Value of Philosophy Links

Collected by Yuri Cath (La Trobe University), with help from Daily Nous’ “Value of Philosophy” webpage

The list below is a collection of links to various online articles touting the many benefits of studying philosophy including employability, critical thinking skills, and success in the AI age. There are also supporting empirical studies and other resources for people interested in philosophy. I put this together for sharing with students and prospective students, but I'm happy for anyone else to make use of it. Please note that links are not endorsements of the linked content. Further suggestions welcome at y.cath@latrobe.edu.au. There is also a pdf of the list at the bottom of this page. If you have trouble viewing the pdf (if you don't have a gmail account that might cause problems) drop me an email and I'll send it to you.

Empirical Studies

“Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers” by Michale Prinzing and Michael Vazquez in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association:

·       “Using a large dataset (including records from over half a million undergraduates at hundreds of institutions across the United States), we investigate philosophy students’ performance on verbal and logical reasoning tests, as well as measures of valuable intellectual dispositions. Results indicate that students with stronger verbal abilities, and who are more curious, open-minded, and intellectually rigorous, are more likely to study philosophy. Nonetheless, after accounting for such baseline differences, philosophy majors outperform all other majors on tests of verbal and logical reasoning and on a measure of valuable habits of mind. This offers the strongest evidence to date that studying philosophy does indeed make people better thinkers.”

The Economist “Is AI putting graduates out of work already?”

·       An empirical study by the Economist looking at the impacts of AI on college graduates in the US. The article is paywalled. If you don’t have access, you can read about the study here at the Daily Nous. “Philosophy, according to their study, involves relatively little exposure to AI, and the percentage change in employment during 2022-2024 for college graduates with degrees in philosophy was actually positive—around +4%.”

Articles

The New York Times “The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors” by Benjamin Wallace.

 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/business/philosophy-majors-ai-jobs.html

·  “When you look at A.I. and think seriously about it, the philosophical questions just abound,” says Iason Gabriel, an Oxford-trained philosopher who joined Google DeepMind in 2017 and now leads its Artificial General Intelligence and Society team. “They’re almost everywhere.”

The Economist “Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers”

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/why-philosophy-is-having-a-moment

The Atlantic “Someone Finally Wants to Hire Philosophers” by Lila Shroff.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/ai-companies-hiring-philosophers/687417/

·       ‘Perhaps the most philosophy-drunk of the major AI firms is Anthropic. It wants Claude, in addition to being a helpful assistant, to have “good character,” Amanda Askell, a philosopher at the company, told me last year. In January, under Askell’s leadership, the company published Claude’s constitution, an 84-page philosophical treatise that outlines Anthropic’s intentions for the bot’s personality and behavior. That document, which includes dense philosophical sections on meta-ethics and epistemology, is then used to train Claude.’

Huffington Post: “The Unexpected Way Philosophy Majors Are Changing The World Of Business” by Carolyn Gregoire.

·       “…many leaders of the tech world—from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman to Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield—say that studying philosophy was the secret to their success as digital entrepreneurs.”

The Atlantic: “Why Study Philosophy? ‘To Challenge Your Own Point of View’” interview with Rachel Goldstein by Hope Reese.

·       “To challenge your own point of view. Also, you need to be a citizen in this world. You need to know your responsibilities. You’re going to have many moral choices every day of your life. And it enriches your inner life. You have lots of frameworks to apply to problems, and so many ways to interpret things. It makes life so much more interesting. It’s us at our most human. And it helps us increase our humanity. No matter what you do, that’s an asset.”

Salon: “Be employable, study philosophy: The discipline teaches you how to think clearly, a gift that can be applied to just about any line of work” by Shannon Rupp.  

·       “It must be summer. In anticipation of fall course schedules, several people have asked what I think someone who wants to be a journalist should study. … I tell people the most useful classes I took were all in philosophy.”

Entrepeneur.com: “5 Reasons Why Philosophy Majors Make Great Entrepreneurs” by Nicholas Miller.

·       “While entrepreneurs can benefit from a number of different backgrounds, many of the traits that make great business leaders are shared by philosophers around the world. So the next time you find yourself struggling with a complex problem or in a situation where there’s no clear solution, take a step back, swap out Carnegie for Plato, and try and look at things from the perspective of a philosophy major.”

The Atlantic: “Is Philosophy the Most Practical Major?” by Edward Tenner.

·        “What makes philosophy different? It can seem self-absorbed…But it also is a tool (like history and religious studies) for thinking about everything else, and every profession from law and medicine to motorcycle maintenance.”

The Wall Street Journal: “Would You Hire Socrates?” by Scott Samuelson.

