself time to read and go down a rabbit hole, and if one can, talk with people. I wouldn't read very much recent analytic philosophy, and would avoid the traditional "Epistemology/Metaphysics/Ethics/Logic/etc." structure like the plague.

Right, I'm just glad we don't have that in math, which is closely related. There are so much better ways of thinking about calculus than Newton's and Leibniz' works.

Sounds like philosophy to me. This trait is shared by scholastics and postmodernists alike.

I think the degree was great. It basically teaches you how to argue a point, makes you a better writer, and forces you to at least temporarily accept viewpoints that you disagree with if only to try to disprove them.

If you’re looking to philosophy to tell you what’s true, you’re going to be disappointed. The history of philosophy is a series of arguments. It is instructive to understand those arguments as the questions have been extensively explored, and you’ll almost certainly go further by reading arguments formulated over years rather than trying to think through the problem on your own. It’s sort of a shorthand in philosophy to simply refer to a set of arguments by the name of the person writing about them, which is why “who said what when” is important - more so than any other academic discipline, philosophy is a dialectic stretching back as far as the written word, and order is important to understanding. Nietzsche is a reaction to Kant and Hegel, and his arguments are far more coherent in that context.

The way you apply these lessons throughout your life is basically how you cope. For a long time I felt trapped in a life I didn’t want, and I found a lot of solace in existentialism as a way to accept the circumstances without accepting an outcome. Nothing in Sartre or Camus tells you this explicitly and I’m pretty sure their experiences were more about life in Nazi-occupied France than being a closeted trans person, but they provide a starting point and a framework for thinking about problems.

Similar to a lot of other commentators here I use it every day, and for everything.

An general apology of philosophy would be something like:

> Philosophy is the pursuit of the truth. That pursuit, and the development of mental tools and models to reach it, ends up spilling out into, and enriching, every other aspect of human thought and experience. Whether you end up questioning if there is any such truth (epistemology), attempting to determine a moral truth (ethics), or working out models of correct/truthful reasoning (logic), you end up building up a robust toolset and understanding of being human. Even the schools of thought that hold there isn’t an absolute truth have a little problem in that _that_ is a truth they are stating. The point being, if you are to be human, then you must act on things being more or less true (did that person do that thing? On a more fundamental level, does that chair exist? On an abstract level, does the money in your bank account exist?). If you accept that being able to evaluate the truth of things is fundamental to operating as a human, then philosophy is a necessary undertaking that everyone practices to some extent. It is, after all, just the love of wisdom.

A few specific examples of how it has been _useful_ to me and my career are:

1) Using my studies of logic to ground my understanding of programming languages - everything boils down to to binary, see “The Mathematical Analysis of Logic” or “The Laws of Thought”

2) Applying abstract mental models directly to code (see Plato’s theory of the forms and object oriented programming)

3) Understanding ethical issues with anything I do and being able to articulate them to others so that we can move forward on a decision not based on just everyone’s feelings.

4) Seeing things from the other side and arguing people to my own by showing them inconsistencies in their arguments - or by changing my own mind by discovering my own inconsistencies

And so on and so on.

As for the final complaint about who said what being an issue - naming is useful. It’s important to identify the source of an idea if you’re going to discuss it with others and share common frameworks (see my references to Plato and Boole above). Beyond that - I don’t know much, or care, about their personal lives.

* Note: idk about the whole student debt to study philosophy thing though. There are huge advantages to taking it while in university (discussion with peers, context from professors, immersion in thought), but I can’t recommend the experience of student debt for a degree with such a low signal (for employment) and such a low barrier to entry (I.e. you can do this outside of the university as well). Ultimately I did well, but only because the Seattle barista scene was too competitive and I had to find a fallback career.

I did get an undergrad Philosophy BA more than 10 years ago. Take my experiences with a grain of salt because I'm practically addicted to education in a way that probably goes strongly against the current in a place like this full of people who self-taught vocational skills (I did undergrad in Biology, Philosophy, and Applied Mathematics after originally starting in Studio Art but giving up, then did grad work in Public Policy, Finance, Computer Science, and Cybersecurity, so I am severely over-educated and love education). To be perfectly honest, I barely remember the "knowledge" of philosophy in terms of just memorizing the history of the western canon and who believed what.

To me, the actual value in studying philosophy formally came from the practice. Reading the entire multi-century history of lines of thought. Seeing all the different angles that different thinkers approached a question from. Seeing a dialog in terms of one thinker directly responding to the arguments of another, and then again in the other direction. Much of that can't always be found in books and is better found in papers because that is how philosophers are publicly debating each other. To really internalize this, you need to not only read, but also write. Making my own arguments and having them publicly critiqued was tremendously valuable, especially when these were purely formal "take one side and give the best you can" and not married to my personal beliefs and ideologies such that I could not take criticism. Learn to see the flaws and the holes in human thinking, including your own.

Studied right, philosophy can be incredibly humbling. It is quite different from studying the creation of software or physics where there have been so many wild successes and great leaps forward of human achievement. It is the exact opposite. You come to grips with what are very likely hard limits on human understanding. You see that the very best minds we have ever produced have been asking exactly the same questions for as long as we've had writing and we're no closer to having answers after at least 5000 years of this. A lot of people would see that and ask well, what's the point then? It's intellectual navel gazing that can never accomplish anything. But being intellectually humbled is itself an accomplishment. Learn to appreciate that the human mind is not almighty. On a similar note, study statistics, because done right, that will teach you much the same thing, how impressively we can estimate and come with good guesses, but hard limits on what we can ever really know.

