“4/06/2008, 1:14pm EST”
Philosophy making a comeback as a discipline. →
Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make sense of their world…
“If I were to start again as an undergraduate, I would major in philosophy,” said Matthew Goldstein, the CUNY chancellor, who majored in mathematics and statistics. “I think that subject is really at the core of just about everything we do. If you study humanities or political systems or sciences in general, philosophy is really the mother ship from which all of these disciplines grow.”
“Mother ship” is an apt term. I am fortunate to have discovered philosophy before it was too late. As a political science and environmental science major at (what is supposed to be) a top institution, it felt like I was wasting time. None of it went deep enough.
In those classes, we were studying what others had said and done — which has its value — but we weren’t learning how to reason properly. None of us knew the many fallacies we were committing, or the contradictions we were implying, or the assumptions forming the bases for our beliefs. We weren’t trying to justify our own beliefs, and we were unequipped to systematically change them to accord better with reality. If the fundamental beliefs forming the foundation for other secondary beliefs did change over time, the change was a result of undirected osmosis of ideas — mostly bad ones. More typically, the changes undergone would be to our secondary beliefs, the ones floating on top of the bad assumptions hammered into us by our upbringing within a radically irrational and delusional culture.
Philosophy can be a liberation from that.
NOTE: In the word “philosophy” I refer to analytic philosophy — not the undisciplined “philosophy” that you’ll find in the “metaphysical studies” section of your local chain bookstore, and not Continental philosophy, which seems to value strength of emotion above strength of reasoning.
Never leave home without it.
