Hello, I would absolutely love to do a philosophy and astrophysics double major! I know that double majors aren’t particularly difficult, but that these are both difficult subjects (even though I’ve excelled with college-level philosophy that I’ve done so far) and that they lack overlapping classes. So, is this double major realistically possible? Don’t recommend that I do a minor, as my reason for wanting to major in both subjects is that I greatly desire to get a degree in both so that I can teach both. I’m perfectly fine with the idea of doing extra work in order to accomplish my goals, but would the work required to do a double major in these subjects be an amount of work that could realistically be completed with diligence, or is it unrealistic to expect to manage it all?
It is entirely possible and realistic to double major in both subjects - but do so only out of pure intellectual curiosity, not because you hope to ‘teach both’.
Colleges appoint lecturers to teach primarily in 1 or 2 closely-interrelated fields at best - like Math and CS, and they expect you to have a PhD in that field. Hence, you’ll have to specialize sooner or later once you enter grad school since there’s no concurrent PhD awarded in both Physics and Philosophy.
Does this mean a double major would be entirely useless? Nope. To clarify, your physics or philosophy knowledge might help illuminate certain aspects of the other subject, or train you to be a rigorous thinker, but undergrad degrees in both will never be a prerequisite for any teaching job in any institute. You could become a physics professor who teaches a course on the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics, but it’s virtually unheard of for any lecturer to hold equally weighty appointments in both subjects.
If you’re still a high school senior, consider exploring joint majors, like this one: http://catalog.yale.edu/ycps/subjects-of-instruction/physics-philosophy/
I’d only have an interest in teaching a subject out of intellectual reasons, so my desire to major in both subjects is definitely out of intellectual curiosity (though once I fulfill a lot of my curiosity, I want to teach what I know).
I am aware of the fact that an undergrad degree in either subject will not assist in me being able to teach; however, if I specialize in one of the two subjects in order to get a PhD after I obtain a bachelor’s in both, I can go back and get a second PhD in the other subject once I already have finished the first.
No, you cannot.
First of all, most universities won’t take people for a second PhD. Most universities specifically prohibit it - they simply don’t admit people for PhD study who already have one PhD. Even in the case that a university does, though, few departments are going to want to admit a student who just spent the last 6 years doing physics research into a philosophy PhD, or vice versa. You won’t have the necessary background (which is about more than just a bachelor’s degree in the field), and the department is going to wonder about your commitment to the field and your desire to remain. Departments want to admit students who they believe are going to become scholars in their field.
Second of all, even if you had two PhDs - one in physics and one in philosophy - you still couldn’t teach both. Getting hired may be a hurdle, because the rare people with more than one PhD are seen as degree collectors who can’t make up their minds. (Look at the faculty of top departments in philosophy and physics and see if you can find anyone with two PhDs.) Even if you got hired, you would get hired into a specific department, and you would teach in that department. If you got hired in a physics department, you would teach physics. The philosophy department wouldn’t also take you on to teach for them. The closest that you could get, maybe, is teaching or co-teaching a class on some intersection (like philosophy of science or ethics in research) with a philosophy professor.
Third of all, after you finish the first PhD, it’s doubtful that you’ll ever want to return to get a second one. Trust me - I have one.
However, there are some science professors that do some scholarship in both areas. If you are interested in intellectual investigation of the ethics of physical research, or metaphysics or something like that, I have seen physics professors who have trained themselves in elementary philosophical scholarship. They are few - and they don’t teach philosophy classes. They do the research because they are interested in it, and they largely engaged in these activities after they had already gained tenure at a university (e.g., after they had already spent 12-15 years engaged in only physics research).
The other thing is that what you might actually be interested in is science, technology, and society or science and technology studies (STS). You can get a PhD in STS and study the intersection of the physical sciences and the humanities.
From what I’ve seen, univerisities won’t allow people to get multiple PhDs only when they are in similar subjects (for instance, it would probably be impossible for anyone who gets a PhD in astrophysics to also get a PhD in physics); however, a lot of universities allow people to get multiple PhDs if they are in notably different subjects (like astrophysics and philosophy). Many people have obtained multiple PhDs and some have done ones in both philosophy and science. While having multiple PhDs is incredibly rare and almost always prohibited in cases where both degrees would be in similar subjects, exceptions aren’t uncommon when the subjects are very different. I wouldn’t necessary want to teach both subjects at the same time, but it I would like to be able to have the degrees required to potentially be a professor of either subject.
Either way, assuming that I might only get a doctorate for and teach one of these subjects, would it then still be wise to begin with a double major in both? Even if I find it to be a bad idea to attempt getting a second doctorate (or a second master’s degree, for that matter), I would still enjoy the experience and knowledge gained from getting a bachelor’s in both subjects. Is this advisable?
@julliet Actually, I have a counter example. But, it is somewhat European.
My son is currently taking a CS class (at UCSB) from a professor who has a dual appointment as a professor in both CS and in Physics. Dual appointments are fairly common at UCSB, because interdisciplinary research is part of the culture.
His CV says he has an MS in Math and Computer science from a university in the Netherlands in 1996. He has a PhD in Physics from Oxford in 2000 and a PhD in CS from Univ. of Amsterdam in 2002. His research field is quantum computation, a field which is generally interdisciplinary. His physics thesis was “Nonlocality & Communication Complexity” and his CS thesis was “On Quantum Computation Theory”. His masters these was also on quantum computation, so it seems his fields are not as dissimilar as astrophysics and philosophy.
Sure, of course! If you are super interested in both and you want to major in both then I think you should.
@Ynotgo - I was talking about the U.S. European PhDs are structured quite differently in that you only have to do the research, no coursework, so it would be easier to earn two there and I think it’s more common. Virtually all of the people I have seen who have done two PhDs have done one or both - usually both - in Europe.
But secondly, when I said “no, you cannot,” I didn’t mean that the OP literally couldn’t get two PhDs. Of course, there are some universities that will take you for a second one even in the U.S. I meant that the likelihood of that happening is very small, and that the procedure is mostly useless anyway.
Dual appointments are very common across related areas. Computer science and physics, or computer science and electrical engineering, or English and American studies, are not uncommon. Dual appointments across something like astrophysics and philosophy would be far less common, but not completely unheard of. That said, they’d be primarily for the purposes of research, I’d imagine, not teaching. I can’t imagine, for example, a professor with a 2/2 load teaching like intro philosophy and intro physics one semester and quantum physics and a course on Plato the next semester.