Academic Philosophy

[Anonymous No.15784975]

What is it like studying philosophy at university? I think many of us on /lit/ like reading philosophy in our own time, but can people who majored in philsosophy talk about what is it like in academia?

What books do you read? Do people read full books or mostly selected sections and secondary sources? Do people spend time reading Kant and understanding transcendental idealism? How broad/deep is the understanding of a philosophy student when graduating? Do people read Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Derrida or is it more stuff like Locke, Mill, Quine, Peirce, Rawls, Sartre, de Beauvoir? How bad are /lit/ philosophy discussions compared to philosophy students discussions?

What books do people read a lot in academia but are seldom mentioned on /lit/?

[Anonymous No.15785293]

Bump

[Anonymous No.15785381]

>>15784975
>How bad are /lit/ philosophy discussions compared to philosophy students discussions
Roughly the same. IMO philosophy was only worth it once I hit grad school, like all majors undergrad is really only high school 2.0. If you get a PhD, you spend a ton of time at conferences and events which leads to meeting a lot of very smart people.

[Anonymous No.15786364]

>>15784975
>What books do you read?
That's a really broad question.

>Do people read full books or mostly selected sections and secondary sources?
Selections of the source material, and some secondary sources.
Ethics I for example, starts with Nicomachean Ethics, Stoicism, Utilitarism, Hume, and Kant; and this is before the first middle-term.
Reading the full books is possible, but a waste of time since we will forget most of it.

>Do people spend time reading Kant and understanding transcendental idealism?
Not much. Students get the main ideas from their course in Modern Philosophy. Nobody goes much deeper unless their want to write their thesis on Kant and his idealism.

>How broad/deep is the understanding of a philosophy student when graduating?
Shallow at best. With a bachelor's degree you get a general idea of the history of philosophy, feel comfortable reading the philosophy books of pretty much any time in history, and have acquired some decent academic writing skills to maybe attempt to publish a paper or two.
Knowledge becomes deep in graduate studies, but also quite narrow.

>How bad are /lit/ philosophy discussions compared to philosophy students discussions?
I don't read much of them, but they seem ok. They're usually more broad than the discussions you would have with philosophy students.

[Anonymous No.15787827]

>>15784975
Humanities have been co-opted for political propaganda in the 21st century so don't expect anything meaningful until grad school

[Anonymous No.15787850]

>>15786364
>They're usually more broad than the discussions you would have with philosophy students.
Yeah we're discussing Guenon here

[Anonymous No.15788561]

>>15784975
Waste of time. Hume had it right, there's nothing to be met in a professor that is not met in books. Descartes wrote his works in seclusion/solitude. Academic philosophy will show you what to think, but not create something new to think.

[Anonymous No.15788667]

>>15788561
>not create something new to think.
No one can show you that

[Anonymous No.15788858]

>>15784975
Studying philosophy right now.
>what books do you read?
Pretty much entirely depends on the institution. You'll probably always have to take core classes on ancient Greek philosophy, modern philosophy, and logic, but the rest is variable.
>do people read full books?
Not really. At least not in any class below a seminar. At my school we read selections but not really any secondary sources.
>do people spend time reading Kant?
I don't think you can major in philosophy without reading at least a little but of the Critique in your modern philosophy class, but he's not given special attention unless your school offers a seminar on it which I've heard of several that do.
>how broad/deep is the understanding of a phil student?
Not very deep, fairly broad. Ideally a philosophy bachelor's gives a good understanding of the history of philosophy and the different branches of philosophy and the competency to approach any philosophical text, but you don't go into very much depth on any specific topic.
>do people read schopenhauer blah blah blah
Like I said before this mostly depends on school. My college is known for Kierkegaard so we've got a whole class on existentialism for example but not all schools will. In America schools tend to be mostly analytic though.
>how bad are /lit/ phil discussions?
They're fine when people have read what they're talking about, but 80% of the time it's obvious people are larping.
>what books do people read a lot in academia?
Honestly nothing comes to mind. At least nothing from like the core classes. We kinda just hit all the big figures.

[Anonymous No.15788891]

>>15788858
Actually addendum to the last question. I don't know if he's commonly studied, but we read a tiny bit of Malebranche in my modern philosophy class and I've never seen him mentioned here.

