Trinity Philosophy

Wooly Hat

I was wondering would anyone be able to give me an idea of what the philosophy course in TCD is like? From the website it looks like dozens of topics are covered each year. Is the work load really as huge as it looks - How many books are you expected to read in a year?

kowloon

Don't know anything about the course but i know someone who was through it and she had no problem making time for a job and drinkies.
So i wouldn't stress too much about the workload.

Wooly Hat

ahhhhh, this seems impossible. I look at the website and see a mountain (of work), and you say your friend drank all the way up. Ahhhhh, impossible.

It wasn't me!

It's alright. To be honest, you read what you think will help you. There's a lot to be drawn from a lot of stuff, but you wouldn't read everything, and you certainly wouldn't have to.

Seloth

What are the benfits of actually doing the coure besides a a good talk and a mental excercise.Are there any job opertunies from them,as the only thing I can think from it is teaching the course or writing a book.

Wooly Hat

It's a popular topic among non-philosophers - "what's the use of philosophy?" or worse - what job can it get? Personally I'v never entertained the idea for a second, it dosn't make any sense to me. Firstly philosophy is an end itself, you may not be able to see that. And there are plenty of jobs where a background in philosophy is useful. Not all of them are obvious. For example, if you're interested in aesthetics, philosophy of architecture and space, postmodernism, deconstructivism etc. then you could work as an architectural journalist or theorist.

Wooly Hat

It wasn't me! wrote: »

It's alright. To be honest, you read what you think will help you. There's a lot to be drawn from a lot of stuff, but you wouldn't read everything, and you certainly wouldn't have to.

Thanks for replying. From looking at the website it looks like there are really lots of topics covered each year. I'm thinking that I wouldn't be able to keep up with the workload, so I was trying to get an idea of how well you have to know each topic. What year are you in ?

pid()

Perhaps you should try meeting with a guidance counsellor at TCD, or one of the lecturers of the course to see what it entails, work load, study time, hours per week, etc.

experiMental

You could try work in marketing and business consultancy. They are crying out for people with good communication and analytical skills.

In business development and marketing, you have to know what cultural, aestehtic and behavioral trends exist in society, analyse these trends, consider implications of developers' ideas on society as a whole and consult with managers, etc when it comes to developing a new product or a service.

Some vacancies don't require specific degrees, so if you think you're up to the job then go for it. The key to success is in picking the right job for yourself.

---

if you're interested in aesthetics, philosophy of architecture and space, postmodernism, deconstructivism etc. then you could work as an architectural journalist or theorist.

I'm a product design student. Having read architectural/design journals, I got to know what the practise of design involved, and that has helped me a huge deal. So there might be a point of working as an architectural or a design journalist.

However, I have also read advanced theories on space, postmodernism and deconstructivism. I have to admit that they haven't helped me a bit in my work and I have wasted my time. Their wording is far too complex.

Design is function followed by form. You have to take non-design ideas and put them together into a complete product. Design actually involves interpretation of very basic principles of aesthetics and expanding them to show how you interpret them. So in a way when you are creating a design, you're creating your own theory on space, postmodernism and deconstructivism.

Thus, being a design critic and teacher is very useful, but creating experimental design theories without any practical purpose is risky and pointless. Someone else may be creating an even better theory and worse still, it may be a best selling gadget and making millions of Euros while your theory will be just a very obscure piece of paper that hardly anyone will ever read it.

Wooly Hat

Interesting post, experiMental my man. I was thinking about the many subjects that philosophy touches on, i'm interested in all of them includiing design and philosophical aesthetics. You seem to have a design philosophy, so thats ok. Have you designed anything cool? Actually, my original post was in search more philosophy students. Anyway, happy new year.

experiMental

I have designed a lot of graphics and a couple of very basic products. I don't have the time and the resources to make them so they are still on the drawing board. I also doubt whether they are any cool.

I've talked about the study of philosophy with my friend, who studies this subject as a mandatory module in his Arts course in UCD. He says that philosophy in his course is approached from a more scientific point of view - they do mathematical and computational logic, and also some analytical techniques used in science and many other areas. I don't know about Trinity, but many philosophers were also prominent mathematicians and scientists, so be prepared to dabble in some very high level concepts.

