/Uni/ General

any Yea Forumsizens studying in Cologne? If so, can you rec comfy bookshops here?

Soon you will discover that it's all a house of cards built on similarly bullshit theses and what you thought was insightful or inspired work when you read it is also garbage. The only difference is you're not intimately familiar with the "bullshit I threw together on the toilet 5 hours before deadline" process they used.

No, it has no practical use in my current field. Having it on my resume opens some doors and makes me look smart, but no job I've had was specifically looking for a PhD.

Chemical engineering.

I did mine at an Ivy, too. But I don't think that carries much weight.

highschool lit is basically focused on making you a very effective pseud

I have an Ivy STEM PhD too lol

Bookshops are gay. The only time I've ever been to Köln I just hung out with BMX riders.

Me too, but STEM is soul crushing. I barely tried and graduated with top honors. I’m going back for a PHD at a different Ivy League school to get a PHD in English to teach

I was a chem student and quit that shit after a dumb bitch fucked up a reaction and got UCLA's shit shut down.

If you want to know suffering, try having a PhD in philosophy. I'm now barely qualified to flip burgers at McDonald's

Whenever someone tells me they have a PhD in Philosophy and they have an American or English accent I immediately assume they spent 8 years talking about whether Kit Fine really solved some problem in Dummett that was fucking stupid and factitious in the first place.

When was this?
t. chem at UCLA right now

2008. Your tuition is probably still paying for that girls death if you're not on a full ride.

Oh, the girl who burned herself to death. I did already know about that, but they spun it as "muh non-flame retardant labcoat" instead of her being retarded.

I'm in America at a school with a so-called "top philosophy program". They are certainly rigorous but it's fucking graining to here them talk about their pedantic bullshit all the time.

The main problem is just that it wasn't until the 70s when anglo American philosophy was violently made aware of what's considered philosophy in the rest of the world, and their first reaction was fear. Since then they've always had trouble admitting their inferiority both in qauntity and qaulity.

What was the violent change in the 70s?

Gonna derail the thread here. Seeing as there are a few stem PhDs, I need advice. I got a degree in math+ comp sci, and my GPA was a C+. Sporadic As and D's.
I went through being effectively homeless at least 3 times due to my family situation over the duration of my degree. I was the president of the student union. The internet tells me my IQ is 128 - 134 depending on the day or test. Degree took me 5.5 years. I haven't touched it since 2019, and all my projects and good papers got lost by accidentally rusting out a hard drive (the cause was poverty vehicle). It's a huge mess.

I just want to write philosophy of sciences and teach discrete math at a cozy christian uni nearby. Do I have a hope of getting in? Or should I just write books and give up on being a professor?

Im finishing my MA this year and plan on enrolling into a PhD program
I have had similar experiences with my previous work, its nothing to worry about and the more you read and the more you write the better its going to be
Dont loose faith in your work, and remember that the people you look up to put their whole life into their work. Its hard to compare yourself to a giganigga author that has decades of experience

Nice to see the finest grad students and future of academia on Yea Forums. Lol

You'll be pleased to know that I applied for a fancy university position recently and on the same day fapped to some tranny porn

If you do really well on the GRE you might make it into a mediocre gradschool, probably not a PhD program. But you can pivot from a masters to PhD if you are doing well. I would recommend avoiding gradschool and just enter the workforce. Gradschool is only desirable if you can pass the prestige bottleneck. There are already too many PhD holders in the US

Academia has lots of Yea Forums tier people. it's one of the few niches where freaks like us can thrive

how the fuck do i analyze the theme of a book
im freaking out a little rn
usually i rely on online analyses and summaries to get me started, but i picked this really obscure soviet novel called "moscow to the end of the line" by venedikt yerofeyev and there is pretty much jack shit besides book reviews and a short wiki article on the plot
i dont know whats going on, im not some retarded freshman and i have at least 4 years of experience writing papers at this level. im usually very much capable of buckling down and spewing out a healthy mix of genuine analysis and bullshit, but ive been in a writing block for the past 2 hours and the time is ticking

maybe i need more adderall but i dont wanna take too much or then ill be braindead... since it's already evening, maybe ill make some white tea? (dont judge me, ive never written sober in my entire life. idk how you writers do this shit for a living)

i could really use some general writing tips for uni level output rn

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yeah, I was in a grad program and stopped with at the masters because I was sick of most analytic philosophy. very happy in law now

If possible, ditch the book. Some books people just don't have anything to say about. If all else fails, fall back on the lenses. Historical lens can work for BSing.