[Anonymous No.15788913]

>>15788858
>>15786364
>>15785381
Not sure if you guys are making it sound worse than it is, but reading this makes it sound like a waste of time. You could just major in a science and do philosophy on the side then if you want to do philosophy academically you just do a postgrad

[Anonymous No.15788936]

You need to pick the right uni if you want a historical and/or continental slant. I studied mostly contemporary analytic philosophy in undergrad, which involves very little discussion of historical or even contemporary significant figures. The focus is very much on the ideas and arguments together with the formal tools, like logic. My PhD program has been much the same.

[Anonymous No.15788951]

>>15788936
So most of the /lit/ philosophy discussion here has nothing to do with what you studied?

[Anonymous No.15788956]

>>15784975
You have 30 credits to pass, and each 6 credits, each semester, is tied to a type of philosophy. Metaphisycs, political philosophy, and so forth.
What is studied is what the teacher can teach you and what he wants to teach you.
As for the teaching process, they explain the thought, then present counter arguments. You also get to read the texts with their commentary.

For instance, I studied Galileo, Descartes and Newton as the authors of modern science, in a way the teacher saw it. That said, most teachers teach related to their experience and field of research : some even made us study their own thesis, heh.

That said, philosophy in university is truly "history of philosophy". We study what authors said. But like sports, it trains your mind, and it allows you to not reinvent room temperature water. After all, if what you think has been thought, or what you think can't surpass the counter arguments some people made, what you think is flawed.

>What books do you read?
Anything related to the topic of the lesson. We do study all the pillars of philosophy tho, so Plato, Descartes, Kant, and some others.

>Full books or not
We read sections, we're sometimes expected to read the whole thing. But even if we were taught Kant, we never read his work in full.

>Spend time reading Kant
More like enough to understand him, and why he's important.

>How broad is the knowledge of a graduate
You understand there's much more that you studied, but you're understanding things easier, and can pick up subjects more easily.

>Schopenhauer and list of author
Depends on the teacher's will. Heidegger, husserl, Wittgenstein were adressed in my case. I read Rawls and Peirce on my own volution.

>How bad is /lit/
Pretty bad. It sounds like pseudos trying to spout demi knowledgde. When you use a counter argument that shut down authors, thoughts, or such, most of the time anons actually refute it with the back of their hand.

.t Ex french philosophy student.

[Anonymous No.15788972]

>>15788956
>For instance, I studied Galileo, Descartes and Newton
Very based

[Anonymous No.15788984]

>>15788972
Especially when you get to read the thoughts of Galileo, and what people today thinks of him is retarded. Nobody reads him anymore, and just spout the same bullshit.

He wasn't purely someone that made experiments. He had the equation for a long time, but simply put it on the side. But it's easier to pick him as an exemple of "lmao he first experiment in science he good boi".

[Anonymous No.15789012]

>>15784975
awful.
I went to a very highly ranked school for Phil and you read Joe Nobody from NYU/Princeton talking about whether or not Red balls have a universal Red or a thing called a Red trope in them. You read the dumbest shit.

Also Lit discussions are terrible.

[Anonymous No.15789027]

>>15789012
>Lit discussions are terrible.
Why are you here fren?

[Anonymous No.15789039]

>>15788984
I thought he made the equation first to organize his astronomy then later did the experiment?

[Anonymous No.15789055]

>>15789039
My memory is blurry, so take it as it is, but I recall him just mixing both, and didn't stick to one category.
He was more tip toeing and tried everything, than anything else iirc. I mean, how do you measure time without clocks? He used some batteries, like in a fanfare, he used many types of instruments to try to measure time and so forth.

As to why he had the equation so soon, I can't recall. But that just means he's not purely trying to do maths, or purely trying to do experiments, like some people try to """"""debate""""".

[Anonymous No.15789081]

>>15784975
undergrad philosophy is a ton of fun. the best classes are honestly those first few years where you cover a ton of big ideas.

the closer you get to senior year and graduate school the more technical and meaningless things get. also your more likely to get into shitty politics at that point

consider just doing a minor and picking additional classes you are interested in. philosophy departments tend to be small and flexible.

[Anonymous No.15789112]

>>15789081
The opposite of this was true for me. The first few years classes are filled by students from other departments and they are so incredibly dumb. More advanced classes on the other hand have better students and the emphasis is on writing a research paper of some kind, which is a lot of fun.

[Anonymous No.15789122]

>>15789112
The more advanced you are, the more you have to specialize yourself and have to be precize. You get into research, as well. It's the old "broad but superficial, or deep but narrow". Depends on what you prefer. And I prefer the former

[Anonymous No.15789127]

>>15789112
What advanced classes did you take?

[Anonymous No.15789157]

>>15788913
I’m being honest. I personally find the education system to be a massive failure qua education. The only real thing you’ll miss out on by not going to school is the social environment. Not sure if that’s worth it.

