Who Studies Philosophy?
It was by far the best major I could have taken in college. It allowed me to do anything I wanted to do. Philosophy is a great major because it allows me to ask questions, and that is what I do every day.
Angela Davis – Professor & Activist
Learning how to raise questions, even about that which one assumes is unquestionable–this is what I’ve learned from my philosophical studies, from critical theory.
Kumail Nanjiani – Comedian & Actor
Philosophy is problem-solving. There’s a philosophical problem, and then you try to solve it by approaching it from different angles and seeing what way works. That’s what comedy is: you have a topic and you try to just hit it as many different ways you can.
Damon Horowitz – Tech Entrepreneur
You go into the humanities to purse your intellectual passion, and it just so happens as a byproduct that you emerge as a desired commodity for industry.
Rashida Jones – Actress, Director, & Producer
It was there [studying philosophy at Harvard] I learned how to think critically, write better and connect the dots.
Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) – Civil Rights Leader
I took “Introduction to Philosophy”… After that course, I was hooked. I loved the clarity and logic and especially the intellectual discipline–in short, the habits and elegance of thought that was philosophy.
I was going to go for an English major, but after [one] class I though, “Let’s go for philosophy.” Because, of course, there is so much reading in a philosophy course of study, and I do love to read. There is a lot of psychology in philosophy, which I found fascinating. And it has been very helpful in my writing.
Lucas Brothers (Keith & Kenny) – Comedians & Filmmakers
We were college students studying philosophy and I wouldn’t say we were nerds, but we were just like really into academics. We fashioned ourselves as intellectuals. I think we just always had this idea that we wanted to do something that involved logic and words and to be able to use our minds to make arguments.
Beverley McLachlan – Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada
Before I started studying philosophy, my mind was a bit of a mess… I felt that that that discipline and all that constructive criticism that I got from people in the philosophy department really helped me to learn how to better marshal arguments.
Arian Foster – Former NFL Player
Philosophy was the root and foundation of science… [Philosophers] think about these topics that we kind of take for granted, but when you start digging into what they actually are, it unveils these beautiful truths about the universe.
Robert Parris Moses – Civil Rights Leader
In college, [I read Camus’s] writing about people who live a life in struggle… That’s what I think really has made my own life have some kind of sense to it.
I’ve had many opportunities to use my philosophy degree and home in on what one politician or another was saying and to find the flaw in their logic and ask them to explain it.
The question of the good, the true, and the beautiful–those were my questions. I realized I had to do philosophy for the rest of my life. That was the beginning of my passion.
John Lewis – Member of the US House of Representatives
The center of my world was school, and I dove into it with a vengeance. The universe of philosophy and religion was opened to me, and I took to it like a fish to water… Now I saw philosophical and theological underpinnings for what I’d sensed and deeply felt all my life–that there was a contradiction between what was and what ought to be.
Grace Lee Boggs – Social Activist
Philosophy has to with how we value ourselves as human beings and how we look at ourselves and how we relate to reality.
I studied philosophy at a very young age. I was interested in asking questions, discussions about the meaning of life… via the thinking of Socrates. Philosophy questions what is real and not real.
I was drawn to philosophy partly because it’s a verbal subject and partly because it deals with the nature of humanity and existence.
Kazuo Ishiguro – Nobel Prize Winning Novelist
Plato’s Socratic dialogues made an impact on me at a formative stage. [I was interested in] things like Euthyphro and Gorgias, in which Socrates takes apart various self-satisfied types who feel sure they know what ‘a good life’ is, but whose beliefs are based on nonsense and contradiction.