Like Scott Berkun, I was a philosophy major (and write for O’Reilly), so I was excited to see his Ignite talk on what you need to know about philosophy. It doesn’t hit the points that I’d necessarily make, but it’s worth checking out, as no doubt will be his promised forthcoming blog entry on the subject.
My two cents: What everyone wants to do is kick ass, so here’s how to do it — philosophically — in three simple steps.
1. State the philosopher’s position more clearly than he does
Philosophy is usually slow, careful, explicit argumentation, so if you want to argue with a philosopher you need to go down the long road of thinking through his position fully. It’s unphilosophical to argue with an oversimplification or parody of his position. Philosophers aren’t supposed to beat up straw men.
By stating the philosopher’s positions better than he does, you signal that your own argument engages his argument on the correct terms. You want the person you’re arguing with to agree that you can state his position with precision and sympathy.
The “more clearly than he does” part is a way of kicking his ass even before you start your refutation. You can do it nicely, of course.
2. Refute his position
He started from premises and, through a series of honest cognitive moves, reasoned his way to a conclusion. If you have a really good reason to believe that some element in this progression is wrong, and that removing that element causes the position to collapse like jenga blocks, here is where you state that reason.
Ideally, you’d find a bunch of contestable areas in the argument you just articulated. If one doesn’t stick, you’ve got another. Oh, and you should also state (and refute) plausible counterarguments to your own position before the other guy has a chance.
3. Clean up
At this point most likely he’ll either take exception to your argument or double back to refine his own in a way that undermines your argument.
But say you really do succeed in refuting his argument, even in his mind. He’ll do one of two things: he’ll either restate his argument in a progressively louder way (à la cable news), in which case you might want to consider kicking worthier asses in the future, or he’ll express his gratitude for getting set straight, in which case he’s a mensch and you owe him a beer or coffee to restore harmony in the universe.
Easy, right?
I said that these steps were simple, because they are. But they’re not at all easy. I’ll be honest with you: I’ve only done what I describe above a handful of times. I argue with people all the time, but the formal, careful, slow business of philosophical refutation eats up quite a lot of time and energy.
People who do philosophy are smart, and thorough. So if you have a subject that’s philosophically interesting to you, and if you want to do real philosophy with it, you need to be ready to put in some long hours. Philosophy, done right, hurts.
Philosophy hurts because of its demands on your attention
Doing philosophy makes brutal demands on your attention. Most of the reading is really, truly boring. From the writer’s perspective, it’s hard to be both thorough and engaging. Making it through most classic and contemporary philosophy books is almost an athletic event. It’s just so hard to stay focused, I don’t care how smart you are.
Most of what you read nowadays has been optimized for quick consumption. You’re probably not going to spend more than 90 seconds reading this, for example, so I have to think about how to break up the content so that you get the key points. Philosophers will not do this for you. Philosophy is a long, slow, painful slog.
Here’s how philosopher John Searle describes it.
[Doing philosophy is] murder, absolutely. I compare it … if you really want to know how to do it, you get up in the morning, there’s a large brick wall and you run your head against that brick wall. And you keep doing that every day until eventually you make a hole in the wall. That’s what it feels like.
Maybe you’ve read some philosophy that is dazzling and fun to read. Those qualities are more literary than philosophical. If you go back and read the same stuff as philosophy, you’re going to be back to the slog.
And lest we imagine that this practice is some sort of Western intellectual machismo, here’s the Dalai Lama on a related subject:
In Dharamsala, India, one of the Tibetans practicing concentrated meditation told me that the cultivation of one-pointed concentration was worse than imprisonment in a Chinese jail! (How to Practice, p. 127)
Formation of attention can be formation of character
Which leads us to the question. Why would you subject yourself to all this?
You might do it for a number of reasons. For example, you might have a burning passion for a topic in philosophy. If you care enough, you’ll fight your way through the dry reading (fighting against the authors, really) to get the insights it contains.
Or you could view the powers of attention that sustained study of philosophy requires as an end in itself. The faculty of attention is something you can exercise like a muscle and develop to high levels of function. Here’s William James on attention:
In some persons [attention] is highly focalized and concentrated, and the focal ideas predominate in determining association. In others we must suppose the margin to be brighter, and to be filled with something like meteoric showers of images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal ideas, and carrying association in their own direction. Persons of the latter type find their attention wandering every minute, and must bring it back by a voluntary pull. The others sink into a subject of meditation deeply, and, when interrupted, are ‘lost’ for a moment before they come back to the outer world.
The possession of such a steady faculty of attention is unquestionably a great boon. Those who have it can work more rapidly, and with less nervous wear and tear.
James goes on to say that he doubts that attention can be cultivated in the way that I’m arguing it can.
And not only can it be cultivated, it must be cultivated, because it’s critical that people have the ability to apply profound faculties of attention to real problems. Strong analytic skills applied to worthy problems can improve society. Who do you want to see in the voting booth? The person who can think through issues thoughtfully and thoroughly, or the person who thinks in sound bites and talking points?
I’m not saying that reading philosophy will make you a better person. But you could use it that way if you were motivated to.
People won’t care that you’ve studied philosophy
Take note that the mere fact that you’ve studied philosophy is unlikely to impress people who have not. (In fact, I’ve studied philosophy, and others’ study of philosophy doesn’t impress me either unless I have reason to think that they are good at it.)
Unless they themselves studied philosophy, or unless they have had favorable experiences with philosophy majors, HR types do not value philosophy degrees.
I had a summer job before grad school where my boss, who was trying to determine my wage, asked me whether I had a degree in her company’s field, and I told her my degree was in the field because philosophy applied to everything. She didn’t see that I was half-joking and thought I was insulting her. Things went downhill from there.
This reality is why Scott Berkun shrewdly picked up a CS degree in addition to his philosophy coursework. Still, computer science, like a lot of applied-looking liberal arts majors like statistics and economics, can be done in a philosophical way, since all the big thinkers knew their philosophy. And you should study these fields philosophically, because doing so will make it less likely that you become a slave to their assumptions.
So while philosophy may not itself give you a body of knowledge that people will pay you for, it will cultivate a style of thinking that will always serve you well. I went into philosophy like a lot of teenagers, looking for answers to “meaning of life” questions, and I came out with some halfway decent answers to those questions but also with a profound and unexpected appreciation for intellectual discipline.
Now that I think about it, though, I probably shouldn’t have just told you how to kick my ass.