[Anonymous No.15789171]

>>15789127
There was a class on the presocratics, one on Kant and another on phenomenology

[Anonymous No.15789179]

>>15789171
Nice

[Anonymous No.15789199]

>>15789179
Yeah it was sweet. I strongly recommend studying philosophy if that’s something that interests you.

[Anonymous No.15789282]

>>15788951
A lot of the philosophical discussions here focus more on philosophers than philosophy, so I think the answer to your question is yes.

That said, a decent number of the philosophical discussions here focus on big philosophical issues (e.g. free will, various questions in ethics, various questions in epistemology, the existence of God etc.), and interest in these issues is not confined to historical and continental philosophers. I actually do some work on free will and some work in ethics myself, all from within the analytic tradition.

[Anonymous No.15789404]

>>15789282
>>15788936

>I actually do some work on free will and some work in ethics myself, all from within the analytic tradition.

What exacllty does this entail? Like, I'll actually admit here that they way you've worded this makes me doubt you understand why people would here care about most 'historical' philosophers.

[Anonymous No.15789409]

>>15789012
Lol this is the kind of thing I was talking about in >>15788936

The NYU/Princeton analytic crowd are insanely smart, but a lot of their work is very recondite and will seem even more so on first exposure as an undergrad.

[Anonymous No.15789418]

>>15784975
I recently completed my undergraduate with a high GPA from a well respected european university and will be starting my masters next year

>What books do you read? Do people read full books or mostly selected sections and secondary sources?

Selected sections and secondary sources mainly, as this allows students to engage with a subject area in a more well-rounded way, rather than engaging with the nitty gritty of what individual philosophers, the time just isnt there (generally) to focus in on single texts. Also you wont retain the information.

>Do people spend time reading Kant and understanding transcendental idealism?

Kant is probably the most frequently quoted philosopher I encountered and TI is extremely important to many subsequent discussions and courses, although i took a specialised class in Kantian philosophy as well as post kantian thought

> How broad/deep is the understanding of a philosophy student when graduating?

Not deep but quite broad. The main thing they seem to aim for is critical thinking and teaching students how to engage with and analyse philosophical texts and discussions, by the end of the degree its pretty clear whether or not youre capable of it/have put in the work.

>Do people read Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Derrida or is it more stuff like Locke, Mill, Quine, Peirce, Rawls, Sartre, de Beauvoir?

Short answer, Yes. Long answer, it depends on the classes you choose to do. I would say the likes of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida, Locke, Sartre, and de Beauvoir are fairly unavoidable (most people i knew had at least studied them once).

>how bad is /lit/

On average they reach the same quality level of discussions, mainly because most people in universities are retarded and living off mommy and daddys dime and most lecturers phone it in. However the best classes i took and discussions I've had in university far surpass anything on this basket weaving forum, so take that for what it is.
TLDR: on average its the same, however university learning can be far better

[Anonymous No.15789448]

>>15786364
>knowledge becomes deep in gradute studies, but also quite narrow
Thats the truth for literally any study, any major. By the time you are writing your dissertation it will be over something so incredibly specific only a handful of people will know what the hell you're even talking about.

[Anonymous No.15789449]

>>15789404
The work I've done in ethics concerns applications of consequentialist theories to some recalcitrant ethical problems, and my work on free will concerns some objections to free will coming out of neuroscience.

Is that what you mean? Not sure I fully understood your response.

[Anonymous No.15789532]

>>15784975
>How bad are /lit/ philosophy discussions compared to philosophy students discussions?
Interestingly, the quality of philosophizing that goes on here is almost exactly the same as what goes on in an undergrad classroom at a reasonably good university.

Suggests to me that many posters here are or were philosophy or philosophy-adjacent undergrads at reasonably good universities, but not many are graduate students in philosophy at good programs.

[Anonymous No.15789692]

>>15788913
I mean there's other benefits. I know phil majors do best on the LSAT and have the highest acceptance rates to grad school. And it's a lot more fulfilling than studying philosophy on your own in my experience. That being said it's kind of a side major for me with my main one being mathematics.

[Anonymous No.15789719]

>>15789692
Fuck I meant highest acceptance rates to law school

[Anonymous No.15789770]

>>15789692
Are you sure you're reading the causality right? I've always assumed that the LSAT success enjoyed by philosophy majors (and their performance on the GRE as well, mind you) was mostly due to philosophy selecting for people with the most verbal aptitude, rather than being due to any special verbal skills taught by philosophy. But it's probably both.

