Why Philosophy

What it’s good for, and how it could be better still

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I majored in philosophy to seek wisdom and escape vulgar status-seeking. Wait, no—I enjoyed watching my professors school visiting speakers, and I sought their approval.

Arguably, Ángel Pinillos’ motives were better: “I chose philosophy because I had figured out, correctly, that it was the most rigorous training available in a particular cluster of skills.” It’s hard, he writes, to build this competence outside the humanities:

“You cannot get it from engineering. You cannot get it from business school. You cannot get it from a coding bootcamp. You can only get it by spending years reading difficult texts, being forced to defend your interpretations of them in writing, and being told, repeatedly, that you have not yet made your argument as well as you could.”

Philosophy cultivates careful reading, writing, and thinking. The data agree. Researchers working with records from over half a million U.S. undergraduates find that studying philosophy improves performance on tests of verbal and logical reasoning, beyond any selection effects.

These skills are not “luxury goods” but general-purpose cognitive enhancements, useful for achieving your ends whatever your ends happen to be. Pinillos argues that they’re instrumentally valuable not just in knowledge work but beyond:

“You will, at some point, need to advocate for your child at her school. You will need to read a teacher’s email carefully enough to notice what it is and is not saying, and write a response that is firm without being inflammatory…. You will need to talk to a doctor about a parent’s care, or your own, and follow an argument about risk and tradeoff that the doctor is making quickly and imperfectly, and ask the question that exposes the assumption the doctor has not examined. You will need to read a contract. You will need to read a ballot measure.”

I think Pinillos is right about the instrumental value of philosophy, but I’m skeptical that the hyper-abstract philosophy of metaphysics and epistemology courses is ideally suited to help you think more clearly about practical issues like how to reason about your child’s education, your own medical care, legal matters, and voting. People reason better with practice in nearby domains.

Besides that, for many everyday cognitive challenges, reasoning carefully is not enough. You also need empirical knowledge. A philosophy education can encourage the false idea that you just need to think harder rather than leave the comfort of the armchair and seek evidence.

None of this means that philosophy isn’t useful. Rather, it means that a philosophy curriculum would gain instrumental value by including a healthy proportion of courses that engage with science and deal with concrete subjects.

Such courses do exist: in applied ethics, political philosophy, social epistemology, philosophy of science. You can take philosophy courses about education, healthcare, the law, and politics. (As an “experimental philosopher” who collects and analyzes data on human cognition, Pinillos’ own research exemplifies this approach.) One great thing about philosophy, as I tell my students, is that no matter what your interests, there’s a philosophy course for you.

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Legally, we’re not allowed to discuss this topic without drawing a connection to AI.

The skills learned in philosophy, Pinillos writes, “are not less valuable in an AI-saturated environment; they are more valuable, because they are now the bottleneck on getting anything good out of the machine.” Why is that?

“To use AI well, you have to read carefully what it has produced. You have to notice the place where the argument slides. You have to recognize when a confident-sounding paragraph is actually evading the question. You have to write the prompt that gets the model to do what you actually want, which requires knowing what you actually want with a precision most people never develop.”

In the same vein, Pinillos writes that large language models produce “fluent, confident, plausible text” but that it remains highly valuable “to tell good reasoning from bad, true claims from merely well-phrased ones.”

However, this dramatically underrates the quality of LLMs. Frontier models are impressive, and they’re only getting better. People may already be better off simply relying on them, or even recursively outsourcing the critical evaluation that Pinillos says remains a “bottleneck on this entire technological revolution.” If the marginal return on judgment is low, a critic might argue, it’s wiser to spend your time on other activities.

Yet while AI raises the intellectual floor, judgment and critical thinking also raise the intellectual ceiling. Today, you might be able to do about as well as your current peers while outsourcing everything. But this won’t last. Tomorrow, people who can improve on AI’s outputs—extracting more from the same tool—will have the edge.

As it stands, unfortunately, philosophy programs don’t train students to reach for the ceiling. The bar for an A is low enough that you can clear it without leaving the AI-elevated floor. Deskilling, as my friend Rachel McKinney says, might erode the very skills needed to use AI well.

Further reforms are necessary. Students must take in-person exams without access to AI. But this isn’t enough. Ultimately, we need to teach students to engage with AI in ways that strengthen their reading, writing, and thinking skills so they go beyond what the models give them, raising our standards along the way. (To his credit, Pinillos is attempting this with his students.) My bet is that we’ll have to engage AI to help with the evaluation itself, not to replace professors’ judgment but to support and channel it.

Pinillos’ essay was prompted by perennial discourse about the fate of the humanities, as they face an enrollment crisis. Not, as it happens, at Arizona State University, where Pinillos teaches and the number of philosophy majors is growing. My own department at Boston University is similarly unusual, with majors increasing by nearly 50% over the last decade. (Don’t ask when I was hired. Not relevant.) And most of our classes here are hyper-abstract, not particularly attentive to empirical evidence. Perhaps no reforms are necessary for enrollment to continue growing.

But that’s the wrong metric. What we should care about is not whether we can sell our students a philosophy degree but how to increase its worth.