Five Benefits of Studying Philosophy

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 critically is a crucial resource for evaluating new ideas and solving complex problems in the workplace. With this background, it’s also no surprise that Philosophy majors have higher LSAT (Law School Admission Test) scores than any other major, but law isn’t the only field that values clear thinking!       

2.     Writing: Very few courses of study require more writing than Philosophy. Philosophy courses ask students to evaluate ideas, defend views and construct arguments on a wide variety of topics. Successful Philosophy students develop deep skills in offering systematic analyses of concepts, charitably outlining the ideas of others before defending or critiquing them, and incorporating feedback into their work. Students also become very clear writers by learning to make precise, unambiguous claims, and are masters of careful word choice. It’s no secret that the ability to write clearly is a helpful skill in any workplace for the day to day of preparing rundowns, memos and emails to the bigger picture tasks like business plans, company websites and major reports.     

3.     Evaluating New and Different Ideas: In a Philosophy curriculum, students are introduced to and asked to engage with ideas and concepts that are foreign, unusual and even offensive to their own understandings of the world. In my own coursework we considered whether democracy actually makes citizens more hostile and polarized than other forms of government, whether morality can be better understood or even dismissed by appeal to an evolutionary explanation of our moral compass, and whether a contemporary understanding of the mind and brain leave any room for such things as a self or a soul. This exposure to provocative suggestions gives Philosophy students the ability to set aside their own biases to analyze new ideas, think outside their own paradigms and understand the perspective of others, and put their own views in productive dialogue with opposing views. This skill of being able to navigate the terrain of new ideas puts Philosophy students at a competitive advantage in a dynamic workplace, where leaders value creativity, open-mindedness and adaptability.    

4.     Happy to Argue: I don’t mean to say that Philosophy students are aggressive or hard to work with, but rather that Philosophy students have spent much of their college or graduate school careers interacting with arguments. They read arguments, they write arguments, and oftentimes they even argue about arguments (for example, which kinds of arguments are most effective or whether an argument falls victim to a particular logical fallacy). Naturally, Philosophy students are hard to offend. Some very sharp students enter the workplace full of great ideas, but find themselves unable to articulate them for fear of rejection or rebuttal. Philosophers are used to having their arguments critiqued and sometimes even annihilated. Many Philosophy students are happy to make contributions, eloquently and politely we hope, and are quite comfortable receiving feedback or even being shot down from time to time. A well trained student of Philosophy will have the intellectual resources to develop, promote and defend her ideas to diverse audiences with confidence and an open mind.

5.     Flexible Workers: Some college courses give students the impression that knowing how to use PowerPoint makes a student an able public communicator, or that learning the “Three C’s” of management makes someone a competent leader. I worry that as colleges scramble to pack classrooms more tightly than ever, several of the most important features of a quality education are lost: detailed feedback, peer to peer interaction and rigorous capstone projects that require students to draw on and apply the skills they have recently acquired. My own experience as a college instructor showed me that many introductory classes are too crowded to do anything more than a survey of influential readings in a field; it simply isn’t possible for a professor to offer thoughtful feedback to over 100 students in the final days of the semester on highly individualized research papers (i.e. not using prompts but instead allowing students to write on related topics of interest to them). But upper level classes (and certainly graduate seminars) in Philosophy allow for genuine intellectual interactions between professors and students, and students grow as writers, thinkers and learners as a result. This is how real education happens, and it is students who enjoy a holistic, personalized education that, in my view, grow into flexible, adaptable and creative problem solvers. These are the students who will go into the workplace and seek new challenges, ask new questions, learn from their mistakes, become productive without supervision and blossom into career difference makers.  

Bonus Tip: As a former student and then teacher of Philosophy, I’m a big believer in the value of the skills developed in a Philosophy curriculum. But a word of advice to would-be or current Philosophy majors: supplement your studies with something else like computer science or a foreign language. Technology has made the modern workplace more fluid and dynamic than at any time in the history of the world, and employers want sharp, flexible employees that they can trust to be effective in a variety of situations. But employers also need people with the core competencies to thrive in a technology-driven and increasingly globalized world. Picking up additional skills like a programming language, web design, or another language will help you standout on the job market.