Studying Philosophy Q&A | note-taking, post-grad, thinking skills and more...

hi guys hope you're doing well today I wanted to film a philosophy Q&A and talk a little bit about my university experience based on my own research there isn't much content out there about what it's like studying a philosophy degree so let's just get into some of the questions you guys had so to begin with what does studying philosophy entail what studying philosophy actually means in practical terms is that you're gonna have to do a lot of reading that is usually very difficult to understand you have to do a lot of writing that is being graded on coherence and conciseness like a certain essay writing style that takes something complex and makes it more simple and then you have to also do a lot of thinking learning how to think logically and rationally and use critical thought and analysis and kind of building on all of those skills so one question you guys asked was what kind of introduction skills do I need to do a philosophy degree this depends on what level of philosophy degree you're going to be doing so I did an undergraduate Bachelors of Arts in philosophy single honours so that means that's all I studied philosophy and so I personally went in never having read a single philosophy text and so I don't think that's necessary in order to take a undergraduate philosophy degree yeah you just simply have to be curious and motivated to learn and of course having some reading skills some advanced reading skills and writing skills would also help especially if you're gonna be entering into a philosophy program that is more advanced than an undergraduate degree then you probably do need to have read a little bit of philosophy and understand a little bit about I say writing but in general you can and will learn how to do these things and you will be trained in the skills that you need to pass your degree within your degree and so I wouldn't worry too much about what kind of things you need to enter into a philosophy degree before actually beginning just some curiosity and motivation is literally all you need well Matt asked note-taking how do I take notes and this actually one of the were complicated questions to answer because it has kind of a kind of contradictory nature so you think that taking good notes is essential to aiding your understanding of a subject and for some people it is but in my experience I think taking notes especially prematurely before you fully understood something can be detrimental to your actual understanding of it and it can be sacrificing time you could be spending understanding the subject matter we take a better understanding of it and you'd be wasting all that time taking notes so for me like how I think notes differs depending on how complicated the subject is how much note-taking is actually gonna help me reach an understanding of it and why I'm taking the notes is a really crucial question to ask so if I'm writing an essay I will be taking notes thinking about my research questions specifically if I'm just trying to understand a subject matter taking notes may not be the best option in order to understand it like depending on the text if I'm reading it for the first time usually I'll just read through it and kind of mark the general areas that I either understood really well or I didn't understand well at all and I'll just take a note like I'll put a question mark in the margins if I don't get it you know underline a few lines if I I think they make the point really well or like the central like thesis statement a conclusion of anything any particular section on a second reading I try to put in a few key words in the margins that indicate what it what it what the section is talking about and this is really helpful for when I go back into the text especially for a longer text to be able to find crucial passages really easily if I know for a fact that I'm only reading this in order to write an essay then I will be reading it with an eye for the research question and the kind of thing I'm looking for I'll also write down quotes in a separate document with their page numbers so I can refer to them and pick them out really easily while I'm writing but this is only if I know what the question is that I'm researching if I'm reading it for an essay and I don't yet know what question I'm gonna be answering or if I don't yet know how this relates the overall topic that I would just do the first things I mentioned and not write down specific quotes in lectures when I'm just trying to understand the subject once again how I take notes depends on how I already understand the subject so all of what I said before has to do with the reading but in terms of going to lecture and taking notes first of all I really recommend like recording lectures if you if it's like a really complicated subject recording a lecture and then just sitting back and listening and not thinking those can be a really useful way for you to just try to comprehend and not be distracted by trying to write down everything that the lecturer is saying because later you go back gonna read your notes and you're like whatever even written this makes no sense and that's not helpful so usually if the subject matter is really easy or if it's really complicated I only take like notes that are questions so I if I'm learning about something that's like super simple and I already get it and I don't need to take notes to aid my understanding I already have that understanding and so taking down any questions that pop into my mind during a lecture any questions a lecture at asked or other students asks those are going to be the most useful to write about because they are the critical questions that will help me like make an argument in an essay or be critically evaluating a problem if it's also a super complicated subject matter like Kant or Hegel and like I don't understand it from the get-go then taking notes will also be counterintuitive to my reaching and understanding and so I'll only take notes that are in question