Uses of Philosophy

Philosophy contributes most directly to the intellectual development of students by raising questions which probe the basic principles of existence and by giving students the opportunity to test their minds against the greatest thinkers of human history. In the process, it provides students with a number of valuable transferable skills.

GENERAL PROBLEM-SOLVING
The study of philosophy enhances one's problem-solving capacities in a way no other activity does. It helps one to analyze concepts, definitions, arguments, and problems. It contributes to one's capacity to organize ideas and issues, to deal with questions of value, and to extract what is essential from masses of information. It helps one both to distinguish fine differences between views and to discover common ground between opposing positions. And it helps one to synthesize a variety of views or perspectives into a unified whole.

COMMUNICATION SKILLS
Philosophy also contributes uniquely to the development of expressive and communicative powers. It provides some of the basic tools of self-expression -- for instance, skills in presenting ideas through well-constructed, systematic arguments -- that other fields either do not use, or use less extensively. It helps one to express what is distinctive of one's view; enhances one's ability to explain difficult material; and helps one to eliminate ambiguities and vagueness from one's writing and speech.

PERSUASIVE POWERS
Philosophy provides training in the construction of clear forumaltions, good argumetns, and apt examples. It thereby helps one develop the ability to be convincing. One learns to build and defend one's own views, to appreciate competing positions, and to indicate forcefully why one considers one's own views preferable to alternatives. These capacities can be developed not only through reading and writing in philosophy, but also through the philosophical dialogue, in and outside the classroom, that is so much a part of a thoroughgoing philosophical education.

WRITING SKILLS
Writing is taught intensively in many philosophy courses, and many regularly assigned philosophical texts are unexcelled as literary essays. Philosophy teaches interpretive writing through its examination of challenging texts, comparative writing through emphasis on fairness to alternative positions, argumentative writing through developing students' ability to establish their own views, and descriptive writing through detailed portrayal of concrete examples, the anchors to which generalizations must be tied. Structure and techniques, then, are emphasized in philosophical writing. Originality is also encouraged, and students are generally urged to use their imagination and develop their own ideas.

UNDERSTANDING OTHER DISCIPLINES
Philosophy is indispensable for this. Many important questions about a discipline, such as the nature of its concepts and its relation to other disciplines, do not belong to that discipline, are not usually pursued in it, and are philosophical in nature. Philosophy of science, for instance, is needed to supplement the understanding of the natural and social sciences which one derives from scientific work itself. Philosophy of literature and philosophy of history are of similar value in understanding the humanities, and philosophy of art is important in understanding the arts. Philosophy is, moreover, essential in assessing the various standards of evidence used by other disciplines. Since all fields of knowledge employ reasoning and must set standards of evidence, logic and epistemology have a general bearing on all these fields.

DEVELOPMENT OF SOUND METHODS OF RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
Still another value of philosophy in education is its contribution to one's capacity to frame hypotheses, do research, and put problems into manageable form. Philospohical thinking strongly emphasizes clear formulation of ideas and problems, selection of relevant data, and objective methods for assessing ideas and proposals. It also emphasizes development of a sense of the new directions suggested by the hypotheses and questions one encounters in doing research. Philosophers regularly build on both the success and failures of their predecessors. A person with philosophical training can readily learn to do the same in any field.