(as a practicing philosopher) the study of philosophy does not teach you critica

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/philosophy-and-standardized-test-scores-causation-or-correlation.htmlAFAIK, (as a practicing philosopher) the study of philosophy does not teach you critical thinking skills any better than do mathematics or the physical sciences. Certainly, any class in the philosophy of science, completing mathematics through calculus 1, and the first course in macro and micro economics, and an introductory course in contract law, and an economic history of mankind, will pretty much prepare you for the world with critical thinking skills in every relevant dimension of human life.

What studying philosophy does seem to do, with painfully obvious regularity, is teach you skepticism against our intuitions and hubris by avoiding nearly all common mistakes that we humans are victim to, because of our evolutionary predispositions. I mean, if we look at history, we have a painfully limited number of philosophers worthy of study (aristotle, aurelius, machiavelli, smith/hume, Kant, Hayek and maybe Nietzsche. Historians and scientists and the works of literature are so far superior to the rest of the corpus (As Durant is so want to tell us). The rest are interesting only in so far that they have been comedies or disasters and almost always done more harm than good.

When people ask me what to study, I show them my recommended reading list. It’s almost entirely constituted of the works of the sciences. I tell them I use the structure of philosophy in order to defeat those past errors on the same terms. But as far as I know, what I actually *do* is seek methods of measurement by which we eliminate ignorance, error, bias, wishful-thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, ficitonalism, and deceit – which are the landmines human evolution has left us with.

Philosophy will increase wisdom: what NOT to do. The rest of the fields generally teach us what TO do to measure and act on the world around us.