the problem is the book has so much to say, but i dont know where to start. it's a great book that is saying something about the condition of the human species, through the lens of an alcoholic traveler. im just too stressed out and stupid to figure out the details.
>fall back on the lenses. Historical lens can work for BSing
what do you mean by the lenses? My rough thesis i sent to my professor was "Just as an alcoholic can feel limited and trapped by their disease, the inefficient command economy of the USSR was also limiting the prosperity of the Russian people. Both [the main character] in the book and the USSR were never able to break the cycle and thus realize their full potential." but she said that was too limited and i should focus on the human experience instead. i feel so lost bc thats such a huge scope tho

anyone in york? i need friends :(

angloid philosophy decided to break with studying continental philosophy (aside from hume and a little bit of kant) around 1910, and then became absurdly confident that logical positivism was the answer to all life's problems, and then after logical positivism it switched to "ordinary language" philosophy, which had many of the same problems and implicit naturalist/realist and "philosophy is the handmaiden of the sciences" assumptions about metaphysics/epistemology

even though some continentals started doing serious work to break out of this in the '50s, it's really only decades later that they begin to realize they badly fucked up, but by that time they are already almost a century deep into an ingrown tradition that only talks to itself about made-up paradoxes of naturalist epistemologies (look up the gettier problem if you want a real laugh), and catching up to continentals would require re-learning everything from scratch from snobby continentals who are now even more snobby and confusing than ever (french poststructuralism shit is in its heyday)

so they close the doors again and try to ignore that nobody gives a shit about analytic philosophy anymore and now that people can find philosophical thought outside of analytic departments, only a few stragglers still end up there, tending a dying tradition that lost most of its raison d'etre in the 1940s

even the people who tried to reform the tradition from within, like rorty, really just pulled yet another ordinary language philosophy move and maintained all the old angloid biases and assumptions. rorty literally cannot conceive of a world beyond a few logical tricks to show things like "we don't know what we don't know," no angloid can truly conceive of metaphysics or fundamental problems of reality and life. they have to reduce everything to dilemmas with binary oppositions laid out in truth tables, and because they're angloids, they think the pinnacle of human existence is basically being 1960s liberal englishman.

most of english philosophy can be understood by reading GE Moore's proof of an external world unironically (it was meant unironically), and looking into the ethics and worldview of the bloomsbury group. england's stagnant, dying upper class established the parameters of angloid philosophy right while its philosophers were cutting england off from fruitful discourse with other traditions, or even knowledge of other languages, and this was ultimately fatal for the english ability to think

say any of this to one, and all he will reply is "lol you want everyone to do cultural theory and read derrida". note that angloids are also terrible at classical philosophy because they REFUSE to understand classical thought on its own terms and keep trying to subject it to those truth tables and artificial anachronistic binaries

You need to structure your thoughts and attack the book part by part. A book can have more than one outcome and you don't have to summarize the book as a whole with your thesis. First identify some general themes of the book, then choose which theme you want to focus on. After that try to identify which lesson, or statement, that the author is trying to say about this theme. Then focus yourself on that one lesson, identify how the book taught this lesson (i.e. the details), and separate into paragraphs.

Also, teachers that say stuff like focus on the Human Experience are retards who use buzzwords that don't really mean anything, what your teacher is really asking for is a broad theme that fits within his/her parameters. I mean literally anything is part of the Human Experience because you are a human and you experience things?

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>Norfener in Uni
>Billy NoMates
M8 you have fucking bottled it. Sort urself out.

Amid the general stupidity that pervades these boards, there is often an undercurrent of intelligence that bubbles up every now and then. If/when you lurk long enough you'll eventually understand. It probably has something to do with most of the user-base being 20 something college kids.

I'm finishing up an MA in Environmental Philosophy this semester. Will try for a PhD next year. I also constantly feel like a fraud but my best career options are to just keep trying to dig myself in deeper.

>I’m going back for a PHD at a different Ivy League school to get a PHD in English to teach
Is it possible to get a PHD in a subject you hadn't officially studied before? Or did you also study English earlier on

not him but for some programs and fields, a PhD in any field is good enough for entry since it proves you can do independent research

Getting a PhD means nothing unless you got it at a competitive program. Is your school top ranked?
Fine and Dummett are good though.
I'm not gonna lie. I don't get people who can't double-track master continental and analytic philosophy both. It's seriously not that hard to become at least competent in both, and you can do it before even finishing a PhD. It's more a matter of whether you love it/are interested/are smart/creative enough. Are you? Are most of them? My advice is get into the stuff on both sides and really dig deep and if you're smart you'll have two things to prove it: 1) You'll be very good at making connections between diverse existing authors and their ideas, and integrating everything in some synoptic picture if needed, and 2) You will also have new approaches to things, new insights and ideas and extensions to make. You're complaining about analytics and continentals but most people who complain about stagnation do fuckall about it, they're reeking of stagnation themselves. Come up with something new. Nobody came up with new things without engaging old things, and the most exciting interesting people have capacity to engage the most things, and in the newest ways.

