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Double majors for a philosophy PhD?

Brian Leiter

A prospective PhD student writes:

After going through some of the current students pages on philosophy department websites I'm seeing a lot of double majors out there at high-end departments. For example, virtually every other current Phd student at Rutgers has a degree in math in addition to the philosophy degree. I'm wondering if you could make a post and open it up to comments about the effects of having another degree, from what the degree is specifically to the simple fact of having one, etc. 

I do not have the impression that double majors are anywhere near the norm.  I would think a double major is an asset when it complements a student's philosophical interests:  e.g., a double major with psychology for someone wanting to do philosophy of cognitive science; a double major with physics for someone wanting to do philosophy of science; and so on.  What do readers think?

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14 responses to “Double majors for a philosophy PhD?”

  1. kurt

    Is it too old-fashioned to suggest a double major of math and classics? Especially for those interested in doing history.

    Reply
  2. harry b

    What the commentator is witnessing is probably just credential inflation. There's been a rise in double and triple majoring (and adding minors, etc) throughout selective institutions, especially in the period since the crash. Two big factors. 1. Students believe (wrongly, but with the enthusiastic encouragement of the institutions themselves) that having more credentials will help them in the labor market and 2. Increasingly privileged students arrive at school having met numerous breadth requirements through taking APs (they take more APs than they used to, and colleges have increasingly recognized them as meeting requirements), so have more room in their schedules for additional majors and/or minors.

    It is sometimes worth taking a second major or a minor or two if you really are interested. But minors in particular tend to be structured with the aim of inducing students to take classes that professors want to teach, rather than classes that students will find valuable (eg, in languages — the student wants to learn the language, and the professors want to leverage that into getting more enrollments for literature courses that they want to teach). Get your major, and then take classes that are worth taking. If you want to learn Spanish, take lots of Spanish classes, but don't then waste a course on a Lit class you don't want to take just to get a minor (or several, to get a major) — take more upper level philosophy (or math, or econ, or whatever) classes instead.

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  3. Daniel Kaufman

    Double majors are very common at our university.

    I, myself, was a double major in Philosophy and History. I find my history background to be of use in almost everything I do, including my philosophical work. Indeed, in my graduate years, when I was in a very analytic, very technically oriented department, most of the people around me were amazingly historically ignorant, and this gave me a substantial leg up.

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  4. Current phil grad student

    It depends a lot on how easy it is to double-major at your university. Where I was an undergrad, the administration actively discouraged double-majoring and made it difficult to pull it off even if you were really determined. I ended up with only one major and didn't even have a minor. But at my current place there are tons of students double-majoring, and the majors require fewer credits too, so it's a lot easier.

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  5. Fee Fi Fo Fum

    A few UK universities won't let you take a straight philosophy degree, requiring it to be in eg Maths and Philosophy or Physics and Philosophy. This seems to work out pretty well for the students involved: from my year of the undergraduate program there are now tenured faculty in Physics, Economics, Maths, and Philosophy (x4).

    A double major reflects pretty well on a student, especially if the majors are reasonably different. And this seems especially true for a subject like philosophy whose remit overlaps with many fields and many types of thinking. So I would not be surprised to see that philosophy graduate students double-majored at a higher rate than those in other fields, and I expect this correlates somewhat with philosophical competence.

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  6. Christopher Morris

    At the University of Maryland, double majors are very common. I don't have the figures ready to hand, but it seems very common and driven by employment anxieties. Students who are attracted to fields like ours seem often to have a second major in a field they think will make them attractive to employers. And then they often add a minor to their double majors. The result is very few electives (and to some extent longer time-to-degree stats).

    I don't think most people should major in philosophy, but it would profit most students to take at least few courses in philosophy. But our university focuses its attention on majors; lots of majors looks good, few look bad.

    The idea of a well-rounded education seems to be the loser here. Ironic, given the fad for "interdisciplinary" scholarship and education.

