/lit/ - Literature

>>22145645
>tfw you will never hang out in the desert with Cormac McCarthy and Edward Abbey.

>>20708859
What German authors are there that write good novels? I am referring to actual Germans, not ((Germans))) or mutts with German surnames (Thomas Mann)

>>20224303

>>19840121
>Privately funded phds
This is probably related to the the point about no funding = the university doesn't really want you. I guess the perception of a privately funded PhD is that you got in via connections/money rather than ability.

As to whether there is a point, there comes a stage where nothing you read is going to help you answer that question. The PhD won't get you a job, it almost certainly won't contribute anything to society, it will isolate you from anyone outside academia, it won't make you an 'intellectual', and its possible you might regret spending what's left of your youth in an academic bubble. Whether any of this matters to you or not depends on your motivations for doing philosophy. Why do you want to dedicate time and effort to writing essays that will likely never be read by more than a double-digit number of people? I probably care more about philosophy than most people but even I think that 'pure' philosophy is dead. It's up to you whether you agree or not.

The one benefit of the PhD being useless is that it doesn't matter whether you do it now or in ten years time. Consider what you would do if the PhD was impossible and then spend a few years doing that. Make sure that you're not just pursuing the PhD to avoid getting a real job or because you think staying at university will somehow prolong your youth or anything like that.

>>19558155
>Which makes me ask, why is it so hard to work doing research? Specially considering that research is one of the pillars of civilization and progress.

For every professor working on the cutting edge, society needs a thousand engineers and codemonkeys to implement the results of that research in the real world. Society might be worse off in the long term if academia disappeared overnight but we'd survive. On the other hand, society would be fucked if there was no one around to maintain all the technology we already have. Research is expensive and progress is secondary to maintenence and continued survival. Understandably, most STEM grads would prefer to work as a scientist discovering new things than an engineer achieving a 0.001% efficiency increase in some piece of data analysis software. Therefore, we have a situation where there a far more qualified people than there are research positions and every position becomes hyper-competetive. It's not like this is anything new. Look at any list of famous scientists from the past two hundred years and you'll see that most of them came from solidly middle-class families (also remember that Einstein himself couldn't get an academic job). Research has always been the domain of the rich or otherwise fortunate.

There is also the possibility that the technological progress of the 20th century was a historical anomaly. Maybe all the 'easy' problems have been solved and science will now consist of a few researchers throwing machine learning algorithms at huge data sets for the next few hundred years. Progress will not be measured by great discoveries but minor increases in efficiency.