When students decide to major in philosophy, they are often greeted with shock, bewilderment and parental dismay. And always a few jokes.
Such as: “How do you get a group of philosophers off your doorstep? You order pizza and then throw it outside your yard.”
Or this one about the Cal philosophy grad: “The only job he could get was at the zoo, where he had to dress up in a bear costume and go into a cage and act like a bear. One day they let another bear into the cage. Here was this bear coming at him and roaring, and he was terrified. When the other bear got close, it whispered, ‘Don’t worry. I’m a philosophy major, too.’ “
The teller of that joke is John MacFarlane, who also happens to be chairman of the UC Berkeley philosophy department. He can afford to be that jocular: He’s witnessing a tremendous surge of interest in philosophy at Cal. This spring, there are 193 philosophy majors, compared with 112 in spring 1996. Although there is yearly fluctuation, the past decade came close to doubling the number of philosophy majors compared to the previous decade.
MacFarlane said no one is quite sure why philosophy has become so popular at UC Berkeley, a campus whose namesake is philosopher George Berkeley. However, in a recent review for The Atlantic of the book “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away,” philosophy professor Clancy Martin wrote: “Philosophy is making the kind of comeback that leaves a Hermann Hesse groupie glad to have headed for graduate school and ended up with tenure.”
