During my days as a philosophy professor, one of the topics often discussed in department meetings was how to 'market' the philosophy major and minor. The following sort of hackneyed point was often trotted out.
Disciplines such as philosophy and religion help train the mind to think about significant issues or view problems in a different way. Such analytical and critical-thinking skills come in handy when jumping through graduate school hoops like the Law School Admission Test.
The very attempt to justify philosophy, religion, and the classics in this way I found and still find repugnant, and is part of the reason I quit the academic marketplace. Note first that any number of disciplines, when properly taught, help train the mind to think analytically, critically, and in novel ways. So the point made does nothing to distinguish philosophy from history, psychology, or mathematics, and gives a prospective student no reason to major in philosophy rather than in psychology, say. But more importantly, the very notion that one would study philosophy in order to acquire skills that might "come in handy" when taking the LSAT betrays a failure to understand that philosophical understanding is an end in itself, not a means to an end:
Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward . . . . What the worth of such an acquirement is, compared with other objects which we seek, -- wealth, or power or honour or the conveniences and comforts of life, I do not profess here to discuss; but I would maintain, and mean to show, that it is an object, in its own nature so really and undeniably good, as to be the compensation of a great deal of thought in the compassing, and a great deal of trouble in the attaining. (John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University, p. 103.)
The above will be dismissed by most nowadays as the quaint and precious rhetoric of a man who even in the 19th century was a superannuated relic. But if so, the university is dead, and we need to pursue, as some of us are, Morris Berman's "Monastic Option" for the 21st Century. The "new monastic individuals," like the members of Paul Fussell's Class X,
. . . make up the class of people that belong to no class, have no membership in any hierarchy. They form a kind of "unmonied aristocracy," free of bosses, supervision, and what is typically called "work." They work very hard, in fact, but as they love their work and do it for its intrinsic interest, this work is not much different than play. In the context of contemporary American culture, such people are an anomaly, for they have no interest in the world of business success and mass consumerism. (Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture, Norton 2001, pp. 135-136.)
Related: Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy and the Humanities?
CORRECTION: My "superannuated relic" above is surely or at least arguably pleonastic. But I will let it stand to illustrate the phenomenon.
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