Last month, a philosophy major from the University of Dallas carried his diploma straight from academia to a job in investment banking. He got this job not despite his degree, but because of it. A firm that manages trillions of dollars in assets contacted UD's career office seeking a liberal arts major.
During the Republican presidential debates in 2015, Marco Rubio told America that "we need more welders and less philosophers." But if that's so, why would a major investment bank view a degree in the liberal arts, and in philosophy in particular, as an asset rather than a liability?
One explanation comes from Wall Street investor Bill Miller, who in January gave $75 million to the philosophy department at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University. "Philosophy," Miller said, "involves critical thinking and reasoning about highly complex issues. At its best it is rigorous and analytical. These skills are exactly what are required to think through and understand capital markets and the analysis of businesses. However good one is at this, philosophical training will make you better."
In a similar vein, the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges and Universities recently issued a joint statement observing that "liberal arts majors make great tech-sector workers precisely because they are trained to think critically and creatively, and to adapt to unforeseen circumstances."
It is true that philosophy and the liberal arts give graduates a competitive advantage in the workplace by fostering critical thinking. But we believe that these disciplines cultivate an even more powerful skill: perceptive thinking.
In April, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told an audience at Southern Methodist University that he does not let his executives use PowerPoint, or even bullet points. Instead, they must craft a six-page narrative memo for each meeting. The first half-hour of the meeting involves silent reading of the text, followed by an engaging discussion. What skill makes for an outstanding narrative presentation at an Amazon executive meeting?
Perceptive thinking is the ability not only to take apart, but to see together, to grasp the whole, to register the first premises at work in an argument. Philosophy is, most profoundly, an ability to think perceptively. It is the art of distinguishing one thing from another, of getting inside what something is, of assessing the web of relations that constitute a thing.
In an interview in February, Mark Cuban said: "I personally think there's going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming majors and maybe even engineering, because when the data is all being spit out for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data."
Taking a view of the data — an insightful view, a view that moves a conversation forward — is perceptive thinking.
Philosophy values and teaches perceptive thinking, above all in contexts where careful discussion, spoken or written, is our best way of getting a better handle on the matter at hand. Discussion is the proper context of perceptive thinking.
The ability to talk meaningfully about Plato's articulation of justice in The Republic, or Kant's distinction between empirical and pure intuitions, enables the philosophy major to make sense of just about anything. Navigating Shakespeare or Euclid produces similar results.
Focusing on big questions — questions about the whole of reality, and about our own place within it — turns out to have practical benefits. It delivers to the workforce graduates who can think not just critically, but also perceptively. It even has something in common with welding, for it is a mode of thinking that unites one thing to another, forging the whole together.
Chad Engelland and Chris Mirus are associate professors of philosophy at the University of Dallas.
Email:
cengelland@udallas.edu and mirus@udallas.edu