>Facticious
What is this, Sartrean facticity? Being and Nothingness? Or did you mean fictitious? Facetious?

I'm 26 and never finished my bachelors degree. Is it to late for me to get back into school for a career in academia? I recently got kicked out of the military for medical reasons and I'm feeling kinda directionless right now, but I know that I want to continue my education

Also not him but I know a couple of people that have done undergrad, masters, and PhD in three different fields, all humanities/social sciences.

It's never too late, my experience is that in PhD programs a chunk are fresh off their undergrads (so they start at 22), some are fresh off their masters which they began after that (so they start at 24 or so), but a lot are surprisingly older, it's not uncommon for first years to be in their late 20s to mid 30s, idk why but it just sort of happens. Often it's people who did like two master's or had other stuff going on though, not gonna lie. But age is definitely not the issue.

will the military pay for your education?
I'd recommend you go back to school, but I knew a vet studying biology and he was fucking miserable(he was older than you, met him when he was 28) so idk, definitely choose something you like and not just a bachelor's for its own sake, something you could pursue without wanting to kys yourself. unless money is really a question and then just go the practical route

majoring in psych, political science and international relations.

Pls anons tell me what I can do with this. i will be very grateful if you can

You are an immense retard for going for a PhD with the farce that academia is these days. A PhD obtained in the past 50y is more oft an indicator of idiocy and dogged compliance than anything else.

>implicit naturalist/realist and "philosophy is the handmaiden of the sciences" assumptions about metaphysics/epistemology
And this is why philosophy within the anglo world treats metaphysics and epistemology as subjects to be studied while philosophy in other places (Germany in particular) amounts to nothing more than social theory that vaguely gestures towards these subjects, right? One of the frequent criticisms of analytic philosophy from the likes of you is that it's useless and that it's focuses are a waste of time, but it seems to me what is meant by that is that they're mad that philosophy can exists without being the handmaiden to the social sciences, history, literary criticism, etc.
>say any of this to one, and all he will reply is "lol you want everyone to do cultural theory and read derrida". note that angloids are also terrible at classical philosophy because they REFUSE to understand classical thought on its own terms and keep trying to subject it to those truth tables and artificial anachronistic binaries
But this is just true, and it's precisely why countries like Germany who once led the world in every philosophical subject has now transformed into producing nothing but social theorists and the occasional theologian. There are some people in France trying to work on other things, but instead of engaging on the broader with the broader discussion on these subjects, they go into a corner and jerk themselves off, and if anything, you're huffing and puffing about truth tables tells us why. It's because you have having real standards applied to your work. If you didn't, you wouldn't bitch and moan about people caring that arguments are logically valid.

neolib think tank analyst is just about the only thing I can see you doing

I'm guessing you call yourself an autodidact

No, I'm calling you a retard.

but you *are* an auto-didact right? ever discussed a difficult Descartes passage with a professor? with a friend even?

Yeah, I have the GI bill as well as a lot of personal savings to pay for education. My only worry is that I'll be starting any potential career I want to get into very late, and won't have much to fall back on if academia doesn't work out. The subjects I'm passionate about are English lit and Chinese history, but I have a hard time justifying pursuing those fields when there's very little marketability for them. I don't really care about making a lot of money, but I want to be able to at least support myself and a family

Was at Oxford in humanities.
Now at Toronto for an MA, thought I wanted to do a PhD too but grad school here has murdered my motivation completely. I barely read the set readings - how can I get my enthusiasm back??

I really handled my education terribly, and I want to go back, but I won't have the money to do so for more than a decade. By that point I think I'll have to start from the bottom-up. It's not that much of a problem, but it will be a pain in the ass.
That being said, I really do look forward to being able to take classes without the school being the center of my social life. I think I'll get more out of it without the distractions that come with all of that.

I'm at Toronto doing my PhD what department are you in?

>Getting a PhD means nothing unless you got it at a competitive program. Is your school top ranked?
Not really I think, but I did my PhD in Germany and the country has a great reputation. Rankings aren't really a big deal in Europe compared to the US.

you got a masters in philosophy then went to law school on top of that?