LaVidaLoca

And to be perfectly honest the course was a joke.

Most of the lecturers (except one, alas now retired) were far more interested in their own academic stuff than in teaching students.

Meny people I know got a 2.1 by doing jack-all and studying up two weeks before the exam.

Seriously, dont waste 4 years of your life studying this stuff. Study something that's both interesting and useful: The kind of philosophy taught in Universiy is largely intellectual weightlifting: Good for training your brain , but of no value in teaching you anything you can use.

You will end up, as most of the people I studied with did, working in a bookshop or in the nether regions of IT, call centres, or whatever with a brain that is far too well-developed for it's surroundings.

Now Im not saying you should run off and study business instead: But do study something with a little practical applicatiion. Even Art college is far more useful when it comes to getting a job.

Philosophy courses are a hangover from the days when only 'gentlemen' went to college, and didnt really need to know much about anything in detail, as the class system would just send them directly into upper management/politics after graduation: all they really needed to know was how to be entertaining at dinner parties.

kowloon

LaVidaLoca wrote: »

Most of the lecturers (except one, alas now retired) were far more interested in their own academic stuff than in teaching students.

True in most courses, there are some truly terrible lecturers as a result of teaching skills not being required as part of their employment, the way lecturers are selected is backward along with the whole way the place is managed. Administration and academia need to be separated properly to get rid of the bullshlt politics.

Philosophy courses are a hangover from the days when only 'gentlemen' went to college, and didnt really need to know much about anything in detail, as the class system would just send them directly into upper management/politics after graduation: all they really needed to know was how to be entertaining at dinner parties.

The class system is alive and well in this country

Wooly Hat

kowloon wrote: »

The class system is alive and well in this country

Pipe down peasant.

Wooly Hat

I should point out that I am adamant on studying philosophy. When it comes to the hairy issue of jobs I have the attiude of crossing that bridge when I come to it. I tell myself it's philosophy for the sake of philosophy,
academic rather than vocational. So I need help trying to find out about this course rather than the hairy issue. I was wondering LaVidaLoca would you be able to answer a bunch of questions for me? Even though you don't seem over the moon about the whole lot, you must have enjoyed to some extent? or interesting at least? I do see what you mean that "Philosophy courses are a hangover from the days when only 'gentlemen' went to college". Which is quite funny. It's still called Mental and Moral Science which is a bit 1908. And I also wondered why they have a thing about psychoanalysis.

Anyway, I'm actually worried about getting through the course and writing essays that aren't pure bull****.I take it the lecturers aren't that great.
Did you find it too technical at any stage with analytic philosophy and symbol logic and all that? Do many people drop out, how many people in the class? Did you read much philosophy before you started at university? How many books do you have to get through each year, I get
the impression it's a few hundred? Would it be at all possible to see some of your essays if you have any???????? I'd like to see whay kind of stuff is expected of undergraduates!

LaVidaLoca

You seem like a sensible chap.

Now dont get me wrong, Im not necessarily down on Philosophy. Im far from being one of those people who'd say **** like "Sure whaddya wanna do all that t'inkin' fer?"

However, personally, I found that Philosophy as I studied it was concerned primarily with questions of purely academic interest. We never talked about "What is the meaning of life?" , "What is the best system of government?" or whatever. It was all "When I say 'chair' , do I mean the object in and of itself or in it's synthetic form?" .

To me, if your gonna use your mind to think about things, you should use it to think about things that really matter (to the world at large and to you yourself)

To take an analogy: If I gave you a guitar, would it be better that you (a) Learn to play it (b) Learn to tune, care for and maintain it or (c) Leave it sitting against the wall while you contemplate what a guitar is, what it is for, and what is the isness of it's thusness until you're too old to play the damn thing?

Option (c) is how (Western) Philosophy looks at life as a whole. I dont find that thinking in this way (except for maybe once in a while, not for 4 years in a row) is conducive to being either, a useful individual OR, (and this is most important: A HAPPY one. I have several friends who went on to study philosophy at postgrad level. Most have problems with depression (one even attempted suicide). I dont think it's a coincidence.

The human mind is not designed to do this type of thinking all the time. If you're gonna think this deeply and this abstractly, do it about art or music, or particle physics or psychology or the meaning of life. Dont waste all that thought, all that limited human energy, on arguments, the resolution of which (endlessly deferred as it is) makes not one iota of difference to the betterment of human life, yours or anyone elses.

