I really second this. The best thing about study as an adult is that you're largely studying for pleasure, even if there is a work goal in there somewhere.

You know what's relevant and interesting to you and what's not.

Philosophy is essential, how it's taught is unfortunate. In my philosophy class it was almost all about the history of philosophy, not the reasoning behind it. Assignments and tests were all about time periods, the specific names of philosophical ideas, from whom they came from, etc.

I'd rather have open ended assignments. Ones that give moral dilemmas, and challenge their solutions. Make me think about something In a perspective I haven't thought of before. That's a powerful tool.

But that's how academics works, the culture wants tests and assignments with check boxes.

I can't help but come to the defense of the traditional style, particularly for introductory philosophical classes. The fact is, people have thought about every moral situation from every angle already and just asking undergraduates to wax on about the trolley problem is kind of a waste of time. It is much more valuable to get them into the detailed history of ideas so they can appreciate just how long these problems have been open and discussed.

I'm not sure where you went, but my undergrad philosophy courses matched your desired approach:. We were presented with problems, and presented solutions in return. Sure, we had to know the historical context of what solutions other have brought already... but our work was not regurgitation of those ideas, it was reconstruction into new ways to advance the discussions.

I have never taken a philosophy class that involved tests or naming philosophical ideas. The work of an academic philosopher is to write papers (like an academic historian or sociologist), so a philosophy degree should focus on writing papers. Often the papers will be analyzing previous philosophical work and attempting to present some novel synthesis of it, either with itself or with some broader context. Neither "giving moral dilemmas" nor "quizzes about history" fit anywhere into that picture.

> (I chose philosophy, much more relevant and practical than I think many realize).

As others have already asked, could you expand on this? Very interested.

I’m a philosophy grad who learned to code a couple years out of school.

Philosophy gives you a set of meta cognitive skills that help everywhere. It teaches you how to think. It shows you what class of problems are soluble, and which are things where we just have to accept tradeoffs. And it’s really focused, in a funny way, on economy: does your argument actually do something? Does this theory offer clarity and bring us closer to truth? If not, well, why are you wasting your breath on it? Philosophy teaches you to see that some avenues are fruitless or just kinda not worth the effort.

Also, non-practically, it shows you the full depth of wonder in the world. Wherever there is capacity for thinking to be done, philosophy says, you can elucidate something important to our human condition.

Not exclusive to philosophy but a strong emphasis within philosophy is the focus on developing the ability to:

- Intelligently entertain various perspectives

- Effectively imagine "possible worlds" where positions may be held or refuted

- Formalize language and all of its "fuzzy" characteristics into clear positions

- Hypothesize generalizations and abstractions to map across domains

- Think from first principles and explore their logical conclusions in conceptual and foreign territories

These were my big takeaways from philosophy undergrad and I find them increasingly important in my various technical careers.

I hear a lot of non-engineers say this. Talking about formal logic, and how philosophy and math were once the same discipline, how math proofs are akin to philosophical arguments etc.

I don't think this crowd would get much out of it.

As an engineer I got into logic through the philosophy department. It was very eye opening for me.

Engineers are not models of logical thinking that they assume they are. Illogic is everywhere and it takes constant vigilance to avoid always going with your gut feelings.

In the very least, I think every engineer should take a "philosophy of science" class. We tend to focus quite intensely on how to do things. Borrow a little bit of "where do proofs and the scientific method sit in the grand pantheon of human knowledge" from philosophy is a bit grounding. Anyway it is probably a gen-ed that is at least somewhat useful.

It depends. Some people have really weak philosophical foundations and really need to hear about it if there is something out there that grounds them a bit better.

We can't say if any particular approach to life is the best, but we can say that if you change your mind about which approach is best at age 70 you've spent a lot of years setting up for the wrong outcome. It is never to late in theory. But as a practical matter 70 is a bit late to sit down, take a step back, ask why and try to act on it. Better for people to line themselves up with good foundations from their 20s or maybe 30s. It is good to explore the options early, and think a bit about what the word 'option' even means philosophically.

I agree. Philosophy gives you a level of abstract reasoning of the form: "if we agree (with Kant) that we should only take those actions which could be universal law, does it follow that the death penalty is morally justifiable?" There is some degree of reasoning from premises here, but all of the objects you deal with are things that you come into with a bunch of intuition that you never really leave behind.

On the other hand, something like:

> Given a one-dimensional invariant subspace, prove that any nonzero vector in that space is an eigenvector and all such eigenvectors have the same eigenvalue.

really forces you to grapple with an entirely different level of abstraction

If you get spooked by deontology in most philosophy classes, than maybe it's better to not take those philosophy classes in the first place.

This world needs more utilitarianism and less categorical imperatives...

