For more details about people who study philosophy, see the next section.
1. Why Study Philosophy?
Avoid being duped
In multiple studies, people with training in philosophy are shown to be significantly less likely to be duped by faulty intuitions.
Critical Thinking
Even at a university that exposed all first- and senior-year students to the same critical thinking assignments and integrated critical thinking into most professor’s other courses, Philosophy majors (n = 7) improved their critical thinking test scores more than any other major (n = 587) despite starting with the highest first-year critical thinking test scores — an incredibly improbable outcome for any major!
GMAT Performance
Philosophy majors outperform every major except math and physics on the GMAT.
GRE Performance
Philosophy majors outperform basically every other major on the GRE.
LSAT Performance
Philosophy majors outperform every major and tie law majors on the LSAT.
Medical School
Philosophy majors are accepted to med school at higher rates than other majors, including science majors.
Money
Philosopy majors’ median mid-career salary has been about $10,000 higher than median U.S. household income!
More Money
Philosophy has been the top-paid humanities major from early to later career!
Other reasons
Why Study Philosophy? What Can it do for you? Check out this conglomeration of data, charts, articles, etc.
Reading And Math Competence (especially for kids)
A randomized controlled trial of over 3000 primary school children showed that introducing children to philosophy significantly improved children’s’ reading and math skills.
2. What Is Philosophy?
Let’s make a few things clear. Philosophy isn’t just esoteric pontification. It isn’t just some form of skepticism. And it certainly isn’t just pseudo-profound bullshit.
Perhaps philosophy is just figuring out what to believe and how to live. Of course, those are life-long projects. Someone may start these projects during their first philosophy course, but they will certainly not finish during that course!
3. What Is Good Philosophy?
Notice that, according to that definition of philosophy, everyone does philosophy at some point.
Of course, not everyone does philosophy well. Doing philosophy well involves good reasoning and good living. Most of the time, these do not happen naturally or easily. We’ve got bad reasoning habits and plenty of ulterior motives to keep us from doing our best. So philosophy takes practice.
This is not to say that there is only one way to do philosophy, of course. Heck, that’s not even to say that there is only one way to do philosophy well. And it is certainly not to say that only certain people can do philosophy (or do it well). Anyone can learn the tools that philosophers use. So anyone can do philosophy well!
4. What Is A Philosopher?
What is the first image that comes to mind when you think of a philosopher? Seriously. What is it? I’m curious. Tell us in the comments.
As I see it, philosophers are people who spend most of their time doing philosophy. So I guess I think of philosophy as a vocation.
If that’s right, then one need not be paid to do philosophy in order to be a philosopher. Getting paid to do philosophy would be something else: a professional philosopher.
Maybe there are other kinds of philosophers that don’t fall into these categories.
Related Posts
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- 30+ Resources for Studying Philosophy
Featured image from dakine kane, CC BY 2.0, cropped, adjusted color