To me, philosophy of this sort is best studied as an amateur. By all means read philosophical texts while you're studying something else. They will enrich your life and sharpen your brain, and you will understand them all the better for having, as they say, one foot in the 'real world'. But for god's sake dont waste the chance you have been given to go to University by studying this stuff.

LaVidaLoca

You seem like a sensible chap.

Now dont get me wrong, Im not necessarily down on Philosophy. Im far from being one of those people who'd say **** like "Sure whaddya wanna do all that t'inkin' fer?"

However, personally, I found that Philosophy as I studied it was concerned primarily with questions of purely academic interest. We never talked about "What is the meaning of life?" , "What is the best system of government?" or whatever. It was all "When I say 'chair' , do I mean the object in and of itself or in it's synthetic form?" .

To me, if your gonna use your mind to think about things, you should use it to think about things that really matter (to the world at large and to you yourself)

To take an analogy: If I gave you a guitar, would it be better that you (a) Learn to play it (b) Learn to tune, care for and maintain it or (c) Leave it sitting against the wall while you contemplate what a guitar is, what it is for, and what is the isness of it's thusness until you're too old to play the damn thing?

Option (c) is how (Western) Philosophy looks at life as a whole. I dont find that thinking in this way (except for maybe once in a while, not for 4 years in a row) is conducive to being either, a useful individual OR, (and this is most important: A HAPPY one. I have several friends who went on to study philosophy at postgrad level. Most have problems with depression (one even attempted suicide). I dont think it's a coincidence.

The human mind is not designed to do this type of thinking all the time. If you're gonna think this deeply and this abstractly, do it about art or music, or particle physics or psychology or the meaning of life. Dont waste all that thought, all that limited human energy, on arguments, the resolution of which (endlessly deferred as it is) makes not one iota of difference to the betterment of human life, yours or anyone elses.

To me, philosophy of this sort is best studied as an amateur. By all means read philosophical texts while you're studying something else. They will enrich your life and sharpen your brain, and you will understand them all the better for having, as they say, one foot in the 'real world'. But for god's sake dont waste the chance you have been given to go to University by studying this stuff.

kowloon

Wooly Hat wrote: »

Pipe down peasant.

Rabble Rabble Rabble

Joe1919

I think philosophy is best studied along with another subject such as English or Socology or Economics as a joint honours subject and this would increase career possibilities..
Its unfortunate that philosophy is not taught in secondary schools in Ireland and therefore does not rank as a teaching subject for hDip purposes.
Lecturers post large reading lists to guide student to paticular areas (like a road map). No-one reads every book, as no one drives on every road.. Indeed one of my lecturers posted 50 books in one module. I only read one. Reading lists can be useful for targeting special areas in essays.
Do not overread.
I never had any problems with lecturers and I did find that the some people always have problems with something, but never with themselves..
I loved philosophy.
Logic only formed one module out of 16 on my course.

Wooly Hat

LaVidaLoca wrote: »

(c) Leave it sitting against the wall while you contemplate what a guitar is, what it is for, and what is the isness of it's thusness until you're too old to play the damn thing?

I find that hilarious. What I don't find so funny is the philosophy-depression thing, but I understand. You've come out the other side of the process and I must admit you do have things to say that I can't really
ignore. But as I said, I remain, adamant on studying philosophy and still very excited about the subject. I think, to an extent, that it's a case of filtering information that contradicts what I already believe, I do value your advice though. Answer me this: Is it easy to get completely lost because I imagine it is dealing with pretty abstract stuff??

Wooly Hat

kowloon wrote: »

Rabble Rabble Rabble

Kowloon, you seem responsive to talk about classism. I've become interested in socialist ideas myself recently, any particular political dogma you subscribe to?

Wooly Hat

Joe1919 wrote: »

No-one reads every book, as no one drives on every road.

I see.

I am beginning to consider studying philosophy with another subject. I think philosophy departments in Ireland are very limited in comparison to English ones when it comes to choice of subjects, can't really study (natural) science with philosophy here.

