Filosophy and Happiness

Inside Higher Ed highlights a new  study  showing only 28% of liberal arts students have confidence that their skills could lead to success in the job market. We don't think studies like this discredit the value of the humanities in the slightest. Instead, we think the result indicates a need for reflection on the role of liberal arts and for more robust career services for the particular challenges humanities students face on the job hunt. An unfortunate disconnect in liberal arts education is that the professorate is largely made up of terminal degree holders in the humanities, but the great majority of students will not pursue graduate degrees, and even many who do will not secure tenure track employment. While we hope that savvy career services departments around the world can rise to the unique challenge of helping bright humanities students find gainful employment, we believe our blog can play a small role to fill that void in the meantime. 

Plenty has been written about the success of Philosophy students across all sorts of different fields, their success on standardized tests like the LSAT, GRE and GMAT, and the impact studying Philosophy has had on influential leaders in business and politics. But what skills specifically do Philosophy students develop that make them able to excel in a variety of different workforces? 1.      Critical Thinking:  Some people think critical thinking means learning to question authority. Learning that leaders are human too is a good intellectual habit, but that’s not what we mean when we talk about thinking critically in Philosophy. We mean something more technical: the practice of recognizing patterns in reasoning and separating valid reasoning from invalid reasoning, as well as learning and being able to identify common logical fallacies. Employers routinely tell researchers that critical thinking is one of the skills they most value in their workforce. After all, thinking criticall