<story><title>Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department?</title><url>http://nautil.us/blog/why-did-a-billionaire-give-75-million-to-a-philosophy-department</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meri_dian</author><text>This is why philosophy is important:&lt;p&gt;Education has two related yet distinct purposes. The first is to endow us with specific domain knowledge and reasoning. The second is to endow us with general reasoning and critical thinking skills.&lt;p&gt;The value of natural language philosophy - not formal logic and other mathematically adjacent subfields - is that it teaches us to be as rigorous as possible when reasoning in natural language.&lt;p&gt;Given that so much of our lives and the events of history and society unfold in natural language and that it is in natural language that we do much of our critical thinking and reasoning, it&amp;#x27;s important that we hold ourselves to as high a standard as is reasonably possible when talking (either to ourselves or others) as when performing mathematical calculations.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s often said that one of the benefits of studying math is that it improves critical thinking skills. I believe this to be true, but I also believe that if our primary concern is improving our day to day critical thinking skills, then we would be better served studying natural language philosphy than mathematics, because on a day to day basis we tend to think and reason and debate and engage with one another in natural language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dsacco</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s often said that one of the benefits of studying math is that it improves critical thinking skills. I believe this to be true, but I also believe that if our primary concern is improving our day to day critical thinking skills, then we would be better served studying natural language philosphy than mathematics, because on a day to day basis we tend to think and reason and debate and engage with one another in natural language.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I agree. For this reason, my favorite philosopher has always been Wittgenstein. I also have an affection for the existentialists, but language games demonstrate that philosophy can be eminently practical and relevant despite the pejorative connotations of the term, &amp;quot;philosophizing.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That said, I really don&amp;#x27;t think philosophy should be its own major in most schools. It would be better, in my opinion, to teach philosophy as we teach arithmetic and language, rather than a focused degree.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department?</title><url>http://nautil.us/blog/why-did-a-billionaire-give-75-million-to-a-philosophy-department</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meri_dian</author><text>This is why philosophy is important:&lt;p&gt;Education has two related yet distinct purposes. The first is to endow us with specific domain knowledge and reasoning. The second is to endow us with general reasoning and critical thinking skills.&lt;p&gt;The value of natural language philosophy - not formal logic and other mathematically adjacent subfields - is that it teaches us to be as rigorous as possible when reasoning in natural language.&lt;p&gt;Given that so much of our lives and the events of history and society unfold in natural language and that it is in natural language that we do much of our critical thinking and reasoning, it&amp;#x27;s important that we hold ourselves to as high a standard as is reasonably possible when talking (either to ourselves or others) as when performing mathematical calculations.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s often said that one of the benefits of studying math is that it improves critical thinking skills. I believe this to be true, but I also believe that if our primary concern is improving our day to day critical thinking skills, then we would be better served studying natural language philosphy than mathematics, because on a day to day basis we tend to think and reason and debate and engage with one another in natural language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>humanrebar</author><text>&amp;gt; ...it teaches us to be as rigorous as possible when reasoning in natural language.&lt;p&gt;A philosopher should explain to all the natural-language-as-code people why their endeavor is much, much harder than they think it is. If a philosopher isn&amp;#x27;t available, a lawyer would probably be qualified as well.&lt;p&gt;Point being, I feel like I&amp;#x27;m getting &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; of those benefits just writing code and talking about it on a regular basis.</text></comment>