·        “I once had a student, a factory worker, who read all of Schopenhauer just to find a few lines that I quoted in class. An ex-con wrote a searing essay for me about the injustice of mandatory minimum sentencing, arguing that it fails miserably to live up to either the retributive or utilitarian standards that he had studied in Introduction to Ethics. I watched a preschool music teacher light up at Plato's "Republic," a recovering alcoholic become obsessed by Stoicism, and a wayward vet fall in love with logic (he's now finishing law school at Berkeley). A Sudanese refugee asked me, trembling, if we could study arguments concerning religious freedom. Never more has John Locke —or, for that matter, the liberal arts—seemed so vital to me.

I'm glad that students who major in disciplines like philosophy may eventually make as much as or more than a business major. But that's far from the main reason I think we should invest in the humanities.”

The Irish Times: “‘Is this on the exam?’ The pressing need for philosophy in schools” by Charlotte Blease.

·        “Uniquely in Ireland, the importance of educational reform—of philosophy in schools—has been acknowledged at the highest level. In 2014, in the wake of the financial crisis, President Michael D Higgins’s Ethics Initiative called for national debate about what we value as a society. The President has repeatedly argued that if we cherish democracy, we need an active and independent-thinking citizenry, and that philosophy in schools is the means to that end.”

Forbes: “Thinkers50 Founder Declares Philosophy As Management's New Frontier” by Ron Carucci.

·       ‘I spoke with Stuart Crainer, cofounder of Thinkers50, an organization that rates and ranks the latest management ideas.  Their new initiative will connect leaders to an ancient, but relatively untapped discipline, one of the few yet to merge with management science: philosophy.  “The business world has become enormously complex.  Philosophy will enable business leaders to better understand that complexity, live with it, and make better decisions within it. The corporate world of the '70s held much more straightforward black and white, right and wrong views.  Today, we are in a constant perennially gray area, blurring lines between science and ethics, social and economic good.  Leaders simply must have a willingness, and the capacity, to wrestle with much bigger concerns of humanity beyond corporate performance,” says Crainer.’

“Love, wisdom and wonder: three reasons to celebrate philosophy” by Matthew Beard in The Conversation.

·       “There are [a] set of questions whose answers cannot be discovered either by formal or empirical inquiry. For instance, the question: ‘why should I be healthy?’ or ‘should I fear losing my life?’ cannot be deduced from the very concepts of life and health, nor discovered through observation of healthy, living beings. These questions demand an entirely different method of analysis. This, Berlin argues, is what defines philosophical questions: ones that ‘cannot be answered either by observation or calculation.’ This describes our questions about life and health. To answer these questions requires a kind of knowledge that neither formal nor empirical inquiry can attain. In this case, we need an understanding of the value of human life.”

Chronicle of Higher Education: “Why We Should Require All Students to Take 2 Philosophy Courses” by Howard Gardner.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-We-Should-Require-All/243871

·       “If I were the czar of higher education that is not explicitly vocational, I would require every undergraduate to study philosophy. And if I were both czar and czarina, I would require all students to take two philosophy courses — one in their first year and another just before graduation.”

The Conversation: “Philosophy is crucial in the age of AI” by Anthony Grayling and Brian Ball.

·       “…philosophy has been instrumental to AI since its inception. One of the first AI success stories was a 1956 computer program, dubbed the Logic Theorist, created by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon. Its job was to prove theorems using propositions from Principia Mathematica, a 1910 a three-volume work by the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, aiming to reconstruct all of mathematics on one logical foundation.” … “But contemporary philosophy, and not just its history, is relevant to AI and its development. Could an LLM truly understand the language it processes? Might it achieve consciousness? These are deeply philosophical questions.”

Longer Essays and Books

“Good-for-Nothings” (2010 APA Presidential Address) by Susan Wolf.

·       “I do not wish to deny that [pragmatic] reasons to study, support, and do philosophy are good reasons. These benefits are real and significant, and may well be the most effective ways of convincing the people around us that there is value in what we do. But they are not the whole story, and it seems to me dangerous not to mention and try better to understand the other part of the story… This other part has to do with the ways in which philosophy expands our imaginations and our minds and deepens our perspective on ourselves and our relation to the world. It has to do with whatever it is about philosophy that makes it worthy of our attention and energy in a way that is disproportional to its benefit to us as either useful or fun.”

What Can I Do With a Degree in Philosophy? An open access book by David Boersema.

·       “The point of this book is to dispel the view that studying philosophy is impractical and unimportant. As it turns out, most of the students I taught over the years who got a degree in philosophy went on to non-academic jobs and careers. They demonstrate that the notion that the only thing one can do with a degree in philosophy is to teach philosophy is simply incorrect. Does studying philosophy teach one how to fix a leaky faucet? No, but neither does studying economics. Does studying philosophy lead to rewarding and fulfilling careers? Not necessarily, but it certainly can, and the point of this book is to demonstrate that.”

Other Resources

Daily Nous’ “Value of Philosophy” webpage.

Philosophy: What can it do for you? webpage.

The Australasian Association of Philosophy’s “Impact of Philosophy” webpage.

The American Philosophical Association’s “Who Studies Philosophy?” webpage.

The American Philosophical Association’s “Resources for Undergraduates” webpage.