I have two degrees in philosophy. I quit my PhD with an MA after I realized academic life wasn’t for me.
When people find this out about me… they rarely react positivity anymore. Most are confused, some look upset, others get defensive or crack cliche jokes about how I got a job with a useless degree like that or if I work at McDonalds.
It seems to have gotten way worse the past few years. In my late 20s/early 30s people seemed to react a lot more positively to this fact about my life? People would ask me about it and why I did it and what I studied specifically. I really liked those conversations.
I feel naive as to why philosophy is so controversial for the average person, anymore than English or History is? I really enjoyed my studies and still do them as a hobby now.
I think Western capitalist culture has slowly eroded the value of thinking in favor of doing and, through gradual financial coercion via the International Monetary Fund, this has slowly become the global dominant worldview.
In other words, you were born a few centuries too late for philosophy to be valued. Even in the past it was often met with scrutiny (though often commanded respect).
Nowadays thinkers are expected to ascend corporate ladders and embed themselves within instituions with the ultimate goal of extracting excess capital beyond ones needs from said institutions. That is what the current global value system supports.
I have nothing about people choosing to study whatever they want.
I get a little bothered when people suggest philosophy majors as the “moral compass of society”. For instance, I’ve been hearing more and more on how “philosophy is central to society because we need philosophy majors in ethical committees everywhere”. And while I agree that ethical committees are important, I disagree that studying philosophy makes you more fit for a ethical committee than any other person. As moral of a society derives from the whole society, those ethical committees should follow more a popular jury structure imho.
My point is that when people follow this position they are, inherently saying “a philosophy major is more moral than you” which is the thing that ultimately bothers me.
i interpret that to mean ethics committees that provide oversight to other aspects of an organization should study ethics. i’d argue that’s a good place to start, but a better direction to go is to include conversations about ethics and their analysis in all curricula. there’s a huge difference between morality and ethics. morarlity is a moment to moment decision making process. ethics describes a critical systems analysis field directed at defining and building a more ideal society
But ethics and morality emerges from society. Giving a small group the power to decide and indoctrinate over that is dangerous and ultimately “unethical”.
I get the feeling of trying to push it. Nowadays most people studying philosophy is left wing. So pushing that those people should control society ethics is basically pushing our political agenda.
I’m leftist, but not the kind of leftist that would do “everything” for the cause. Because I see the dangers of it. What if we do that, we leave ethics of society into a small group and that small group now or in the future diverges from what the society or myself consider moral?
That’s why I’m also against that idea of trying to push a “ethics” course on every major. Now it’s seen as a way to push a particular agenda that we agree on. But surely in the future it will be used to push an agenda we don’t like (as it had happened in the past), that’s a big risk.
I prefer to leave ethics to the individual and society as a sum. An not giving a small group power over it.
I think a philosophy degree is cool as hell. Fuck anyone who thinks otherwise.
it makes me sleepy
Philosophy gets a bad rap, even by fellow academics sometimes. Commonly cited criticisms are that it has become too prosaic and detached from society at large. Maybe that’s true of some philosophers but I don’t see a problem with people studying something purely for the joy of learning and there are philosophers who do an excellent job of explaining philosophical ideas to lay audiences, Alain de Botton immediately springs to mind. Status Anxiety is among my favourite videos.
The reality is that we have too few people who think about what it means to live a good life and make a wholesome society
anymore than English or History is
It’ll be the same for them too.
Nobody appreciates learning for the sake of learning anymore, learning is strictly for getting jobs. Although if you have the money to spend on getting many degrees worrying about paying off loans, then there may be another aspect to the resentment, considering the cost of university these daysThere’s a philosopher/history of philos on the bowling team I’ve just joined. I’m philospically inclined so I asked him if Descartes was ripping off Socrates’ “I only know that I know nothing” which could be interpreted as “I doubt everything except my existence”. It’s a topic that came up the other day on Lemmy. He said no, Socrates was just saying he was wiser than everyone else because he wasn’t deluded about his abilities.
I asked him about Descartes’ relationship to solipsism reply: Descartes wasn’t a solipsist because his god wouldn’t deceive him like that, Descartes’ god is real because of the ontological argument. Which one’s that again?..
I kinda just felt like I was making him do his job…
Philosophers are always the first targets of anti-intellectuals. People genuinely believe that studding what’s true about the world is a waste of time.
You can tell that this is a prejudice because the same people who think you shouldn’t get paid for having useless knowledge will still hire economists.
I’ll be real with you: philosophy seems like a bougie thing to major in.
It’s something you major in when you have a cushion that allows it.
Most people don’t have that cushion, so they get mad when they see someone who does use it.
For a layperson, philosophy doesn’t have an obvious practical application. They think philosophers just sit around pondering esoteric topics and can’t imagine why anyone would pay them for it.
I like the philosophy but I also don’t understand why anyone could pay for it. IG, It’s like chess, only top players & teachers earn money from it.
It’s not about the content, but rather the skills gained when becoming an expert on the content. For example, physics degrees are often sought after in the financial realm because of they’re expert ability to model things with mathematics.
Philosophers are generally expert thinkers, writers, and debaters. Not a lot of jobs are hiring philosophers for their content knowledge, but instead, they’re hired for their skills.
philosophers just sit around pondering esoteric topics
CEO material?
Its because most of them don’t really know what philosophy is, so someone being a master of it makes them feel very insecure - like they’re cornered with a topic they know nothing about.
Anti intellectualism.
It’s just this yeah
I think, because people think it’s a useless degree, because there is no industry or marketable jobs not phil that’s not from a university. Much like BA in psych or some Studies degree. There really isn’t jobs outside of academia for phil. I was in a philosophy course in college like 10+ years, a instructor recently finished his PhD, and seems to love it. But he has no permanent position, so he jumps from college to college teaching it, I was following his LinkedIn profile. On the other side, its probably propaganda against philosophy as too much on one side of the political spectrum, right wingers scoff and it quite a lot. Also it includes religions as part of the studies, so people find it very uncomfortable that it contradicts their religious beliefs
Because religious people are raised with a flawed worldview that they can’t waver from or they’re going to hell and also made to feel extremely shameful about regular human emotions like curiosity and horniness
What do you work as?