[Anonymous No.15789873]

>>15789692
>I know phil majors do best on the LSAT and have the highest acceptance rates to grad school.
But philosophy students usually have pretty high intelligence so it doesn't really mean the degree helped them

[Anonymous No.15790014]

>>15789770
My school (europe) didn't have admission tests and I did ok in those too.

There's some abstract quality in both philosophy and mathematics that, having struggled with them for a few years, you get "something" to solve a problem or answer something changing approaches and interpretations at a reasonable speed for the test.

[Anonymous No.15790036]

>>15789081
>cover a ton of big ideas.
What counts as a "big idea" in philosophy?

t. STEM-fag

[Anonymous No.15790296]

>>15789873
yep

[Anonymous No.15790436]

>>15784975
What you read at school depends on what classes you take out of the classes they teach at the school you chose. Note I'm talking more about graduate school because undergrads usually don't pick their schools with the philosophy department in mind from the start. For graduates, if you're picking a best fit then you get to read stuff you want. If you want Quine and so forth you get to read that, if you want Heidegger you get to read that, but you need to blame yourself for what you read in the end, the same as being an autodidact. Also you can still read whatever you want on the side.
>How bad are /lit/ philosophy discussions compared to philosophy students discus
There's some knowledgeable anons who make effortposts, but there's also a lot of pseuds who suck.
>What books do people read a lot in academia but are seldom mentioned on /lit/?
Many analytic ones like Word and Object, Naming and Necessity, or On the Plurality of Worlds. /lit/ is more likely to dig deep into obscure late 19th century untranslated German Schopenhaeurianism like Philipp Mainlander, than to read the essential analytic books.
>Do people read full books or mostly selected sections and secondary sources?
They can read full books sometimes, but selections + secondary sources is very normal, though I imagine some schools might avoid that on some sort of completionist principle perhaps, but not the schools I've been to. Expect selections/secondary sources in survey classes. Expect books or something close to entire books in classes that are specifically on a historical philosopher like Kant, but usually note that the course description will tell you ahead of time if you'll read the Critique or something.
>Do people spend time reading Kant and understanding transcendental idealism?
Yeah if you take classes on Kant.

[Anonymous No.15790528]

>>15790436
>/lit/ is more likely to dig deep into obscure late 19th century untranslated German Schopenhaeurianism like Philipp Mainlander, than to read the essential analytic books.
Why do you think this is?

[Anonymous No.15790570]

>>15790528
Not him, but I think it's both because "obscure late 19th century untranslated German Schopenhaeurianism like Philipp Mainlander" is sexier than analytic philosophy and because it's easier to pontificate on semi-convincingly while being a non-expert.

[Anonymous No.15791651]

Bump.

[Anonymous No.15791721]

>>15790528
Because analytic philosophy is dying despite what its increasingly desperate adherents say to the contrary. /lit/ is mostly people from fields other than the tiny insular field of analytic philosophy, so its interest in philosophy is broad and eclectic. It's sort of like asking why people on an art discussion board, when they discuss film, discuss all national traditions and aspects of film instead of discussing only Chinese state propaganda movies. The simplest answer is that the only people who care about Chinese propaganda films are their producers and their captive audience.

This is a Princeton analytic philosophy professor for reference. Beyond just being an idiot personally, the style of argument she's using is very analytic so you can get a taste of it if you like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5SQnQjryzI

[Anonymous No.15791773]

>>15791721
You can tell if a field is dying by seeing whether it is or isn't growing in numbers of adherents across schools across the world. Analytic philosophy is by no means dying, it's taken over everywhere and continues to expand into places like India, China, Scandinavia, Russia, Latin America, even Germany and France itself. Just because analytic philosophy doesn't relate to your personal life doesn't mean it's 'dying.' You're right that analytic philosophy is insular, but so are the sciences. They're not dying either just because you could care less about octonions in mathematics or Faddeev-Popov ghosts in physics or whatever else in obscure biology, chemistry, psychology, and so forth. And you would be wrong to think that the 'uselessness' of analytic philosophy to the 'real world' means it's dying, because it isn't, not anymore than continental philosophy and the humanities as a whole would be if that were true.

[Anonymous No.15791795]

>>15791721
>analytic philosophy is dying
I'm not so sure. Analytic philosophy is increasingly coming to dominate university philosophy departments, even in continental Europe.