Where did you study?

kowloon

Wooly Hat wrote: »

Kowloon, you seem responsive to talk about classism. I've become interested in socialist ideas myself recently, any particular political dogma you subscribe to?

Theres plenty of opportunity in College to get involved in these things.
Lend an ear to everyone.

FionnMatthew

I'm sorry LaVidaLoca, but I need to redress the balance here. Here is a person with a rare thing: a positive inclination to study philosophy, that most rare and undervalued of disciplines, and it seems to me all you can do is try to dissuade him.

Besides this, your message is confused. Your experience in the Trinity College department appears to have been allowed to besmirch the discipline itself, and the entire history of Western Philosophy. I would think your attitude could benefit from a little restraint, and a little more rigour, than to denounce the history of Western thought itself on the basis of a few bad teachers you had.

LaVidaLoca wrote:

And to be perfectly honest the course was a joke.

Most of the lecturers (except one, alas now retired) were far more interested in their own academic stuff than in teaching students.

This may be true. I have heard that the Trinity College department isn't very good at all. I myself am a graduate student at UCD, where I got my BA, and I can vouch for the quality of the department.
While there has been an institutional emphasis on research as opposed to teaching in UCD in the past few years, teaching remains central to the ethos of the school here, and I can strongly recommend most of the 20 strong staff there as excellent teachers, with an admirable commitment to the learning and wellbeing of their students.

The department is cross-disciplinarian too, and there are as many continental philosophers as analytic philosophers there, who have a range of specialties which contribute to strands in the three year course, including: social philosophy, modern philosophy, classical philosophy, ancient eastern philosophy, european critical theory, phenomenological/existential philosophy, poststructuralism and its predecessors, aesthetics and art-theory, and the wide variety of different interests that are common to the anglo-american philosophical community.

The department enjoys strong ties with important parts of the rest of the academic community: certain professors are or were quite close to the biggest names in the field - Jacques Derrida, Hilary Putnam, Noam Chomsky. We had Putnam over for a huge conference in his name only last year.

Further, many of the teachers are eminent in their own right: Dermot Moran is a world authority on phenomenology, Richard Kearney is... well just google his name. Specifically, it sounds as if Brian Elliott might be a really good person to study under if your interests are in philosophical aesthetics and art criticism. I recommend you look at his staff page on http://www.ucd.ie/philosophy/staff/elliott_brian.htm.

In fact, here is the staff page for your perusal. There were one of two bad teachers - but you get them everywhere. It's one of the strongest departments in the Arts faculty.

So if you hear only dubious things about the Trinity department, which I am unqualified to confirm or deny, I can vouchsafe that UCD does not match that description.

Meny people I know got a 2.1 by doing jack-all and studying up two weeks before the exam.

Sadly that will always be the case. Who cares? Firstly, the people who do this are generally quite intelligent, but lazy. This, surely, guarantees that if you apply yourself, you can expect to distinguish yourself with a first. But the most important thing doesn't really have anything to do with watching other people closely to see what they're doing and how they're getting on; it's enjoying the subject yourself. If you do that, you can't fail to excel at it.

Seriously, dont waste 4 years of your life studying this stuff. Study something that's both interesting and useful: The kind of philosophy taught in Universiy is largely intellectual weightlifting: Good for training your brain , but of no value in teaching you anything you can use.

This is astonishingly conceited. Firstly, I urge you to satisfy your original inclination, and spend 4 years of your youth studying philosophy. Further, I enjoin you thereafter to spend the rest of your life studying it, because that is the particular gift imparted by philosophy.

The kind of philosophy taught in university, quite obviously, is far more diverse and far more important than anything taught in Trinity College, since the kind of philosophy I studied in UCD is vital and immediate to the intellectual life of someone who thinks in the present day. Philosophy is patently not "training for the brain." For me, philosophy has laid open the otherwise impenetrable discourses of contemporary life. Aesthetic discourses are no longer a mystery to me. Political spin is instantly transparent. New ideas are no longer felt to be some invisible thing to be wrestled with, but some quarry which I know how to catch. The history and sum total of human intellectual endeavour (that endeavour which seperates us from slime) has become my element.

Furthermore, I am in a position to take a perspective on the more specialised disciplines. In the tradition of Sellars - the philosopher must be a generalist, and it remains important that there be people who are in a position to point out the damning intellectual blindsides to Richard Dawkins' inane philosophy (which purports to be merely science), or to recognize that economics is just the latest, fashionable metaphysics.