form so that later I can go to my lecture and be like okay I don't understand this stuff I won't be taking notes that's just writing down something a lecturer said unless I already kind of have an understanding of it and taking that note will help me reach an even deeper understanding of it so when note-taking I would say like the most important thing is to know why you're doing it and to optimize for that scenario if you're taking notes simply to take notes you probably shouldn't be saying that's what I'll say so someone else asked how do you decide what ideas to omit keeping only what is crucial to the philosophy and so this person was summarizing being a nothingness by Saud which is a huge book that like it's really hard to summarize especially if you don't have a focus and so yeah the question is essentially how do I summarize a complex piece of philosophy and so I completely relate to the struggle in my first year the very first philosophy module I took was called tutorial study and every week we met and we had read a certain piece of lhasa v and every week that was to follow we had to summarize this piece of philosophy and on average the text we had to read was like 20 to 30 pages and the summary had to be 500 words so like it was like a hyperbolically difficult task you had to read camcos myth of sisyphus and summarize it in 500 words this module was basically catered towards teaching you the skill of amazing information and producing a concise summary of it using only what you thought was relevant and so basically my experience in this problem has always been solved for me by the concept of a word count or a word limit because I have to write an essay of like 3,000 words on this subject matter I already know that I can't include everything in that essay I already know that maximum I'll have to summarize something in a thousand words and then spend 1,500 to 2,000 words analyzing it and critically looking at it and a lot of philosophy is not about summarizing and it's about critically analyzing so I would say you set yourself a word count and if need be set yourself and as a question or a topic of focus because those can really help you narrow your search and develop those skills of critically analyzing on top of the skill of summarizing and omitting certain information picking out only the crucial stuff these are two really essential skills in philosophy and you need to have focus essentially you cannot summarize something if you don't have a focus if you're trying to summarize a whole think you're gonna end up writing like a 50 page summary and that might be a summary for a book as you just being a nothingness but it's just it's it's not useful to read and to get all of the crucial information but remembering that like summarizing also necessarily means that you sacrifice some detail and so you can't have both it's a trade-off if you're gonna be summarizing you're gonna lose some of the substance some of the detail but you can't keep like the most essential stuff and I would say it just comes with practice just practice summarizing something to like a level that you you feel really uncomfortable with like I was really uncomfortable writing 500 word summaries and I felt like I definitely missed a lot of the points but it forced me to learn how to pick out the relevant information and use as concise language as possible to explain really complicated topics next what can you do with a philosophy degree I feel like this is a question everyone asks like what what even is a philosophy degree like what can you do with it and like honestly you can do so many things with a philosophy degree like I'm gonna Amina list them for you but just as a thesis statement just because it's not a vocational degree just because you don't you just study philosophy to become a philosopher you study philosophy to gain a set of skills that are transferable to different subject matter just because it's not a vocational degree doesn't mean that you can't learn things and you can't apply them to future jobs so here's a fact for you philosophers consistently gain the highest marks on tests like the LSAT because of their critical thinking skills so as a philosopher you're actually very equipped to do a conversion degree into law also very equipped to study something like politics or history all of the skills in philosophy are very transferable to those kinds of degrees that involve thinking and writing and reading and analyzing philosophers are also really good at learning new things in general so if you took a conversion course into computer science or into artificial intelligence have a background in logic in order to be able to excel in these be if you so choose it if you are motivated to learn that kind of skill set those B is applicable to these kinds of scientific fields as well especially ones that are based on logic they're also yai equipped to work in publishing or in editing or in researching because your writing skills your analytic skills that I've been talking about your reading skills your researching skills are very high like you can do so many things with a philosophy degree and yeah with subjects like English literature or psychology you can apply a philosophic knowledge which a lot of your peers may not have because they didn't study philosophy to these fields and it would give you a very unique edge in terms of computer science or artificial intelligence you can think about the ethical ramifications of the problems you're trying to solve and that gives you again a very unique edge in solving these problems and it makes you a very valuable person to hire if that's what you're looking for if you're looking for a job philosophy is not an unemployable field contrary to popular belief for me however the biggest thing philosophy taught me was personal I learned a lot about myself I learned how to evaluate my own life my priorities my progress according to my own values and yes it made me question Who I am and yes it made me question what I want to do but it also gave me the skills to