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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

How many miles does your Philosophy Minor have on it? I've heard they're not very reliable

It varies by brand. Plato pretty much runs forever. Kant, even property maintained, will leave you scratching your head. People keep Aristotle running, but it’s not pretty. For what you spend Hume is a bargain—you can even take it off road in the forest...assuming there are unfallen trees. For the DIYer, Wittgenstein will keep you busy but Russell is known to have a computational design flaw. I recommend a late model Singer if you can afford it because they’re still making parts.

this was the best thoughtful chuckle I got in a while

In fairness it does break down constantly, but I can usually repair it on my own. I should mention that it handles well in difficult terrain, and it appreciates in value over time.

Philosophy will get through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no philosophy.

" Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." — Rumi

> Philosophy will get through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no philosophy.

Good quote!

I always feel philosophy is the abode for people who couldn't get sucked in by religion.

Isn't philosophy kind of like CS minus the computers? I remember my sister talking about how much she hated her philosophy class and what she described was essentially discrete math-lite.

This is interesting. Can you expand it a bit, please?

Since they said "philosophy class," singular, I suspect they're referring to the unit on logic: modus ponens, modus tollens, valid vs sound arguments, etc.

Philosophy major here (I jokingly tout myself as a trained philosopher). Philosophy is a big field with different schools of thought. In the US/UK, the primary school is known as "analytic (philosophy)" which is focused on tight arguments, precise language, and clarity of thought (see Russell, Wittgenstein, Lewis, Godel). This is contrasted by European -- in particular, French -- "continental (philosophy)" which waxes more poetic (see Nietzsche, Sartre, Lacan, Derrida).

The former deals quite a bit with logic (which was my area of focus in undergrad). Classes I took ranged from "baby logic" (predicate logic, first-order-logic), to second-order logic, to mathematical logic (mostly Peano arithmetic), to metalogic (learning how to prove things like Godel's incompleteness), to lambda calculus, to game theory. This was on top of ethics classes, history of philosophy, and other miscellaneous classes (took a very fun seminar by a Yale visiting professor -- I forget his name -- on the philosophy of food). Most of the graduate seminars I took were on philsophy of language and model theory.

Just about every philosophy class had a pretty strong "logic" undercurrent.

Just to clarify, and defend the old continent a bit: while it certainly originated German Idealism and its descendants all the way to post-structuralism and (gasp) “critical theory”, today of course you can find proponents of both schools (the continental/hermeneutic/postmodern and the analytic) on all continents.

And regarding the gp: most philosophy programs will have classes in informal and some even in formal logic, to Goedel’s incompleteness theorems and way beyond.

Also, the less logical bit of analytic philosophy is all about breaking down and understanding other people's arguments. It's a very similar process to teasing out business requirements from stakeholders!

From what I remember, her class involved a lot of logical proofs using propositional logic, but in the form of word problems, not logical statements. I.e., if Bob is larger than Alice, then... instead of P -> Q. They also discussed probabilities, but I'm not sure to what degree.

Those two topics are discussed in entry level CS courses as well. So I assumed that the fields might be semi-related if they require the same mathematical foundations.

This was my undergraduate degree, many years ago:

https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/philosophy/undergraduate/logic-...

Possibly it is because philosophy is a lot like being bothered by a bug in your code, and you stress and strain to resolve it which provides growth in wisdom after the objective is completed.

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