If there are any professions for which philosophy is training, then they are legion. Often cited are practical jobs like the legal profession, etc. for which more training must be taken - and I concur here. But consider also the vigorous intellectual public life of Ireland - towards which any number of professions contribute. While it is becoming increasingly bottlenecked these days (requiring the sort of vacuously trained graduate that journalism degrees produce) the written media is in sore need of people with some intellect, with some writerly skill and the intellectual tools with which to tackle public life. Many public intellectuals in Ireland write for newspapers, or broadcast for RTE, as well as pursuing literary or scholarly interests in publication. Further, the most respectable politicians are those who underwent an initiation into the arts and into the intellectual history of our race. If you wish to pursue a career in the arts, philosophy is the key - not because it's training (and let's face it, if you're looking for "training" you shouldn't be in University - training is for the skilled work sector) but because it is 100% impossible to work as a creative artist without some feeling for the history of the human being in the life of the mind. (Case in point: the diverting, but ultimately meaningless, inconsequential whinings of self-appointed guitar band prophets, who aren't even in a position to know that actually having something to say necessitates actually knowing something - just sounding meaningful doesn't bequeath meaning on meaningless junk.)

From my vantage point, I consider myself infinitely more capable to do any job than I was when, having finished a three year course in actor training, I found myself without the confidence of my convictions, cast adrift in a world which I knew I wasn't ready for, even though my diploma announced I was. The final point is, yes, philosophy isn't training for anything at all - but it qualifies you for life in a way that is superior to the piecemeal, obfuscated jargon that most people receive during their training - the muted, fractured, systematized truths that the other professions universalize in order to justify their assumptions, and their mandate. Contrary to what LVL says here:

The human mind is not designed to do this type of thinking all the time.

... a philosopher is what the human being should be first, before he is anything else. Most citizens in democratic states do not understand the philosophy on which that state is founded, do not understand their status or their position on it. Intellectual life is the highest aspiration and fullest investment of the abilities which distinguish us from mere gene-vehicles, and philosophy is the surest path to intellectual autonomy. If a person has any potential at all, it is to be a philosopher, and he can thereafter spend his days performing the menial tasks of the business sector, or of the IT profession without ever diminishing that potential.

You will end up, as most of the people I studied with did, working in a bookshop or in the nether regions of IT, call centres, or whatever with a brain that is far too well-developed for it's surroundings.

You'd probably have found your brain too well developed in that environment even if you hadn't studied philosophy. It was exactly that feeling, that the world was not fine enough for me, that drove me to academic philosophy, an environment where I found I had to sink or swim. The knowledge that you have a mind which transcends its surroundings ought to make you transcend those surroundings yourself. Ultimately, your lot is not the fault of philosophy, but of your own lack of imagination. Do you have a language? How good is your degree? Apply for the civil service. Join the police force. By the sounds of it, your own particular mental acuity (for which you have to thank philosophy) would bequeath you a fast promotion record in either of those jobs. You could be a detective (where do you think they come from?)

Philosophy courses are a hangover from the days when only 'gentlemen' went to college, and didnt really need to know much about anything in detail, as the class system would just send them directly into upper management/politics after graduation: all they really needed to know was how to be entertaining at dinner parties.

I find it frankly baffling that someone who was in an academic environment for 4 years (granted with bad teachers, but you can only be taught so much - did you really spend so long in that environment without intuiting that you inherit some responsibility for educating yourself too?) could be this much of a philistine with respect to the benefits of a university education.

There is a reason that previously people who went into those disciplines studied philosophy - a reason that while there may have been Bertie Woosters, there was a particular ideal behind that sort of education - because the people who have undergone a proper education, such as you can still only get in a university, are equipped for public life in a way that most of the twenty to fifty somethings of Ireland are simply not. It is a sad reflection on our age that even someone who had the benefit of that education in our time was historically enjoined to intuit so little of the reason it is good for human beings to know about the very stuff that makes us special - who is willing to reject the rich and invaluable landscape of the educated, aware mind as "not useful."

LaVidaLoca wrote: »

You seem like a sensible chap.