That said, is it worth spending a whole lot of money on getting this education and getting a philosophy degree when you could get a degree that will lead to an actual job? For most people, probably not. I think it's a great second major, but it should only be your only major if you're absolutely certain you want to get a PhD and become an academic philosopher, but good luck since there are only maybe a few thousand people in the world able to do that.

There is some merit to this observation. Frederick Wilhelmsen[0] criticized Great Books for this reason, that not only was it selective and culturally restricted, but that it tends to degenerate into a he-said-she-said sort of relativism and leave it at that with no real finality to the whole thing. (Some will likely counter that philosophy isn't about the truth but considering "ideas", but that's nonsense. If we consider ideas, it is only because we are trying to determine if they're true and no other reason.)

Incidentally, it did not escape my notice that medieval philosophy appears nowhere on this list. This is preposterous. To venture from the ancients to the moderns while skipping over Scholasticism is lunacy. I don't necessarily blame the author. There may be a general ignorance and silence about the medieval period at may universities.

[0] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/09/great-books-e...

A more careful reading will show that Anthony Kenny's Medieval Philosophy appears in two different positions on the list, under Histories of Philosophy and under Electives. There's also another medieval text listed which I'm not familiar with that includes readings from the familiar trifecta of Aquinas, Augustine, and Scotus among others.

> If we consider ideas, it is only because we are trying to determine if they're true and no other reason.

I hope this is a definitional quibble (a poorly thought out one, I think) about what it means to be doing "philosophy" and not literally a statement of what you believe to be true. If we observe fallacious or false ideas popping up in literature or culture it's normal to do some work trying to understand the thinking that brings those about. That is work that has nothing to do with determining those ideas' truth or falsehood, which we've already decided upon.

In a way, the major accomplishment of today's philosophy curriculum is showing that it is not sufficient. I'm sort of okay with this :-)

Or an outright hostility toward Christian philosophy. St. Augustine[1] is conspicuously absent there as well and he’s certainly not medieval.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/

For starters, they all assume Jehovah exists, or seek to prove he exists. However, we have falsifications for most of the claims of Jehovah:

* Egyptology disproves the Exodus

* The Documentary Hypothesis disproves inspiration of the holy texts

* Quantum mechanics disproves omnipotence and omniscience

So the field of Christian philosophy is built upon sand which has already been washed away; the foundations already collapsed. How about the main philosophers?

* Aquinas just parroted Aristotle

* Augustine claimed that war can be justified and that souls exist

* Erasmus didn't really say anything of note

* Ockham gave us tools for breaking out of Christianity!

The main contribution of Christian philosophy to the rest of philosophy is the confirmation that Jehovah is an epistemic dead end.

That's quite generous of you. In the spirit of charity I'll reciprocate and then some. I'm going to give you the rest of your life to learn why love of God and love of wisdom are duals. Don't worry, given your obvious philosophical immaturity I don't expect you to figure it out anytime soon, but I honestly hope that you do in good time. A good place to start would be a deeper study of the three normative sciences: ethics, aesthetics, and logic. Respectively they can be thought of as the sciences of what is good, what is beautiful, and what is true. Pay particular attention to their necessary premises. As with all human understanding, they are subject to confusion, so be very sure to keep your thoughts both clear and distinct.

As for your particular examples, they are one and all either nonsense or irrelevant. One thing that Aristotle taught us is that there are persons who cannot be educated, only persuaded. Try not to be one of them.

You have your whole life to read, study and think about philosophy. It is easy, it is enjoyable, all the material is readily available.

I would almost view having a fresh recent philosophy degree as a huge negative in the 2020s. I would not hire someone with a recent philosophy degree almost point blank because IMO your decision making is highly suspect.

A formal education in philosophy at a good R1 school is not comparable to light reading by an amateur. The process of discussion, argumentation, and mentorship is not something you figure out yourself. Even an undergraduate degree is a huge step toward a philosophical education. I'm not sure it can be replicated in a vacuum. And it's certainly not easy (first time I've heard that).

OK do it. I don't want to pay for it though.

The core question of philosophy is: how to appreciate life? What is our responsibility? How should we act? These are vital questions. Everybody engages with them in some way. Everybody learns philosophy in some way, the vast majority of learnings have no explicit connection to any religion or philosophical writings. Real life teaches you philosophy.

This list, and the philosophy curriculum, has issues. For one, it's not the best way to learn critical thinking. It's better to learn math proofs. Truth tables, contra-positive, breaking things out into cases, induction. For two, western philosophy rarely provides actual answers. It asks more paralyzing questions than provides answers. Don't get me wrong, there are many beautiful things in many of the books - what I'm saying is that they don't equip you to recognize their value.. none of them give you the full picture. If you read these books, you will find that very few books will claim to present the full and complete truth. That's because they don't. They are incomplete.

I believe true philosophy is more psychological, pragmatic, and spiritual than most of the philosophy curriculum would teach you. What are thoughts? What is productive vs not productive uses of time? etc.

After I graduated with my minor in philosophy I read a book called Be Here Now. It discusses common aspects of many spiritual traditions. I also read some of the books in the bibliography of Be Here Now -- Tao Te Ching, some Hindu/yoga books, some Christian books. Today I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian. In Orthodoxy we understand Wisdom to be another way of talking about Christ. That's philosophy after all - philo sophia - love of wisdom. I can attest that the orthodox church has the fullness of truth and all the answers to any questions I have. It is the true philosophy.

Either you don't have many questions or you're content with answers that are sufficient rather than sufficient and necessary.

On the level of thinking and pure logic, nothing in orthodoxy is necessary. Part of the joy is learning to incorporate and trust other sources of information in addition to the empirical and logical. The two main ones being the conscience, and advice from a friend. Once you incorporate these other sources of information, it is terrifying how necessary some answers become.