As a Philosophy major, I enjoyed reading Harry Brighouse of the purpose of philosophy departments at American Universities. Sugary excerpt:
Ideally we’d be attempting to provide every single student with the experience and resources which will be most valuable. In practice, in large classes and deciding under uncertainty, we can’t do this; we design our syllabuses and instruction with the aim of providing quite specific things to particular groups of students. For myself, in the large lecture Contemporary Moral Issues course which is the course I teach most often, and which I have taught to many many more students than all my other courses put together, I have two main aims – one is to get the students thinking more carefully and in a richer way about moral issues that will affect their lives or about which they will be called to deliberate as citizens, by providing them with resources that our discipline has developed; and to give some of the students a realistic insight into what moral philosophy is and why it might be interesting to them. Both are, I hope, good for the majors, and I do try to ensure that students who either will major in, or are majoring in, Philosophy, will get a realistic sense of what one small corner of the discipline is like from my class—but that’s a secondary, not a primary, goal.
I have probably gotten more from being a philosophy major than I did from any from other degrees. Most of the classes that I took to earn were classes that I wanted to take; they were small and full of students who, for the most part, wanted to be there and were thus more eager to discuss complicate subjects exhaustively. There were so few philosophy majors during my undergraduate years that we knew that the ones who stuck it out were dedicated, knew a lot about almost anything, could demonstrate it and wrote very well.
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