<p>Which is easier?</p>
<p>English = more reading. Philosophy = more thinking.</p>
<p>generally in philosophy classes, you get pretty light workloads, but they deal with VERY difficult topics. I heard in english classes they just assign a ton of reading. It all depends on what your good at. I don’t read particularly fast, and my mind is wired to think philosophically, so it’s easier for me. But if i could read fast, and my mind wasn’t wired to think philosophically, then english would be much easier for me.</p>
<p>these ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ questions are all subjective. It’s not as if math majors and english majors struggle equally in mathematics, and the MM simply have more determination. In reality the math majors don’t find mathematics to be hard, and take that in combination with the fact that they’re also really interested in it (and good at it) in account of why they major in it.</p>
<p>Hi beyphy. Thanks for taking the time to respond to my post. I really appreciate your answer. So basically the work load for philosophy is less, but it requires more effort to receive an A?</p>
<p>I haven’t taken english classes at UCLA, so i don’t know what they require. However, to get an A in phil. courses, you generally have to attend sections, go to your TAs office hours, etc. Sometimes the prompts aren’t straight forward and you can completely miss the issue when you write a paper. Some people think philosophy is all BS. These are the people who generally get Cs on their papers. I’ve had 4 phil classes here, of which i’ve recieved a B, a B+, and two As. I got my first two As last quarter, but it wasn’t easy and required a ton of work on my part, even though i didn’t read that much.</p>
<p>in my first quarter at UCLA, i took two classes. One of which was a class on bertrand russel and denotation. We read two papers, each of which was maybe 10 pages for the whole quarter. I’ll leave it to you at this how difficult the two papers were: our professor wrote a 100 page paper discussing the first TWO PARAGRAPHS of 1 of the papers. so as short as the reading assignment was, it dealt with very difficult topics which required large amounts of thinking and collaboration with TAs on office hours, etc. i’m actually still thinking about the issues that we dealt with in that class and am still fascinated by the problems that bertrand russel discovered.</p>
<p>tl;dr you can BS philosophy, but you won’t get good grades, which completely defeats the point of majoring in it. If people were studying it because they were interested in it, the effort they’d be putting in wouldn’t feel like work because they’d be genuinely interested in the material; additionally, their high grades would be good if they want to go to grad school, and would help to get letters of rec. from professors; if someone on the other hand is taking phil. because they’re pre-law, then again, it makes no sense to try to BS it because to get into any decent law school, you’ll need a really high GPA in addition to a high LSAT score.</p>
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<p>Was that 127B? What’s the difference between the classes in the 127 series?</p>
<p>Yes it was 127B. The 127 series deals with various aspects of philosophy of language. Certain philosophy courses don’t have set criteria such as metaethics (which when i took it with the professor i took it with dealt with moral disagreement; another more famous professor taught it on a completely different topic)</p>
<p>there are, at least, for classes i know of that are phil. of lang. in the department, of which one of them is taught solely by David Kaplan (one of the most famous philosophers in the department and the world)</p>
<p>Kaplan’s curriculum is as follows: 127A is on Frege; 127B is on Russel; 127C is on Kripke; 172 is on Quine</p>
<p>127C is the one that’s taught purely by kaplan i think (he said at least that he is the one who got them to add it) although he joked that they make such little progress with the book every quarter, Naming and Necessity, that the course should really be labeled 127C-1, 127C-2, etc.</p>
<p>I know last quarter Hsu taught 172, but he didn’t do it on Quine, wittgenstein, or any one philosopher but on various aspects of phil. of language IIRC.</p>
<p>right now i’m taking 127A with Martin, and that deals with vagueness within language (which is probably completely unrelated to the course kaplan teaches on frege) Although i would love to take kaplan’s class on frege, i don’t regret taking this class because i’ve been interested in vagueness and vague predicates for years(i don’t know if you’re into logic, but right now we’re analyzing the law of excluded middle and look at things whether it’s something which holds true for reality, or if it’s merely some statement about language which assumes that language is not vague i.e. has set boundries on it’s meaning)</p>
<p>it’s a fascinating subject and i’ve been interested in it for years, so i’m really glad to take it.</p>
<p>if you have any more phil. questions to ask, you’re more than free to send me a PM.</p>
