In 2015 Marco Rubio made an interesting statement regarding the need for more welders and fewer philosophers. Setting aside his confusion between count nouns and mass nouns, as a philosopher living in Florida during 2015, I found this to be a peculiar statement. His support for his claim that welders make more money than philosophers was false, given that those who majored in philosophy have an average mid-career pay of $85,000 per year (don’t worry, I don’t make this much). Furthermore the top ten percent of philosophy professors make more than $100,000, yet the top ten percent of welders earn around $63,000 per year.
But we really shouldn’t value jobs on the basis of their earnings. What should we value, then? That question I leave as an exercise for the reader–it may be dependent upon what we define as ‘happiness’, ‘success’, and ‘meaning’. If you want to talk about these topics, please stop by my office (Building 3 Room 234). I have coffee!
Thankfully, Rubio recognized that both philosophers and welders contribute to society and the world. Interestingly, it was the Stoics who helped change his mind. Go figure!
People who have studied philosophy have shaped every industry we value. Please, if you click on any link, please click on that one. You’ll see examples of people who have studied philosophy who have gone onto careers in government and politics, activism, academia, business (really), religion, writing, news and journalism, arts and entertainment, and (even) sports. Take note, they’re not just dead white guys.
Often times, my time is spent sharing what we can learn from philosophers–how their tools of analysis can help us discover our assumptions and how they have provided us frameworks for making sense of democracy, mathematics, economics, art, business, aviation, medicine, physics, biology, and chemistry. Really! All of these fields originated with philosophers asking questions about the nature of the world, health, us, society, and the environment. There is a reason why a ‘Ph.D.’ is a doctor of philosophy…In particular, a Ph.D. requires the candidate having made a novel contribution to his or her field. (I ‘m happy to discuss what was involved in earning a Ph.D. in Philosophy.)
But philosophy has a bad PR problem. We’re annoying, abstract, idealistic…just look to history and you can see that many philosophers were either asked to kill themselves, go into exile, or enslaved. Granted—many philosophers have ended up killing themselves, due to the belief that autonomous humans have the right to choose when and how to die.
It’s little wonder as to why contemporary culture has not been receptive to what philosophers had to offer.
One of my favorite examples of philosophy being on the defense (and the Liberal Arts more generally) is found in Seneca’s 88th Letter to his nephew Lucilius, in which he writes:
You have been wishing to know my views with regard to liberal studies.[1] My answer is this: I respect no study, and deem no study good, which results in money-making. Such studies are profit-bringing occupations, useful only in so far as they give the mind a preparation and do not engage it permanently. One should linger upon them only so long as the mind can occupy itself with nothing greater; they are our apprenticeship, not our real work. 2. Hence you see why “liberal studies” are so called; it is because they are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman. But there is only one really liberal study, – that which gives a man his liberty. It is the study of wisdom, and that is lofty, brave, and great-souled. All other studies are puny and puerile. You surely do not believe that there is good in any of the subjects whose teachers are, as you see, men of the most ignoble and base stamp? We ought not to be learning such things; we should have done with learning them.
Certain persons have made up their minds that the point at issue with regard to the liberal studies is whether they make men good; but they do not even profess or aim at a knowledge of this particular subject. 3. The scholar busies himself with investigations into language, and if it be his desire to go farther afield, he works on history, or, if he would extend his range to the farthest limits, on poetry. But which of these paves the way to virtue? Pronouncing syllables, investigating words, memorizing plays, or making rules for the scansion of poetry, what is there in all this that rids one of fear, roots out desire, or bridles the passions? 4. The question is: do such men teach virtue, or not? If they do not teach it, then neither do they transmit it. If they do teach it, they are philosophers. Would you like to know how it happens that they have not taken the chair for the purpose of teaching virtue? See how unlike their subjects are; and yet their subjects would resemble each other if they taught the same thing.
Seneca was the consultant to Nero, a playwright, and an investment banker (in fact, he was one of the wealthiest Romans). This was written around 64-65 CE! Not much has changed in terms of our need as philosophers and proponents of the liberal arts (i.e., humanities).
The point is that we have never been very good at living (I’d say we’ve gotten worse at living) and philosophy provides us with tools for assessing the lives that we live so that we have some better chance of getting on the right track.
