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I think you're missing something a little key here. Much of philosophical study deals with exactly how we think, and the nature of the mind and reality. So it's not so much "teaching you how to think" but teaching you "what is thinking".
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There's a difference. Epistemology, which is a discipline of philosophy, is the study of analyzing knowledge itself--including how we acquire it. This is the same as what is thinking because the thoughts you have are a result of the knowledge you have. Exactly how we think, as in the specific biological processes, is cognitive and neurological science.</p>
<p>Logic is incredibly helpful for giving us a framework and process in which we can learn more efficient and studied methods of how to think, but it's arguable as to whether or not people need it. I'd say logic would be helpful for most people, but most of the more capable people have already developed their own internal logic that they are unaware of, or else they would not be capable people.
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To understand philosophy, is to understand's one's existence.
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This is incorrect. Existence--and identity--are disciplines within philosophy that would generally be filed under metaphysics.</p>
<p>Philosophy, as we know it as an academic program at the undergraduate level, is largely split into two parts: an introduction to logic and epistemology, which essentially form the foundation of your ability to interpret most philosophical texts, and an introduction to the thinkers and the movements. There is nothing beyond this, there should be nothing beyond this, undergraduates should not be presenting theories when they do not fully understand the field. It's all an analysis of what has come before, because the foundation of knowledge and logic has been developed and there is no point in trying to force every 22 year old philosophy major into reinventing the wheel.</p>
<p>Half of this thread has been trolling, a quarter has been stupidity and the last quarter has been written in some kind of moon language that I can't decipher, so I feel like I need to explain what the hell the reality is for the three people who are reading this thread and who are not escaped mental patients.</p>
<p>Historically, mathematics was a branch of philosophy in the same way that existentialism was. Philosophy was responsible for the development of logic (although that could be argued in reverse--that the logic and understanding derived from logic became its own discipline and came to take on the title of philosophy), mathematics is logic, and, with the exception of basic pattern recognition that was responsible for counting, philosophy predates mathematics. Philosophers were mathematicians, and they developed the vast majority of our knowledge on the topic of mathematics. Mathematicians themselves did not exist--they were philosophers, philosophers who happened to focus on the topics we now consider within the field of mathematics (or physics, or, to a certain extent, computer science). Philosophy evolved, like it should, and mathematics became a well-defined field just like philosophy initially did--it essentially became the king of quantitative sciences, which is what it should be, because the rigor of mathematics is something other sciences can only dream to achieve.</p>
<p>The rigor of the arguments in mathematics only first came from Euclid, who existed fairly far along our little historical time-line, and his introduction of mathematical deductive reasoning, which is different from the reasoning in philosophy because the questions philosophy raises often cannot be proved empirically and what we know now as philosophical theorems must be presented differently as a result, was a part of the development of logical reasoning--development that occurred within the field of philosophy, which is what mathematics once was. In the same way criminology would have never existed without sociology, mathematics would have never existed in the way it does today without the developments that occurred within philosophy.</p>
<p>To bring us up to date, philosophy is essentially logic, as learned through reading the works of prior philosophers, that extends into the theories that resulted from the application of logical reasoning. From a pragmatic stand-point it's an incredibly useful major if you intend to enter law, because most of the foundations of law come from ethics, and ethics is a part of philosophy. Other than that, I'm not sure how useful it is. It's useful if you want to try and understand the "greater" things in a context other than one that is mathematical, I suppose in the same way history is useful if you want to learn... about history. It's probably useful because it teaches you to digest an incredible amount of sometimes painfully dull information which can directly correlate to a life in business and finance, but having philosophy as your primary major can make the job search a pain in the ass.</p>