<p>Ah, thanks for the explanation. I took 31 and 137 last year and considered minoring in Philosophy, but I realized I was probably only really interested in the logic offerings. Unfortunately none of those classes have fit into my schedule this year.</p>
<p>My mom was actually a grad student in the Philosophy department a while back, so I had heard of David Kaplan before, and I had him for 31 (which I thought was a waste of his talent given the level of the material). Her area wasn’t logic though, so she didn’t know much about those particular courses.</p>
<p>From someone who has taken multiple classes in both English and Philosophy departments at UCLA, I will say that philosophy tends to be easier in the sense that you could skip readings, some classes, and still receive a good grade. Most philosophy classes don’t require participation, nor a grade for participation. The only philosophy classes I have experienced that do this are seminars, and these seminars are usually continental in subject and often taught by visiting instructors or professors in other departments. With English(which is a literature major), most all classes have a section of grading for participation, even the LARGE lecture classes. Skipping classes can hurt you as you usually end up covering an entire book/novel a week per class. The grades you receive in philosophy tend to be based on how well you argue whatever point you make based on the readings/understandings of the readings. The prompts for most essays are pretty straight forward, flexible, and fairly easy to get a decent grade. The grades you receive in English tend to be based on how well you can regurgitate points discuss in class while adding your critical and analytical interpretation of details that are in line with the subject or theme of the class(eg race/gender/time/authour/etc). Generally speaking the papers you have to write for English tend to be slightly longer than those for philosophy courses, but because with philosophy you are not discussing multiple subject/themes/details, writing a philosophy paper is less challenging, but can be challenging if you are required to write more than 6 pages.
With English, you read more, 5-10x more than in a philosophy class. Yes philosophy may be more dense(per page) but unless you are trying to get an A, attending class, paying attention to lecture, and reading it carefully(and rereading it before a test/exam, or for a paper) will do. Some works of literature can be dense without you knowing it. A good teacher points this out. With English(literature) so much of what you think you understand(or is deep) is surface level reading. Attending class will become necessary to fully understand a work of literature as there is often other hidden meanings that a surface level reading will not provide. In philosophy there is no hidden meaning, or secret conversation between reader and writer. With philosophy, the writer is making his or her argument for you to understand. Literature is different, and requires a lot more work than just reading.</p>
<p>With all that said, maybe it’s just my taste, but philosophy is easier only to the extent that you can tolerate semantics, logic, dull professors, and students who feel the need to interrupt class with a question that would be best suited for discussion/office hours. I have received higher grades in philosophy classes than in literature, but if you actually care about a well rounded education, philosophy can be somewhat limiting. Philosophy is amazing at preparing you/teaching you the skills of how to be critical and write clearly, but lacks the “humanistic” component to it.</p>
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<p>that’s not always true. As i argued earlier with bertrand russel’s on denoting, there was a crapton he should have put in that paper, but didn’t. And hence, he wrote a 10 page paper which probably should have been a 100 page paper. Also, certain people’s points are so complex, they’re very difficult to understand even though it’s seemingly straightforward imo (i kind of struggled reading john rawl’s overlapping consensus) </p>
<p>additionally, if you’ve ever read kant, aristotle, heidegger, wittgenstein, or so on, you know that some philosophy is anything BUT straightforward, and people still argue on what the hell these people meant in their papers. ideally, philosophy should be straightforward (that’s it’s goal) but in practice, you find that a lot of it isn’t. </p>
<p>hell, i’m reading a paper right now in vagueness that’s making an appeal to modal logic and set theory. You know a paper is difficult when the teacher warns you ‘don’t worry if you don’t understand it’ xD</p>
<p>i also think a lot of the phil. classes in the department are heavily inflated (although i can’t say this hasn’t worked in my favor lol) but there’s probably several people here recieving grades they shouldn’t be.</p>
<p>Thanks for everyone’s response!</p>
<p>I’m actually trying to get into medical school, so GPA is a huge factor for me. I really like English and philosophy, and it won’t matter to me which I major in. I’m just worried about getting the better GPA. Any thoughts to this?</p>