I haven’t linked to my Libertarianism.org Greek series lately; there are a bunch of new ones:
[cross-posted at BHL]
The other night I caught a few minutes of Marco Rubio talking about education. (I think it might have been from this.) One of the remarks he made was that students shouldn’t major in “Roman philosophy” if they want a successful career after graduation. Apparently he’s been saying this a lot, though more often with Greek philosophy as his example.
Will studying Cicero wreck your career?
I suppose it’s no surprise that a Senator named Marco Antonio Rubio would have it in for the likes of Cicero. But apparently Rubio is unaware that philosophy is one of the very best majors one can take to prepare for a successful career. For those going on to law school, philosophy majors score higher on the LSAT than any other major; they also have higher admission rates to law school than such common prelaw majors as political science and criminal justice.
For other graduate degrees, philosophy majors score higher on the verbal and analytic portions of the GRE than any other major, and are also very competitive on the GMAT. Philosophy majors also enjoy a higher acceptance rate to medical school than either biology and biochemistry (and also higher than English or history).
For students planning to go straight on to the job market after graduation rather than going to graduate school, philosophy majors with no post-bachelor’s degree receive on average a higher starting salary than most other majors, including biology, chemistry, and business. And philosophy majors also enjoy a faster rate of salary increase than any other major.
I wouldn’t suggest that any student major in philosophy solely for the sake of the career boost. First, such a strategy disrespects the mind. And second, the kind of student who values philosophy solely as a career boost is not likely to have the kind of mindset that makes philosophy majors do so well after graduation. But any student who loves philosophy but is afraid to major in it because she doesn’t plan to become a philosophy professor and she thinks there’s no other practical use for the degree should take heart – and heed the data rather than the junior Senator from Florida.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that I’ve had two more posts on my Libertarianism.org Greek legacy series, both on Euripides: one on the evils of war and one on the status of women.
Popular culture gets Zeno’s paradox wrong again:
There’s a widespread impression that Zeno’s proposed problem is that after you reach the halfway point to your destination, you then have to go halfway to the remaining distance, and so on ad infinitum, so that you get closer and closer to your goal but never reach it.
But that’s not how the paradox goes. The problem is much worse. The paradox is that before you can get halfway to your destination, you have to get halfway to the halfway point, and so on ad infinitum, so that you can never even start moving. (Here’s Rose Wilder lane making the same mistake.)
Probably the mistake arose from someone conflating this paradox with another of Zeno’s paradox, the Achilles, in which the fastest runner gets closer and closer to catching up to the slowest runner.
I have another Libertarianism.org post on ancient Greece up; this one’s on Aeschylus’s Eumenides.
Awkward evenings around the dinner table.
Last weekend I was at the SFL Oklahoma Regional. This was, I believe, the first SFL Regional to be specifically focused on anarchism. I spoke about the “final arbiter” objection; here are my powerpoints.
This was also, I think, the largest concentration of left-libertarians at any conference I’ve been to – so it was great to catch up with old friends and meet new ones. Here’s the main group photo from the conference:
And here’s the photo of just the left-libertarians:
We are everywhere, we are Hydra.
Oh, in other news, I’ve got two more columns up in my Libertarianism.org series on ancient Greece: one on public-choice aspects of Athenian law and one on political ideas in Greek tragedy.
