Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department?
This is why philosophy is important:<p>Education has two related yet distinct purposes. The first is to endow us with specific domain knowledge and reasoning. The second is to endow us with general reasoning and critical thinking skills.<p>The value of natural language philosophy - not formal logic and other mathematically adjacent subfields - is that it teaches us to be as rigorous as possible when reasoning in natural language.<p>Given that so much of our lives and the events of history and society unfold in natural language and that it is in natural language that we do much of our critical thinking and reasoning, it&#x27;s important that we hold ourselves to as high a standard as is reasonably possible when talking (either to ourselves or others) as when performing mathematical calculations.<p>It&#x27;s often said that one of the benefits of studying math is that it improves critical thinking skills. I believe this to be true, but I also believe that if our primary concern is improving our day to day critical thinking skills, then we would be better served studying natural language philosphy than mathematics, because on a day to day basis we tend to think and reason and debate and engage with one another in natural language.