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You can go to law school and become a lawyer. Philosophy major trains your critical reading and writing skills, logic---qualities that law school looks for.

Or you can become a teacher in a university, if teaching is your thing.

Philosophy trains logic and reasoning and broadens knowledge on ethics, essence of things, reality, etc. You will acquire great reasoning and convincing presentation skills useful in many aspects in arts & humanity.

I say the best route is to combine it with another field that is more pragmatic, like law or arts & literatures. Then the possibilities are endless: lawyer, teacher, media editor/writer, movie writer, novelist, etc.

Good luck to you!

"What are you going to do with your degree in philosophy?" If the past is any guide, and if we can trust induction, the answer has to be: "You will do all manner of things." Some of you will become members of the bar or bench, some physicians, some scientists, some founders of great enterprises, some journalists, some professors of philosophy, some provosts of great universities. Such are the paths traveled by generations of your predecessors. We, of course, can't take full credit for preparing you for medical school or for graduate school in psychology or computer science or to be a dot-com entrepreneur. Necessarily, there is much that you had to learn and still have to learn besides philosophy if those are your chosen paths. Because a philosophical education doesn't suffice to prepare you for any particular career, someone will be tempted to think that, except for those of you who are destined for or about to depart from graduate school in philosophy, the philosophy degree is really an ancillary thing. Maybe philosophy doesn't ruin you for your future, but it doesn't prepare you for your future either. One can do many things despite having a degree in philosophy; there isn't much that one can do because of having a degree in philosophy. I want to challenge that assumption....

So if these last few years haven't been about job training, what have they been about? And why has it been worthwhile to you to devote four or more years of your life to pursuits that will add so little to the bottom line? I hope the answer to these questions is obvious. The first we've already answered, really. We have largely been about cultivating within you certain habits of mind: a relentless and wide-ranging curiosity, a taste for hard questions, the habits of rigor and clarity of thought and expression without which the taste would be a mere indulgence, an imagination not constrained by authority, tradition, or passing fashions. Do such habits of mind have a practical pay-off; do they contribute positively to the bottom line of one's life? Who could doubt it? Indeed, what habits of mind could be more practical, more indispensable to a well-lived life? They are the habits of the mind that characterize free, autonomous, thinking people in every epoch and every culture, the habits of mind that underlie innovation in every sphere of life....

Philosophy at its best has always been a rich source of culture. It is philosophy that has struggled hardest and most persistently to spell out the rational foundations of the coercive powers of the state, the duties of human to human, the limits of the scientific method, to adjudicate the long struggle between science and religion, to integrate the daunting results of the natural, biological, and cognitive sciences into an uplifting or at least not debilitating picture of the place of humanity, and our deepest aspirations, into the order of things....

Life is bound to take you in surprising directions. But I am confident that given your education, intelligence, passion and industry you will eventually occupy positions of power, responsibility and influence. You will thereby have a place on the front lines of culture-formation for this new century. And this is my plea to you. Wherever life leads you--whether to business, law, politics, medicine, science, the arts, journalism or service to the poor--please retain a philosophical consciousness, please keep asking hard, even uncomfortable questions, keep challenging received wisdom, keep demanding of yourself and others rigor, coherence and clarity. Ultimately, it is through you and through your work at the front lines, that philosophy can reach beyond the ivory tower and play its rightful and vital role in the urgent task of making a new culture for a new century.

Department Commencement Address, Stanford University. June 16, 2002, delivered by Ken Taylor.

Department Commencement Address, Stanford University. June 16, 2002, delivered by Ken Taylor.

if your IQ is through the roof, you can become a philosopher