The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors

Re:The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors by b450 on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @12:09PM (#48819786)

Philosophy students tend to be understandably insecure about the value and prestige of their field, and study often ends up indirectly training students to defend philosophy. Impressive-sounding pontificating, problematizing, cranking out arguments and fallacies and refutations, deploying jargon and historical references. There's a whole toolkit used to dazzle, bewilder, and cow the untrained. Not to mention outright self-promotion, like Chalmers in this article: oh yeah these companies totally desperately need more philosophy graduates!

It's great preparation for law school, as a commenter has already pointed out, since skill in one game carries over to the other. The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious, and I think one can reasonably argue that philosophical training does more harm than good by inculcating bizarre/narrow/counterproductive intellectual habits/commitments/bugaboos. But philosophers have tricked themselves into places where they really have no business being, like hospital ethics panels. Cool for these guys though, it seems harmless.

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Re:The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors by samrus on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @12:14PM (#48819878)

> The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious

I wouldnt go that far. I think your clutching at straws a little bit. Its a real stretch from philosohers are insecure to they are useless. This is the sort of thing confident ignorance gets you, when you dont know how philophy impacts mpdern life so you assume it doesnt because you think you know everything

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Re:The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors by applicative on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @02:29PM (#48821646)

The experts on hospital ethics panels are trained internally by medical schools, which are like little universities inside universities. There has not been philosophical access for about thirty years.

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Re:The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors by satellite2 on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @03:02PM (#48822110)

You have a great build up for an argument but why this conclusion?

At some point who should be doing ethics? Lawyers? Computer scientists? (I'm not asking ironically, who really is well placed to make population level and extremely though questions like balancing the protection of the few against a global important health interest/gain?)

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Re:The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors by RugnirViking on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @04:39PM (#48823411)

Presumably, a reasonably repræsentative cross section of society. So my cop out answer is "all of them, plus the stay at home mother, the farmer, and the lumberjack"

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Re:The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors by plastic-enjoyer on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @03:06PM (#48822175)

This just reeks of Dunning-Kruger

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