Now dont get me wrong, Im not necessarily down on Philosophy. Im far from being one of those people who'd say **** like "Sure whaddya wanna do all that t'inkin' fer?"

I would think you ought to be an awful lot less "down" on philosophy - duly recognizing that your experience of it must have been limited in the extreme.

We never talked about "What is the meaning of life?"

That question isn't really one you can tackle head on, nor is it one that can be answered in a few words. However, if you ever studied european existential philosophy, you will know that that is precisely one of the questions you must tackle: by abrogating any pre-given meaning within life, philosophers like Sartre lay open the field for people to make meaning within their own lives, for choosing their meaning. If Sartre is a little lacking in consistency for you, you could trace his ideas back to Heidegger, where emerges a compelling and enthralling picture of meaning in life, and therein, the meaning of life. Equally, Bergson, Husserl, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Fichte, Dilthey, Spinoza, Gadamer etc., all the way back to Plato, offer something up to this monumental question. How could you have missed that?

"What is the best system of government?"

I know you didn't have a social philosophy course, but didn't you have to read The Republic at some point?
If that sort of philosophy is your thing, a strand in the UCD undergrad course will take you through Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Mill, right down to contemporary academic/analytic social philosophers like Popper, Russell, Berlin, Rawls, Nozick Chomsky and Dworkin, and 20th century european thinkers like Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Habermas, Foucault, Lyotard, Arendt, Voegelin and Strauss.

It was all "When I say 'chair' , do I mean the object in and of itself or in it's synthetic form?" .

Sounds to me like neo-Kantian conundrums. Which is really the smallest part of contemporary analytic philosophy. The same issues are reinvigorated in the more current debates of the anglo-american tradition: the philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, contemporary metaphysics, and contemporary epistemology. Post-Kantian scholarship continues, but its not really where it's at right now. It's just that: scholarship rather than philosophy, and a good philosophical education will get you to do both, because you need the one for the other.

To me, if your gonna use your mind to think about things, you should use it to think about things that really matter (to the world at large and to you yourself)

All things about which you are likely to think fall manifestly within the magisterium of philosophy. The study of philosophy can bequeath you with an adeptness at thinking systematically about anything about which you are likely to think. Hence, if you are inclined to think about the things that matter to you, or that you take to matter to the world at large, the task of thinking in any way significantly about those things will be greatly eased by the study of philosophy. I speak from experience here. I went to philosophy to come back to dramatic theory, acting theory and the criticism of copyright law with conceptual abilities I had not previously, the which rendered all the less opaque those complicated subjects.

To take an analogy: If I gave you a guitar, would it be better that you (a) Learn to play it (b) Learn to tune, care for and maintain it or (c) Leave it sitting against the wall while you contemplate what a guitar is, what it is for, and what is the isness of it's thusness until you're too old to play the damn thing?

Alternatively, you could do all three at once, or, to leave the analogy behind, you could enjoy the study of philosophy, while also maintaining a healthy social and family life, pursue concrete interests in the arts or sciences, exercise your prerogative and duty as a citizen towards critical and informed public life, and realize that the slow pursuit of all levels of adeptness at life contributes in time to the endemic, holistic betterment of all of the constituent parts.

Option (c) is how (Western) Philosophy looks at life as a whole

It's not. That's simply, utterly wrong. Western Philosophy is the sum total of all the conceptual tools that contemporary man is likely to employ. When you're researching in a scientific discipline, you're adhering to a particular philosophy. When you're voting, that's a philosophy you are endorsing, whether you know it or not. When you get on a plane, the knowledge and design which keeps it in the air is ultimately indebted to an entire outlook on how the world works and how particularly knowledge about it should be pursued which dates back to the dawn of Western Philosophy.

You can choose to continue oblivious to this, ignorant that it is the air you breathe, or you can make yourself aware of it.

I dont find that thinking in this way (except for maybe once in a while, not for 4 years in a row) is conducive to being either, a useful individual

I should think that your particular philosophy on the matter would have deprived us of just about all of the best things about human civilization, and left us with only the worst. Without Borges, Aristotle and Shakespeare, my existence would certainly have been thinner. I would think that Newton's particular musings have been useful in the long run, as have been Solon's, and Marx's.

OR, (and this is most important: A HAPPY one.