Even though Rubio changed his mind about the benefit of having philosophers among the public citizenry, it is not anytime soon that the general public will understand what benefits and joys philosophy can provide.
So everything above has been about what philosophy may have to offer. But I deeply respect and appreciate anyone capable of working with metal. I’ve worked in areas of the country where mining and fracking were the main sources of occupation–I have a deep appreciation for their work ethic and dedication, but am I envious of those lives…I’m sorry to report, but no. The depression, sickness, and addiction I observed in these environments indicates that there is more to life than stripping the earth of resources to which we’re addicted.
Yet, I believe that we can still learn from welders…in particular we can learn from welders how they learn. In particular, vocational training incorporates a method of learning understood in pedagogical circles as experiential learning. There’s a society, association, and institute dedicated to this practice.
In general, experiential learning is thought as “learning by doing.” But it’s more than that. Unsurprisingly, philosophers have made contributions to education as well–and experiential learning is no exception. First, Aristotle was very concerned with how we cultivate intellectual virtues (around 350 BCE). Second, Dewey (around was responsible for most of our modern developments of the educational system, including experiential learning in his book Experience and Education (1938). These approaches have helped inform Kolb’s model of experiential learning, which includes the following steps:
- Concrete experience (including doing an activity or having an experience)
- Reflective Observation (reviewing / reflecting on the experience)
- Abstract Conceptualization (Concluding / Learning from the experience)
- Active Experimentation (Planning / trying out what you learned)
- Repeat
So, in the case of welding, you have a concrete experience of working with oxy-aceylene equipment, using a torch tip in a back and forth patter to make a small molten area on each side of a joint (thank you Google). You see which patterns of moving the torch generate the desired result to then realize that a “U” shape is more effective than an “O” shape or “T” shape. You then try that knowledge out in different contexts to develop a general understanding of how to move a torch so that you can then refine your skill in more advanced sequences.
This is something I’ve used in philosophy courses. Most notably, in my logic course I teach students how to assess deductive arguments for validity. First, they’re introduced to the tools of logic, including propositions, premises, conclusions, unary and binary operators, T-tables, in addition to a general syntax for generating well-formed formulas and a semantics to determine truth-values of complex statements. Second, they’re tasked with translating ordinary language statements (i.e., English) into the formal language of PL (propositional logic). They learn which operators can adequately capture the meaning of words such as ‘both’, ‘and’, ‘not’, ‘when’, ‘if’, ‘either’, and so on. They also recognize the meanings of which words are not easily captured by the formal language (e.g., ‘bald’).
Logic is a nice example in which philosophy students are able to have the concrete example of seeing how the formal language relates to the ordinary language. They can reflect on the experience of translating ordinary language statements into the formal language. They can then recognize patterns to determine how to properly apply operators in future instances, which allows them to make accurate assessments about validity in more complex cases.
But logic is an easy example since it is more obviously a skill-based subject akin to mathematics (in fact, thinkers such as Russell, Whitehead, Frege, Marcus, and Winters argue that logic is the foundation of mathematics). What about more content-based areas in philosophy?
Interestingly, at least I think interestingly, I’m in the process of editing a special issue of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers’ journal Studies in Pedagogy that is focused on experiential learning and education. (Can’t believe I’ve been working on this for over a year now–it’s almost done!) In this special issue, researchers from education, psychology, and philosophy have been contributing to the discussion about how to develop experiential techniques in content-based philosophy courses (including Critical Thinking, Environmental Ethics, Introduction to Philosophy, and Philosophy of Science). Such techniques include using knowledge from other fields, including physics, biology, ecology, game theory, and psychology.
What have I learned from editing this volume? In response to Rubio, I’m glad that he learned something about the contributions that philosophy has made, but we should also recognize that we can learn from the vocational fields. In particular, they engage their students, get them to care about their fields, and make meaningful connections inside and outside the classroom. These are the very things we want philosophy and humanities students to learn as well. We want them to engage the material. We want them to care about the material. Last, and most importantly, we want them to take the skills they learn in the humanities to their everyday lives. In particular, if I can end with a wish, may they learn how to become happier, more virtuous, caring, empathetic, literate, communicative, sensitive, and, yes, even wiser.
This blog post has been written by Andrew M. Winters.
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