I’m becoming very intrigued with the philosophy major, primarily in the vein of logic and math. Which undergrad programs are known to excel in these concentrations?
I’m generally interested in medium to very large universities in an urban or suburban area.
3.94 UW/4.30W GPA
32 ACT (34 superscored)
11 AP’s by end of high school
For more specific stats, you can view here:
Anyone?
I think you would be better off looking for a good, solid all-around philosophy major (among other things). Most philosophy programs embrace logic as a central tenet or part of philosophy. There are many colleges with good philosophy majors.
I’ve only took Ethics (which is a higher level philosophy course at some schools), and I’ve took a bunch of math courses. (calc 3, lin alg, diff eq, prob and stats 1, combinatorics, discrete math, etc)
The courses I found to apply to Philosophy were primarily of Discrete Mathematics, such as logic, proofs, set theory, etc. Then there are others such as Mathematical Logic, and Category Theory, that apply directly, but that is about it.
The “Symbolic Logic” class at my school is basically a dumbed down version of the Discrete Mathematics class I took.
I’m neither a Philosophy Major or Minor, but I learn it on the side when I have free time. Philosophy is kinda easy, I mean, you don’t need to take Philosophy classes to learn it, but you WILL need to take math classes to understand “Philosophy of Math”, “Analytic Philosophy”, etc, “Philosophy of X”, you will need to know a lot about X than you will Philosophy. Philosophy is really something you pick up yourself.
Think about it. All famous mathematicians/scientists through history were also Philosophers on the side without any formal training in Philosophy. Because Philosophy can be something you pickup yourself, you don’t necessarily need to go to school for it.
You are better off choosing a different major IMHO. I mean I probably know just about as much as a BA Philosophy as a Chemistry/Math major, with only taking Ethics and reading philosophy on the side. Do yourself a favor, choose a different major, and read philosophy on the side when you have time.
A mathematician/Scientist is basically already a Philosopher.
@deltax2 I appreciate your response. Based on my thorough research, philosophy majors have the highest success rates among those students taking the MCAT, LSAT, GMAT, and/or GRE. Considering that I’m unsure which path I’d like to persue, Philosophy seems like the right major for me. I’m also planning on double majoring in Statistics or Mathematics.
@juillet Any suggestions? All I can find is information on graduate programs.
My suggestion is that you don’t try so hard to rank the programs. Most good solid universities have good solid philosophy programs, so focus on trying to find a good solid university that appeals to you in a variety of ways.
Philosophical Gourmet has a good comment on undergrad philosophy education [url=http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/undergrad.asp]here[/url], which includes this statement:
Many faculty at major departments did not do their undergraduate work at institutions with top-ranked PhD programs. …There are eminent philosophers—who have held or now hold tenured posts at top ten departments—who did their undergraduate work at the University of New Mexico, Queens College (New York), and the University of Pittsburgh. It is possible to get good philosophical training in many undergraduate settings.
I hope that you are basing your major choice on more than just this, because it’s kind of a bizarre way to select one. First of all, it’s not actually true; second, in the cases in which it is close to true it also falls prey to the ecological fallacy - just because sometimes philosophy has higher average scores doesn’t mean that any individual student who majors in philosophy will achieve higher scores on standardized tests than if that same student majored in something else.
The four test groups that collect information on this have some breakdowns by major, and most of them indicate that philosophy majors do pretty well but do not “have the highest success rates.” On the MCAT, LSAT, GMAT, and quantitative portions of the GRE, physical science, mathematics/statistics, and engineering majors outscore philosophy majors, and economics, international relations, government, and political science majors often equal them. The LSAT has the most robust information on this, and there are and there are 11 major groups (including linguistics, American studies, and classics) that outscore philosophy and five groups (including French and biology) that score about the same.
Second, there’s no evidence that there’s a causal path here. It’s entirely possible that there is some third variable: not that majoring in philosophy somehow prepares you well for test-taking, but rather that the kind of students that are drawn to philosophy (or physics, math, and engineering) also tend to do well on standardized tests. It could also be both - a cycle, if you will. Students who already test well are drawn to these highly logical, ordered fields, and they then learn the content that helps them perform even better.
But that’s not to say that excellent biology, chemistry, psychology, or education majors can’t do well on these tests and go off to graduate school. They do - all the time. That’s because there’s probably as much variation within these majors as there is between them.
How would you know, if you aren’t a philosophy major? I’m betting you are wrong about this. I’m not being deliberately snarky, but it’s difficult to gauge your comparative level of knowledge of a subject in this way if you don’t have the experience, unless someone has independently evaluated you as such.
Well, first of all this isn’t true. Not all of the famous mathematicians and scientists throughout history were philosophers. Many people who are now recognized as mathematicians were philosophers first, before the modern era of science. But that’s because the scientific method as we know it wasn’t really developed in full until the modern era, and philosophy and math/science were far less distinct fields. Philosophy is the mother of science and math. But they’re not the same field, and they’re a lot more distinct today than they were before.
Secondly, one can also pick up mathematics on their own, or physics. You don’t need to go to school to learn those things either; pick up a textbook and with some time and close reading you can probably teach yourself the rudimentary fundamentals. (In fact, personally I find it far easier to teach myself concrete subjects like math and physics than more abstract ones like philosophy or anthropology, which are harder to grasp correctly at higher levels.) That doesn’t mean you should learn it that way. The disciplines are often based upon conversations between scholars; by taking classes from experts, you learn to participate in that grand conversation and how to think like a philosopher (or mathematician, or physicist).
I think this comes from this idea that the humanities are simple fields that you can simply pick up a book and read about. They are not. They are just as complex and deep as any science or mathematical field, but the problem is a lot of elementary scholars of the fields in question don’t realize that precisely because they haven’t taken enough coursework or read deeply enough to recognize the depth and complexity therein.
@juillet Thanks for your reply!
I guess I didn’t include all the information in my response to @deltax2, which was more in tune with replying to the “philosophy is not a useful major” take.
I enjoy philosophy immensely and have been intrigued with it my entire high school career. This is why I have decided to pursue a major in Philosophy. I wouldn’t be interested in majoring in something I did not like.
Case in point, my idea was to major (or double major) in either Neuroscience or Philosophy. I was able to obtain a research intern position this summer in a Neuroscience lab. Through that, I learned that I absolutely do not want to major in Neuroscience. Thus, I can focus on Philosophy which I love.
Off the top of my head, I think you’d be interested in Carnegie Mellon University. Their [philosophy department](Department of Philosophy - Department of Philosophy - Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences - Carnegie Mellon University) has an undergraduate major in logic and computation, an undergraduate summer school in logic and formal epistemology, and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in pure and applied logic.
With an interest in logic, the double major in math (along with a few statistics classes) is a good idea. You may also enjoy computer science (especially theory).