The Daily Campus

Issue date: 1/31/06 Section: Commentary

Brad Zambrello, Weekly Columist

Last semester, two Daily Campus comic strips ("Ha Ha … Wait What?" and "Freshman 15") took unappreciated jabs at my major, philosophy. The former implied that being a philosophy major meant that one was both out of touch with reality and a habitual marijuana smoker, while the latter suggested that philosophy is an unacceptable educational path. Early this semester the comics' assault on philosophy resumed, as Larissa Treyster's aforementioned "Freshman 15" proclaimed that the difference between a philosophy major and the frivolous Segway Human Transporter is that a Segway is useful. Although I realize that these comics' remarks were only meant to be jokes - and that if anyone should be concerned with being taken seriously it should be a comic strip artist in a college paper - I believe that, as a philosophy major with a weekly space in The Daily Campus, I have an obligation to my peers and to the university community to clear up some misconceptions about philosophy (and philosophy majors) that have been propagated by this very newspaper.

Contrary to popular belief, philosophy isn't the art of hitting a bong, sitting on a bench by Mirror Lake and contemplating the trivialities of life. Rather, philosophy is a challenging discipline focused on resolving logical, metaphysical, epistemological and ethical questions. It is a field centered on intelligent debate, an avenue for attaining greater understanding and a means of learning to think more objectively, critically, precisely and analytically. In philosophy classes, one learns not mere facts with limited application, but new skills that last a lifetime - invaluable skills with universal application.

These skills reveal themselves in many ways, with the most obvious and quantifiable being standardized test performance. According to a recent study of college students' scores on major graduate school admissions tests, philosophy majors' performance on said tests well exceeds their peers' in other majors. On the LSAT, for example, philosophy majors averaged higher scores than all natural and social science majors (save economics and mathematics), had higher scores than all applied majors and scored 10 percent higher than political science majors. Further, on the GMAT, philosophy majors had an average score that was 15 percent higher than all business majors and average scores greater than all undergraduate majors except mathematics. Additionally, philosophy majors averaged the highest score on the verbal portion of the GRE, outperforming even English majors, and scored significantly higher than all humanities majors on the quantitative portion. In short, the test results show that the skills learned in philosophy classes have application far beyond analyses of Hume, Nietzsche, Sartre and Plato.

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