Why Study Philosophy?

Why study philosophy?

Philosophy makes a central contribution to the educational enterprise through its demands upon intellectual activity. education in philosophy involves becoming aware of major figures and developments in the history of doctrine, learning up-to-date techniques and accepted answers to philosophic questions, and learning critical, interpretative, and appraising skills that, in the overall system of things, may be considered to be of greatest rate .
Graduates of the philosophy course of study at James Madison University are expected to have come to terms with unmanageable texts dealing with advanced philosophical arguments. These readings are much quite diverse in method and content. Further, a diverseness of written work is contribution of the philosophy student ‘s assignments, and it is expected that these assignments be carefully composed and thoughtfully addressed. last, informed discussion is necessity to philosophy and philosophic education. This verbal interaction is expected to occur as a act separate of naturally offerings .
much of what is learned in doctrine can be applied in virtually any attempt. This is both because doctrine touches sol many subjects and, particularly, because many of its methods can be used in any field .
The sketch of doctrine helps us to enhance our ability to solve problems, our communication skills, our persuasive powers, and our compose skills. Below is a description of how doctrine helps us develop these assorted important skills.

General Problem Solving Skills :
The cogitation of philosophy enhances a person ‘s problem-solving capacities. It helps us to analyze concepts, definitions, arguments, and problems. It contributes to our capacity to organize ideas and issues, to deal with questions of value, and to extract what is necessity from large quantities of information. It helps us, on the one hand, to distinguish very well and subtle differences between views and, on the early hand, to discover common grind between opposing positions. It besides helps us to synthesize a variety show of views or perspectives into one mix hale .
communication Skills :
philosophy contributes uniquely to the development of expressive and communicative powers. It provides some of the basic tools of self-expression – for example, skills in presenting ideas through well-constructed, taxonomic arguments – that other fields either do not use or use less extensively. philosophy helps us express what is distinctive in our views, it enhances our ability to explain unmanageable material, and it helps us to eliminate ambiguities and vagueness from our writing and actor’s line .
persuasive Powers :
Philosophy provides trail in the construction of clear formulations, commodity arguments, and appropriate examples. It, thereby, helps us to develop our ability to be convincing. We learn to build and defend our own views, to appreciate competing positions, and to indicate forcefully why we consider our own views preferable to alternatives. These capacities can be developed not merely through reading and writing in philosophy, but besides through the philosophical negotiation, both within and outside the classroom, that is so much a separate of a thorough philosophic education .
Writing Skills :
Writing is taught intensively in many philosophy courses, and many regularly assign philosophic text are besides excellent as literary essays. doctrine teaches interpretative writing through its examination of challenging text, comparative write through emphasis on fairness to alternative positions, argumentative writing through developing students ‘ ability to establish their own views, and descriptive publish through detailed portrait of concrete examples. Concrete examples serve as the anchors to which generalizations must be tied. structure and technique, then, are emphasized in philosophic spell. originality is besides encouraged, and students are broadly urged to use their imagination to develop their own ideas .
The general uses of philosophy just described are obviously of great academic value. It should be clean that the study of philosophy has intrinsic rewards as an unlimited quest for understand of important, ambitious problems. But philosophy has far uses in deepening an education, both in college and in the many activities, professional and personal, that follow graduation. Two of these far uses are described below .
Understanding other Disciplines :
doctrine is indispensable for our ability to understand early disciplines. many authoritative questions about a discipline, such as the nature of its concepts and its relative to other disciplines, are philosophical in nature. philosophy of skill, for exemplar, is needed to supplement the understand of the natural and social sciences that derives from scientific function itself. doctrine of literature and doctrine of history are of exchangeable prize in understanding the humanities, and doctrine of artwork ( aesthetics ) is authoritative in understanding both the ocular and the perform arts. philosophy is, furthermore, all-important in assessing the versatile standards of evidence used by other disciplines. Since all fields of cognition hire intelligent and must set standards of evidence, logic and epistemology have a general bear on all these fields .
Development of Sound Methods of Research and analysis :
even another value of doctrine in education is its contribution to our capacitance to frame hypotheses, to do research, and to put problems in accomplishable class. philosophic thinking strongly emphasizes clear formulation of ideas and problems, selection of relevant data, and aim methods for assessing ideas and proposals. It besides emphasizes development of a sense of the raw directions suggested by new hypotheses and questions one encounters while doing research. Philosophers regularly build on both the successes and failures of their predecessors. A person with philosophical prepare can readily learn to do the lapp in any plain .
Among the things that people educated in philosophy can do are the following. They can do research on a kind of subjects. They can get information and organize it. They can write intelligibly and effectively. They can communicate well, normally both orally and in writing. They can generate ideas on many different sorts of problems. They can formulate and solve problems. They can elicit obscure assumptions and pronounce overlooked alternatives. They can persuade people to take unfamiliar views or novel options badly. They can summarize complicated materials without undue simplification. They can integrate diverse data and construct utilitarian analogies. They can distinguish insidious differences without overlooking similarities. They can besides adapt to change, a capacity of growing importance in the light of rapid advances in so many fields. And well educated philosophers can normally teach what they know to others. This ability is particularly valuable at a time when train and retraining are sol often required by rapid technological changes.

These abilities are quite general, but they bear directly on the range of careers for which philosophers are fix. Philosophers have the skills necessary for an enormous range of both academic and non-academic jobs. The kind of basic education which philosophical training provides is eminently useful in some major aspects of virtually any occupation .
Below are lists of philosophy courses that are peculiarly allow for people studying, aspiring to, or working in disciplines outside of philosophy, as these philosophy courses help to deepen one ‘s understanding of early fields of study, to answer some of the fundamental questions that arise in early disciplines, and to clarify the relationship between one discipline and another field of sketch .

Note : this text is adapted from three sources : ( 1 ) doctrine : A Brief Guide for Undergraduates ( a publication of the American Philosophical Association ), ( 2 ) Careers for Philosophers ( prepared by the American Philosophical Association Committee on Career Opportunities, and ( 3 ) The Philosophy Major ( a statement prepared under the auspices of the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association ). These texts are available on-line at apaonline.org .