>This is a Princeton analytic philosophy professor for reference. Beyond just being an idiot personally, the style of argument she's using is very analytic so you can get a taste of it if you like.
I've got to admit, this is an excellent example of some awfully dumb and sophistic analytic philosophy. That said, it's not representative of the best that analytic philosophy has to offer. For one, you can't expect a take on abortion from a young-ish American female academic working in the northeastern United States in this day and age that isn't totally ideologically corrupted. Ideology can make even the smartest people say some horrendously dumb things. On top of this, Liz Harman's position at Princeton is the product of straight-up nepotism: her dad Gil Harman is also a philosophy professor there, and unlike Liz he's the real deal.

[Anonymous No.15791852]

>>15791773
I never said most of the things you're implying. I have personal experience with the Russian and Chinese philosophy scenes and I don't see how it's spreading there. If anything, they are moving in the opposite direction in a big way. Can you give some sources on how they are becoming more analytic oriented?

Scandinavia I can see but they are an adjunct of the German scene. Nothing new there. In any case I disagree that it's about numbers. It's typical of an analytic to think that quantification is everything and there are no deeper dimensions to the health of an intellectual tradition.

>>15791795
I have to strongly disagree with this as well. Analytic departments are either lysing and becoming porous with concerns historically excluded from analytic philosophy, which is causing the boundaries of the tradition to become vague and dissolve, or they're trying way too hard to make themselves appealing to soft science research in areas like artificial intelligence, which also causes the field to lose distinctness.

I agree Harman is especially stupid and was hired via nepotism. But it is one of, if not the, top philosophy departments in the world, and she is a distinguished professor there. Also as I said, even setting aside her personal stupidity, if you read her manuscript on analytic ethics you can quickly see how shallow it all is. This is what passes for philosophy in peer review among analytic philosophers. That's not a good sign.

I agree that the very best of analytic philosophy can be alright. There's another thread about logical positivism up right now, which is an awful thread but this was a good post in it >>15790326 showing that even the logical positivists could be interesting. It's more since the 70s that analytic philosophy hasn't produced anything valuable.

[Anonymous No.15791891]

>>15791721
Her views look silly if you're not familiar with four-dimensionalism and rejection of open futures in philosophy of time, and JTB+ theories of knowledge. If you read Derrida or other people grounded in semiotic, without knowing semiotics, you'll find their styles absurd too, without realizing why they're doing what they're doing. They view meaning as rooted in the way signs bounce off one another, which explains the use of neologisms and why they focus on connections that to us look like wordplay or equivocation or etymology or other seemingly unsubstantially connections between concepts.

[Anonymous No.15791899]

>>15791721
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5SQnQjryzI
What?
>is it moral to abort a fetus?
>it's moral to abort a fetus if you decide to abort it

[Anonymous No.15791938]

>>15791852
I think you're working with a very narrow understanding of analytic philosophy that's probably overly tied up with early 20th century work in mathematical logic, ordinary language philosophy, logical positivism and the like. I have in mind a broader conception on which analytic philosophy is just the philosophy that is historically continuous with the aforementioned, and whose method is characterised by aspirations to clarity and rigour, the use of formal logical and mathematical tools, attention to the findings of the sciences, and a reliance on argument, abduction, and sensitivity to theoretical virtues.

Analytic philosophy so understood is making huge inroads in China, already dominates in Scandinavia, and is close to taking over Germany. I have personal experience with all three, having spent the bulk of the last two years doing analytic philosophy at several universities in these three regions. No idea about Russia though.

[Anonymous No.15791947]

>>15791891
>her views look silly if you don't think in a silly framework yourself
Wow you defended a circular argument with another circular argument! Well done sophists

[Anonymous No.15792000]

>>15791947
No dude. I didn't defend anything except that the view looks less silly if you understand the background. That's also my point with Derrida. The only silly thing is pseuds who have no patience for philosophy.

[Anonymous No.15792038]

>>15792000
Nice trips but no.

[Anonymous No.15792045]

It is all up to the style of the professor and the department.

My department was half analytic, half continental, and I did both. Some courses were just a textbook, some courses were entirely on one book by one canonical thinker; some were many selections of primary texts, some were a handful of primary texts in full; some were surveys of a topic or specialty of philosophy, some were surveys of one philosopher (Nietzsche, for one example).

[Anonymous No.15792305]

>thread about academic philosophy
>most discussion is about contemporary analytic stuff
You got your answer OP

[Anonymous No.15793264]

>>15792045
Confirming this, which is why you have to decide what you like and not assume your department/professor is necessarily serving up what is good.

Analytic philosophy sucks, /lit/ hates it for a reason.