be able to learn anything that I want and gave me confidence that I'm able to learn everything I want like basically if you have read Kant and survived like whether or not you understood can't if you've read Kant and survived you can do anything and you have this like all-encompassing confidence that you can do anything you want in life and so yeah I've I've just I've gained so many skills from studying a philosophy degree and for me the most important one is the skill of being able to think interiorly and question my values and change my mind if I need to change my mind and kind of question how do i how do I want to live my life what do I want to do with my and all of these like questions have helped me find clarity about what especially what I don't want to do like I think philosophy has taught me a lot about what I do not want to do more than it has taught me about what I do want to do but I mean the biggest cliche is that after completing this degree all that I know for sure is I know nothing for a short and all that I think I've gained is being able to question what I think I've gained oh but it's true and it's kind of a mind bender but it's it's worth it I mean it's absolutely worth it to study philosophy should you study philosophy based on what I know of studying philosophy if you want to be sure of nothing you want to leave your reading with your head spinning and aching a bit if you want to leave your lectures with your head aching a bit from the complexity of the subject matter that you've just been talking about if you want to entertain questions and uncertainties if you want to entertain some of the most fundamental and sometimes unanswerable questions in the universe like the meaning of consciousness or like you know what is a universal ethics and can it exist if you want to almost never reach a conclusion but have some very heated and stimulating debates with your friends and your family and your lecturers alike then maybe you should study philosophy I have been so lucky to be able to study philosophy almost exclusively for three years and I don't think I'm ever gonna stop thinking like a philosopher or entertaining philosophical questions I think they are so valuable and fundamental and interesting and and I would encourage everyone to study philosophy even a little bit like you don't have to dedicate yourself to it full time like I did some people may not have the privilege to study philosophy full time but definitely try to minor in it try to you don't take a philosophy course try to read philosophy on the side this is why this channel exists I want to make philosophy accessible for you I want everyone to engage with it because I think it's just absolutely so valuable um and then I guess the final question that a lot of you have asked is what am I gonna do next now that I'm done my bachelor's and I don't know guys like I said philosophy equips you to do so many things but like one of the biggest things it does is make you question everything and everything you thought you knew and the thing is I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up I never knew that I wanted to study philosophy before I discovered what philosophy was and I before I attended a philosophy lecture and realized wow I really want to do just this I initially went into university thinking I wanted to study literature because I love books but I realized that that wasn't for me and that philosophy was for me and so I'm sure that in my exploring in the next few years I'm going to discover maybe what I wanted dedicate myself to I don't want to rush into doing another academic degree because I think that I've I've just been in an institution and been educated within an institution for so long and honestly during my degree at some point I felt disillusioned with academia I felt like I wasn't studying what I wanted I felt that there were constrains that were put on me as a student that I didn't want to be there and that's why for the next year at least I think I'm going to just take a step back from academia I'm going to get some life experience I'm gonna travel but I'm also gonna keep learning I'm gonna keep reading books I'm going to keep questioning things I'm gonna keep making videos and having discussions with people on the internet and people in my real life I'm so excited for this chance like if I can just read if I can just you know get through all of the books on my TBR I think I need a break from the pressures of academia and I just need to explore for a bit free reign you know see what I can do outside of an institution and yeah I I just I'm so happy with my free time now I'm so happy that I get to like read what I want and do what I want write about what I want and explore my creative energy and explore my intellectual energy and explore the world's energy and just be in nature sometimes for long periods of time and you know socialize with the people socialize with the people and I'm just I'm really grateful that I get the freedom to not know what I want to do for a little while but what I do know if I do can in you with academia because I do love the research I will let you guys know and yeah but that I hope that answers your question it's it's a big question mark learning and exploring and seeing where life takes me but yes thank you so much for watching thank you for submitting your questions I hope I answered your question if I did not you can leave a comment down below and I will be sure to get to it and we can keep the discussion going but yeah okay thank you so much for watching this video has gone on for long enough goodbye I did a Q&A guys I am a youtuber now what

Channel: Intellect Grime

Views: 5,976

Rating: 4.9699249 out of 5

Keywords: philosophy, undergraduate, questions, experience, studying, jobs, transferrable, skills, philosophy skills, philosophy tricks, philosophy questions, qanda, answering, answers, undergrad experience, post grad, future plans

Id: zCQAUDLxzmA

Length: 18min 15sec (1095 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 23 2019