Kant is actually towards the top of my list of "stuff I thought was dumb before I read the actual source material but which I now have a lot of respect for." The categorical imperative stuff is a reflection of a really profound value that Kant assigns to human life.

Utilitarianism benefits a lot from having a Cliff notes version that sounds less dumb than the Cliff notes versions of other ethical frameworks, but I don't think that is the right way to evaluate ethics. Besides, philosophy class ethics is really more of an exercise in "let's construct a formal framework that matches our intuitions" rather than "let's make normative judgements about stuff in the real world."

> As others have already asked, could you expand on this? Very interested.

I started undergrad in my 30s, and also majored philosophy for similar reasons. It really is the most rigorous non-STEM undergrad degree you can get. And for people (like myself) who can’t pass calculus, but are still fairly intelligent, it can easily be parlayed into a more technical graduate program.

Everybody can pass calculus. The only way one can fail at math is gaps in knowledge. If you managed to get through something like Kant or Hegel, you can get through any math subject provided you have the necessary prerequisites.

I was a double major in philosophy and CS in my undergrad. Philosophy was fun, but in hindsight I wish I did math or stats or some other STEM instead. I would say my main takeaway from the philosophy degree was developing a sense of intellectual respect for big, important ideas that I don't personally agree with (various religious thinkers, Marx, Aristotle etc), but it really doesn't compare to the actual nuts-and-bolts abstract reasoning skills you pick up in an abstract algebra course, for example.

I also found that I could consistently get As in humanities courses with ~20-40 hours of work per quarter (the time to write 1-3 papers) once I picked up the skill of "writing like an academic", vs my CS courses which continued to be challenging and require a ton of effort to succeed in up until my graduation. My senior year, for example, I had some core-requirement course about theater -- I attended zero classes and did zero readings until I sat down to write the paper, and I got As with compliments from the professor on how well-written my papers were. YMMV.

I doubt there is significant transfer between philosophy education and other tasks (like programming). Curiously, the people who should doubt this conclusion (the educated philosophers) are the ones that jump to accept it. Anyways, the literature on this matter is wide enough that our prior should be that there is no transfer and evidence to the contrary must be stated.

Can you expand on how you found philosophy practical?

My daughter is a philosophy major while most of my family has been STEM for generations (father's an engineer, mother taught college math, grandfather was an engineer). I'm reassured by the requirements for formal logic, and the obvious applications in law, but also at the intersection of law, ethics, and many of the ML systems that I foresee coming online.

She actually brought up this Harvard philosophy professor who had a story about keeping track of parantheses. I took advantage of the opportunity to show her the connections to Curry and from there to Lisp and the Little Schemer. She got it. She can reason, formally. That's important.

In my experience, philosophers make great software engineers. I’ve worked with a few and always been happy to work with them.

Just to offer a counter-point to the others here, I've personally noticed that quite a few people who study philosophy (either formally or via self-study) tend to become "disembodied". Formal reason becomes king, even when informal methods are more appropriate for solving the task at hand, and the intangible becomes irrelevant, even when it matters deeply.

Perhaps things would be different for someone in their 40s, who has a wealth of real world experience to draw on, philosophy would be valuable. But for the average 18 year old kid, studying it seems to create a set of terrible habits that take years to undo before the student can become a properly integrated adult.

> Perhaps things would be different for someone in their 40s, who has a wealth of real world experience to draw on, philosophy would be valuable. But for the average 18 year old kid, studying it seems to create a set of terrible habits that take years to undo before the student can become a properly integrated adult.

In the time of Plato and Aristotle it was frowned upon to teach philosophy to students below the age of 35 because they wouldn't know what to do with that knowledge.

I started as a philosophy major and switched to history and economics for this exact reason. My philosophy classes became incredibly disconnected from reality and ended up being endless arguments about frameworks and formalisms, but without the rigor of mathematics outside of formal logic. I still loved my philosophy classes, but I'd recommend anyone studying it as their first undergraduate degree pair it with something more concrete.

I guess philosophy education tends to vary from region to region, but "young people into phil" tend to be insufferable in one way or another, while older people with an understanding of philosophy (...and a great many real world problems) tend to be pretty okay people.

But that seems to be a broader issue with specialization anyway. Focus on one lane for too long and your brain starts to disfunction in odd ways.

I find philosophy is the sauce that goes well on everything.

Sure, you can live on the bland essentials, and you cannot live on toppings alone, yet who doesn’t like a little… sauce with that?

The ability to conceptualize and abstract a problem into its component parts is a key skill that will never underserve you.

Teaches you to think in ways that other courses won't.

Upper level proof based math courses are much better in my experience (speaking as someone with a BA in philosophy who has been taking math courses part time for the past few years)

Not mutually exclusive. I took comp sci and philosophy so yeah I would agree.