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  7. Mason Gross

    I am not a spokesperson for the RU dept. and am not privy to the grad admissions thinking – BUT – maybe 5 of the kids seem to have a degree in math out of 40+

    ​What's more interesting is how many kids have MAs from other institutions (EdinburghX3, Stanford, Virginia Tech, Houston, ​Yale Law (MSL), Wyoming, Oxfordx2, Texas Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Western Michigan, Carleton, Northern Illinois, Tufts). That's 16 by my count.

    That latter point is mindblowing. *If* similar holds for NYU and Princeton, then something very interesting has happened at the elite three. But I haven't checked the other two.

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  8. Charles Pigden

    Double majors are good, but one should not forget the there are also such things as COMBINED majors that is major *programmes* in two or more subjects, such as Philosophy, Politics and Economics. (Full disclosure: we have such a programme at Otago of which I was, until recently, the chief. ) At Otago it is perfectly possible to major in two distinct subjects (each single-subject major taking up nine papers out of twenty for the BA) or a single combined major (the PPE programme taking up sixteen papers out of twenty, with students on a rough average, taking about five papers in politics, five in philosophy and six in economics) . Interestingly about two thirds of the PPE students at Otago take double *degrees*, most often a BA/LLB (Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Law).

    Although I personally went on from a philosophy-only BA to a PhD by thesis, I am inclined to think that it is very good thing in an aspiring philosopher to have a bit of intellectual breadth. When refereeing papers, one of the things that I am often inclined to say is ‘ You would not talk this kind of nonsense if you were a bit more broadly educated.’ Naturally I try to put the point a bit more tactfully in my ‘Comments to the Author’.

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  9. Daniel Kaufman

    Many universities — including mine — require a minor, so it isn't really a choice. Students double major, because it isn't that much more work than a double minor, which one has to do anyway.

    Reply
  10. Michel X.

    I suppose one thing to note is that six of those sixteen MAs come from countries where that's part of the normal progression to a PhD. That doesn't mean something interesting isn't happening, of course, but it might indicate that there are a few different interesting things happening at once.

    Reply
  11. Russell Blackford

    Are we talking about double majors (e.g. doing major sequences in both history and philosophy within a BA program) or double degrees (e.g. BA, LLB)? Although the original quote from the student uses the expression "double majors", it actually seems to be about double degrees.

    Speaking for myself, by the time I did a philosophy PhD I already had a BA, an LLB, and a PhD in English literature. I may have been the most absurdly over-qualified PhD student in my cohort at Monash, but there seemed to be a strong tendency for students to come into its PhD program with more than just a BA with an honours year in philosophy (or the equivalent from differently structured programs). FWIW, my training in law, in particular, certainly feeds strongly into my research. But I wouldn't want to prescribe for anyone else.

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  12. Jason Aleksander

    I have never served (nor is it likely that I will ever serve) on an admissions committee for a PhD program. So take that as a hefty grain of salt as you weigh anything else below.

    Suppose we had the advantage of very clear data showing a strong correlation between double majors and PhD admissions to Philosophy programs. Would that tell us that admissions committees are favoring double majors because they are double majors? Or would it tell us that there is something about people who are interested in and able to pursue double majors that makes those people stronger applicants, in aggregate, than those who do not? There's probably a way to study this, but there's really no reason for anyone to spend the time and effort to test either hypothesis. (But we could easily look for negative correlations.)

    But my recommendation, in the absence of data one way or the other, is that undergraduates interested in philosophy should pursue interests in other fields whether or not they jump through whatever hoops are necessary to add additional majors or minors. The reason is simple. It is a healthy intellectual exercise, and doing so is likely to make one a better philosopher anyway.

    Or, put differently, almost every subfield in the discipline of philosophy relates in some significant way to at least one other major academic discipline… why not assume that there is a good reason for those relationships?

    Reply
  13. Daniel Kaufman

    I thought by "double major," the OP meant two majors, within the BA/BS degree. If that is not correct, my comments do not apply.

    Reply
  14. Nevo

    as least in Israel double major is the standard for a philosophy undergraduate degree (very few if any take only philosophy and most universities aren't pleased to authorize it). I find this system excellent as you get to immerse yourself in 2 disciplines and cross between them more easily. (on the other hand our undergrads take substantively more courses than our American counterparts)

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