Reality disagrees with you. Most academic philosophers I know are happy, well adjusted people with families, friends, children and fulfilling productive lives. Indeed, I have found the study of philosophy (encompassing as it does so vast an index of disciplines) to be the one thing capable of allowing me to balance the myriad worries which used to assail me. So often, intelligent people who have not been educated properly find anxiety swiping at them from behind the invisible screen of things they don't understand. They intuit problems that remain hidden to them. The only path for such people is to enlighten themselves. One of the worst experiences of my youth in Ireland was not knowing how to think about things I needed to think about. Not quite understanding things, or having a perspective on them, from which to start comprehending them. I speak here of why specifically advertising seemed to annoy me so much, or why the idea of working in an office all week and then drinking every Friday night seemed such a despicable type of existence, when everyone else seemed to enjoy it so much. The perspective, knowledge and systematic approach which the study of philosophy provided me with has allowed me to figure out these puzzles, to tie down my anxieties and worries to the particular problems. I can identify and work on the things that used to have me confused and depressed these days.

I have several friends who went on to study philosophy at postgrad level. Most have problems with depression (one even attempted suicide). I dont think it's a coincidence.

Well, perhaps it has something to do with where they went on to study.

This story is, in my experience isolated and particular. The postgraduate community in UCD is really vital and exciting, and has a good ethos. I've rarely felt less depressed.

You're always going to have your Wittgensteins and your Turings, but guess what? You have them outside of academic philosophy too.

If you're gonna think this deeply and this abstractly, do it about art or music, or particle physics or psychology or the meaning of life. Dont waste all that thought, all that limited human energy, on arguments, the resolution of which (endlessly deferred as it is) makes not one iota of difference to the betterment of human life, yours or anyone elses.

IE. Don't study philosophy at Trinity College. On LVL's advice, (with perspective) it's not a very good department. Go to a good philosophy department.

To me, philosophy of this sort is best studied as an amateur. By all means read philosophical texts while you're studying something else. They will enrich your life and sharpen your brain, and you will understand them all the better for having, as they say, one foot in the 'real world'. But for god's sake dont waste the chance you have been given to go to University by studying this stuff.

I plead with you not to take this impoverished advice. LVL's experience is isolated and marginal. You sound like a person who could stand to benefit immeasurably from the study of philosophy. In the course of this, you will find out that philosophers too live in the real world, and that neither of their feet ever leave it. The university of life is something everyone gets a degree in, automatically. Make sure you also have a degree from an accredited university, in a subject that will make you a superior person, and not just some grain for the industry mill.

experiMental

Fionn Matthew: PM'd you

Wooly Hat

Thank you so much for providing the (badly needed) encouraging advice, really, I'm so glad you were browsing boards. I actually would have reconsidered studying philosophy altogether if you hadn't straightened the issue out. More inspiring than anything. What can I say, big thanks!

experiMental

Don't be put off by graduation prospects, etc - you might have to work a little bit harder when it comes to finding work than professional course grads, but it will all be worth it.

Explore your subject in-depth, try to write a blog on your views, maybe later on try to write a paper - there must be a way to make yourserlf successful in Philosophy, otherwise the degree would be scrapped.

DadaKopf

That's a long post, FionnMatthew. Is your first name David by any chance?

Anyway, I'm all for studying philosophy. I think it's the exact opposite of a waste of time. I went to UCD, and found the staff there (1998-2002) excellent, for the most part. Most importantly, it grounded me in the belief that we live in a world of multiple perspectives and infinite possibilities. I now work in a political and social research organisation, and my philosophical background has only added value to my practical work.

I'm mad into aesthetics - for its own sake, and art's - and especially aesthetically grounded political philosophy (post-/neo-Marxian and post-structuralist thought). So I understand the attraction.

By comparison, I find that people who entered working life through a narrow discipline also live narrow lives, and while not bad in itself, makes me feel bad that they're not opening themselves up. I'm not a utopian, but the world could be a better place if people valued and studied philosophy.

LaVidaLoca

I respect of course your erudite and in depth reply, though I will have to agree to disagree on the issue of studying philosophy.

