Philosophy
- Thread starter vimothy
- Start date
swears
preppy-kei
Yeah... 'til I read this, pure fiy-ah:
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues
Honestly, if the left had guys like this then "we" wouldn't be pissing and moaning about the aftermath of 30 years of neo-liberalism. Surrender to the void!
Dr Awesome
Techsteppin'
People probably realised that their philosophy degrees were useless. Or maybe they didn't. It's one of the most contentious issues in the ivory tower right now.
This is only a view held by the embittered and the jaded. I don't think anyone gets very far by assuming that everything that has worth does so in direct relation to its usefulness. I'm quite happy with education for its own sake really. Anyway, I wouldn't say that philosophy is entirely useless anyway, at least not in the way that, say, art is. It at least purports to be useful, and I find that its use is really what you make of it anyway.
Beyond that, anyone who went to university for philosophy with the idea it would lead them to a lucrative job or something was sorely mistaken from the get-go anyway, or at the very least, misguided in their intentions. It was their fault for not taking law, or economics, or immunology, or computer science, or whatever. One of my professors (for Ancient Philosophy) stopped in the middle of a particularly difficult lecture on Aristotle's metaphysics once and mentioned that there are probably a few people in the class who are asking themselves what the point of studying any of this is, and how could it possibly ever be useful or relevant to them. He urged that if this is a significant issue, to drop the course immediately and take something else, because they'd probably end up being right.
I mean, that's obviously a pretty extreme piece of advice, but I think the point he was making was that anyone who saw the suggestion as being a bit ridiculous would already be the kind of person who tends to see disagreeing with the arguments or aims of a particular theory as a reason to study more, not less.