Philosophy is cool again
The discipline is in a good place
On the NBC sitcom “The Good Place,” a young woman dies and gets an undeserved ticket to heaven. Once there, she enlists the help of a philosophy professor to teach her to become — belatedly — a good person. It’s not just a shtick: Aristotle, David Hume and others, including the modern philosopher T.M. Scanlon, get not just name-checks but actual discussion.
Meanwhile, the YouTube channel Wisecrack routinely racks up million-plus views for videos such as “The Philosophy of Deadpool” and “The Philosophy of BoJack Horseman.”
Over at Quartz (qz. com), a popular post asks, “Should Driverless Cars Kill Their Own Passengers to Save a Pedestrian?” a riff on a classic philosophical conundrum.
And contrary to the fears of parents, a bachelor of philosophy has the highest earning power of any humanities degree, according to a survey by PayScale.
What’s going on here? When did philosophy get cool?
“Wait, it wasn’t cool?” says Gwen Bradford, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rice University. “It never stopped being cool for us.”
Bradford, her department chair, Donald Morrison, and Peter Zuk, a graduate student, sat down recently at Rice to discuss the joys of philosophy.
Classic philosophical problems often present themselves in popular culture, Morrison says. Think of “The Matrix,” he says, and the question of “knowing whether every person is a brain in a vat.”
“It has coincided with a renaissance in consciousness study — (David) Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness,” Zuk says. “On philosophy in film, science fiction is a really good medium.”
Think of the mindbending movie “Inception,” which, Zuk says, harks back to concepts from Descartes.
But what makes someone study philosophy?
Morrison says he thought he was interested in politics and the social sciences. “But I discovered that what interested me were the foundational questions.”
Bradford showed up at college wanting to learn everything.
“Philosophy was the most fundamental, and it offered immediate gratification,” she says. “It took a while for me to commit to the major, but I did once I was persuaded it wasn’t completely impractical.”
Zuk took his first philosophy class just to fulfill a course requirement, but it turned into more.
“I really got excited,” he says. “It was the sense of wonder I felt.”
Who hires philosophy majors?
“It’s pretty well-known that consulting firms like the bright kids from good schools,” Morrison says.
Even philosophy Ph.Ds find jobs with companies such as McKinsey, Bradford says. That was her fall-back position if a job in academia didn’t come along.
Philosophy grads succeed because, well, they know how to think.
“They question assumptions,” Morrison says. “You need somebody on the team who is not just going straight down the track but looking to the right and left.”
They are also comfortable with thinking about thorny questions and not persevering in that thinking, Bradford says.
It’s not all about getting a job but about being a better person, too. Zuk says his studies of philosopher Baruch Spinoza have helped make him nicer.
“He invites you to think of people in a more sympathetic way. It’s a good ideal to strive for.”
Elliot D. Cohen would agree. He is one of the founders of the National Philosophical Counseling Association, which offers a kind of alternative to psychological counseling.
“It’s founded on the idea that people can logically deduce their own emotional headaches,” he says.
The association trains both holders of advanced degrees in philosophy and psychologists on how to help clients with the problems of life.
(He stresses that though a psychologist may treat someone with problems in the realm of abnormal psychology, the philosophical counselors who come from a philosophical background deal with only the issues of normal life.)
Writer’s block, relationship issues, work problems: Philosophy is here to help, Cohen says.
Cohen started the association in the early 1990s with a handful of people, and as of five years ago, the association had certified about 75 counselors. Now, he says, there are several hundred. The website lists them by geographic area, and they can do online counseling as well.
By talking to a client, the counselor can figure out what philosophical school would appeal to the client, and what tools it gives for helping with a problem.
“It’s a way to explore assumptions they’ve never looked at,” Cohen says. “By thinking about philosophy and logic, they can discover an agenda hidden even from them.”
Take, for example, a perfectionist. Epictetus would teach that a person should try to control what is within that person’s power to control.
“It is an attempt to use philosophy in the most nitty-gritty way,” Cohen says.
Morrison thinks teaching philosophy even to children makes great sense.
“It makes people smarter sooner,” he says. kyrie.oconnor@chron.com