Philosophy excels as a pre-law major because it teaches you the very proficiencies that law schools require: developing and evaluating arguments, writing carefully and clearly, applying principles and rules to specific cases, sorting out evidence, and understanding ethical and political norms. More about the benefits of Philosophy for careers in law. Philosophy has proven itself to be good preparation for medical school.
Critical reasoning is as important in medicine as it is in law, but the study and practice of medicine requires something else—expertise in grappling with the vast array of moral questions that now confront doctors, nurses, medical scientists, administrators, and government officials.
These are, at their core, philosophy questions. David Silbersweig, a Harvard Medical School professor, makes a good case for philosophy and all the liberal arts as an essential part of a well-rounded medical education. As he says,.
If you can get through a one-sentence paragraph of Kant, holding all of its ideas and clauses in juxtaposition in your mind, you can think through most anything. I discovered that a philosophical stance and approach could identify and inform core issues associated with everything from scientific advances to healing and biomedical ethics. More about the the rewards of a Philosophy major for careers in medicine. I think if you have a good background in what it is to be human, an understanding of life, culture and society, it gives you a good perspective on starting a business, instead of an education purely in business.
More about the benefits of Philosophy for business careers. You might be surprised to learn that the mid-career median salary of philosophy majors ranks 16th out of 50 majors studied by PayScale. Want to know more about what you can do with a philosophy major? Follow this link to find more resources. It helps us understand that things are not always what they seem, it helps us learn about ourselves and the world, and it teaches us how to grapple intelligently with fundamental questions, such as: Who am I?
How should I live? Should I do what society tells me to do? What is truth? We lean very heavily on science today. And with good reason: Thanks to advancements in science and technology, we live in a very different way to how we would without them. But just because science is important, that does not negate the value of philosophy.
In fact, the two go hand in hand. Just like every other field, it has its limits. We cannot derive everything from experience, and philosophy is not dead….
For example, science cannot determine human values. Empiricism cannot determine why we ought to act morally, nor why we ought to value human happiness over human misery. She adds, "You will need to see quickly through complex issues, put together convincing arguments for or against given proposals, filter relevant from irrelevant information, check the consistency and soundness of policy papers, decide which problems are crucial and identify the issues that are still badly understood.
These skills of rigorous analysis, sound argument and critical examination are the bread-and-butter of philosophy: no subject trains our ability for consistent, systematic thought better than philosophy.
What changes in philosophy curriculum have you seen over the last 40 years? It makes me so happy! Because I was seen as a hard-core analytic philosopher, and when I first began to write novels people thought, Oh, and we thought she was serious! People take literature seriously, especially in moral philosophy, as thought experiments. A lot of the most developed and effective thought experiments come from novels. Right—a recent study shows how reading literature leads to increased compassion.
A lot of women philosophers have brought this into the conversation. Martha Nussbaum really led the way in this. She claimed that literature was philosophically important in many different ways.
This is a real change from when I was in school and it was only theory. For example: In philosophy, unlike in other areas of study, an ancient historical figure like Plato is just as relevant today. You hear this quite often. There is, among some scientists, a real anti-philosophical bias. The sense that philosophy will eventually disappear. We incorporate philosophical progress into our own way of viewing the world. Plato would be constantly surprised by what we know. And not only what we know scientifically, or by our technology, but what we know ethically.
We take a lot for granted. That would never have occurred to him. He makes an argument in The Republic that you need to treat all Greeks in the same way. It never occurs to him that you would treat barbarians non-Greeks the same way.
And it takes more, it takes a movement, and activism, and emotions, to affect real social change. It starts with an argument, but then it becomes obvious. The arguments against slavery, against cruel and unusual punishment, against unjust wars, against treating children cruelly—these all took arguments.
Which philosophical arguments have you seen shifting our national conversation, changing what we once thought was obvious? About 30 years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer started to argue about the way animals are treated in our factory farms. Everybody thought he was nuts. It has to become emotional. You have to draw empathy into it.
But here it is, right in our time—a philosopher making the argument, everyone dismissing it, but then people start discussing it. Philosophy teaches students how to develop and support their own positions, interpretations, and analyses. It provides training in the construction of clear formulations, good arguments, and apt examples.
Writing is taught intensively in most philosophy courses, and many regularly-assigned philosophical texts are unexcelled as literary essays. Philosophy writing emphasizes clear structure, good arguments, and original ideas. Students learn to be both critical and creative thinkers. Many important questions about a discipline, such as the nature of its concepts and its relation to other disciplines, are philosophical in nature.
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