At the same time as I was studying philosophy in Trinity, my friend was studying Philosophy in UCD, during a time when one of the heads of the department (now deceased) was actually behind a sticker campaign warning against the use of condoms - based on the completely scientifically spurious notion that they were full of holes large enough for a sperm to pass through.

That a man of such medieval mindset was allowed to head a department of philosophy at UCD back in the 90's does not fill me with confidence in their academic rigour either. And this is the key point: As Im sure you're well aware, philosophy as an academic subject has disgraced itself terribly in the past 40 or so years: Having clutched to it's bosom some of the most transparent charlatanry seen this side of Homeopathy: That people like Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and other Po-Mo pundits were actually taken seriously as thinkers is as deep a scar on the face of Western thought as any I can think of. Give me the lucid, solid progression of logic of a Dawkins any day. Which is why philosophy has had to concede so much ground to science in recent years. If you want ruthless commitment to logic and truth, you're more likely to find it in Dawkin's department than in Derrida's.


Studying philosophy for 4 whole years is to me the equivalent of doing a 4 year course on how to be better in bed. Sure, it's a skill we all need to have, but many of us will develop it whether we study it in university or not (by reading books and living our lives). I consider it profoundly conceited to assume that only those who study philosophy in university can see beyond the 'shadows on the cave wall', to use a philosophical metaphor. Anybody can train himself to think profoundly by reading books, and discussing them with other people who read books. There is absolutely no reason why one should need to do this under the roof of a university.

My advice to the OP was not to ignore philosophy and bury his head in the sand with regards to matters intellectual. My advice was to study something both interesting and useful, and read whatever books of philosophy take his fancy on the side. That's what I do, and I find it much more fulfulling than studying it in university, because I have real world experience to measure it against.

DadaKopf

Interesting, because that man you mention who (allegedly) spread lies about condoms is a bit of an authority on Wittgenstein. And it was Wittgenstein who said, before he radically changed his mind, that he could dissolve the problems of philosophy so that human beings could start doing something useful. Later, he realised philosophy is essential in exploring the limits of human activity.

That activity you name - science - is fine in as far as it goes, but even Dawkins would say he's a scientist, not a philosopher. As Wittgenstein said of language, Dawkins is well aware of the boundaries and limitations of the scientific method.

And, like it or not, science does impose strict limitations. It examines only the observable measurable world. But the human condition is not science, nor are the kinds of questions it throws up - what is right or wrong?, for example.

But for a concrete example to demonstrate the real-world value of those 'charlatans' you mention, the ideas of Derrida, Adorno, Foucault, Deleuze, Bordieu, etc. have given rise to liberatory discourses that have empowered the oppressed across the world - in the developed and developing worlds - to question the domination of science and pseudo-science (particularly economics) and to empower themselves to improve their conditions and challenge injustice.

So don't tell me philosophy is useless.

LaVidaLoca

"So don't tell me philosophy is useless."

I didnt. I merely suggested that the OP would be better off spending his university years studying something else and reading philosophy in his spare time. It's just an opinion. And Im not suggesting he should go off and study something 'sensible' like business or accountancy either.


"But for a concrete example to demonstrate the real-world value of those 'charlatans' you mention, the ideas of Derrida, Adorno, Foucault, Deleuze, Bordieu, etc. have given rise to liberatory discourses that have empowered the oppressed across the world - in the developed and developing worlds - to question the domination of science and pseudo-science (particularly economics) and to empower themselves to improve their conditions and challenge injustice."

The 'ideas' of those men did no such thing. The charlatans I mentioned did quite the opposite: While conservative capitalism was busy swallowing the planet whole from the 1970's onwards, those very men went into a huge philosophical sulk, refused to talk about anything using 'mainstream discourse' (i.e. sense) any more. The whole Po-Mo establishment was quite literally fiddling while Rome burnt. The serious left-wing ideals of the Sixties (The So called Old Left) were discarded as being just another 'historical meta-narrative" and the Third World was left to sink in to the far worse state that it's in now. (Read Baudrillard on the 'unreality' of the Gulf War for a particularly egregious example)

And how the Right-Wing did laugh at the lefties, who had ceased to talk about justice, equality and the rights of man, and were now arguing about signs and signifiers and the interplay of metafictions of discourse. (or whatever, Im a little rusty on the terminology now)

Read "Intellectual Impostures" by Alan Sokal for details.