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by galkk 21 days ago
I am not trolling or anything, just have genuine question.

What is the expected deliverable of philosophy degree and of its holders in 21st century? What do they produce. I can understand stem - the ones who have it presumably can do math, engineering, construction, even pure math I can to some extent understand. I can understand, to some extent, even memetic English language, women studies, dance etc.

But what is philosophy degree? I don’t think that it’s just history of philosophy.

Like when I was in college I read history of western philosophy. And for majority of philosophers there the thought was that yes, maybe at a time it was reasonable opinion, but looking back from 21st century it was often pretentious nonsense. So what are modern philosophers doing, especially run of the mill philosophy majors? Again, I’m not trying to be rude or anything, I just don’t even know how to formulate that question :)

1 comments

I think this line of thinking is a bit dangerous. It reminds me when I used to teach in a Civil Engineering department and the other faculty members focused exclusively on how well our coursework prepared our students to become civil engineers. Of course, very few of our students actually did become civil engineers and those that did both required years of additional training and often didn't last long in the profession before transitioning to something else. I used to teach maths and decision making. Had numerous students thank me later on for teaching some of the only material they actually used in their (non-civil-engineering) careers. No one knows what students will do post graduation. One of the best things we can do is to give them tools that are broadly useful.
Honestly, I’m super tired of the trope “we at college teach to learn”

And that’s what I’m asking.

What is philosophy major? What he supposed to do. Is he philosopher? What does it mean?

Like I, with my cs major, at least in my country can go and teach cs in school, my diploma presumably allows me to do so. I can imagine that there are similar occupations for philosophy majors. But this is not the goal of the education, and I’m trying to understand what is the goal.