"What can you do with a Philosophy degree?"
Responses from alumni in careers other than philosophy.

Class of 1952

James Ewing

I graduated in philosophy in 1952 under the great teaching of Martin Eshelman. Dr. Eshelman helped me to find my intellectual stride and propensity for comprehending, thinking through, and grasping the larger picture of things. This took me into theology at the University of Chicago and ordination in the United Church of Christ. That took me into pastoral counseling and psychotherapy as well as University Administration where I have stayed throughout my career. Philosophy and philosophical theology have been the ground of my psychotherapeutic work with persons, families, and institutions. I still teach at the University of San Diego with my wife, Ellen Colangelo in the Pastoral Care and Counseling graduate program. In that program I help ground students in the philosophical underpinnings of human functioning and meaning. I am deeply indebted to my beginnings in philosophy at Carleton and the great gifts given to me by Dr. Eshelman.

Class of 1960

Jerome L. Lonnes

I was awarded one of the first NDEA graduate fellowships and went to graduate school in philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, where I earned an MA and a PhD in philosophy. I taught philosophy at the University of New Orleans, Drake University, Washburn University, Colorado State University, and Virginia Commonwealth University where I was tenured in 1975.
After being tenured, I realized that I was tired of academic philosophy and studied accounting at VCU, passing the CPA exam in 1978 and becoming a CPA in 1982. In 1977, I resigned my tenured position and went to work as an accountant and paralegal for a local (Richmond, VA) law firm. In 1981 I entered William and Mary Law School as a full-time student and worked part time at the Richmond law firm to put myself through. I have practiced tax, estate planning and employee benefits law in Richmond since 1984 and am still working part-time in my own law firm.
Obviously, the philosophy major was very useful for philosophy graduate school. However, I found my philosophy education to be very useful in law school and even in accounting, most of which is simply applied logic. Law and accounting require much the same analytic ability as is (or should be) developed and utilized in the study of philosophy.

Class of 1966

Lawrie Cherniack

I minored in philosophy, and took some pretty heavy-duty philosophy courses during my time at Carleton. They have helped me in a number of different ways. First, in my subsequent various careers, I was never cowed by any new ideas--if I understood Aristotle and Kant (and I think I did), I could understand anything. Second, the central life issues that can incapacitate people through their lives--what is the right thing to do, why is there suffering--were things I had already faced at Carleton, and did not incapacitate me. Third, I can always check to see if I am deteriorating mentally by rereading Kant; and so far, so good! Philosophy made and keeps my mind supple, and has allowed me to change careers and to adapt to many different circumstances. I ended up in law; about the only problem that I encountered in studying law (and some law is pretty intellectually difficult) was recognizing how bad the reasoning was in some court decisions that purported to be written logically. The only advice I ever give to someone who is entering university is to take philosophy. It is, so far as I know, the only course that cannot be self-taught.

Class of 1967

Toni Dorfman
I was a philosophy major in the class of '67, but after my brother died in Vietnam in March 1966 I got married almost immediately[ and finished my degree at the University of Iowa, with only two more philosophy courses to go (Reid and Husserl) and no comps to wrestle with. My then husband, Will Valk '65, had been a Carleton philosophy major, but from 1965 to 1969 he was earning an MFA in intermedia, with an eclectic art form, at Iowa.
What can you do with a philosophy degree? In our case, it was start a theater in New York City when I was 24 with another Carleton friend, Ed Berkeley '66, called the Shade Company, in an eighth-floor loft on Canal Street. Our first show was MACBETH. Members of The Shade Company included Dale Fuller '66 and Diane Quaid '68. We had a diverting four years of doing theater in that loft and we con-founded the Off Off Broadway Alliance, now called the Association of Resident Theaters New York (ART?NY). We made a film based on our production of Ionesco's EXIT THE KING, with Ionesco's blessing. The Shade was the seedbed for our professional careers. Since then I've earned an MFA in theater at Columbia and now am the acting director of the Theater Studies Program at Yale, where my now husband, John Gaddis, teaches history. I'm a director (will be doing OUR TOWN with the Yale Dramat in April), actor (am appearing in a production of THE TEMPEST at the Long Wharf Theater with Olympia Dukakis in December), and a playwright (my FAMILY WOLF will be read at the Goodman in Chicago on Saturday). And in the last capacity I'm working on a play called SEMINARS that features a philosophy professor in an unnamed Midwestern university who falls in love with a student. Plato's "Phaedrus" gets some play in that script, along with a direct quotation from David Sipfle on one of my ethics papers, re-attributed.
The philosophy degree I largely earned at Carleton has been the most nourishing major I can imagine. I'm a fervent exponent of the reciprocal relationship between theory and practice in Yale Theater Studies. Mr.Sipfle had long ago drawn my attention to the logical absurdity of moral relativism so I skittered across the quick sands of "critical theory" with dignity intact. Philosophy raises the right questions. You will never regret majoring in it. You can "do" anything with it. It is a joy forever.
With best wishes

Class of 1976

Diane L. Redleaf

A philosophy major really does teach excellent analytical thinking skills and an ability to think more deeply and in a more wide-ranging way about problems than many other majors would provide. I credit my philosophy major with not only getting me interested in law (thinking I would be a legal philosopher at the time) but getting me interested in the sorts of ethical/political/social change issues that I have pursued throughout my career. To be sure, I was pretty much in the clouds when I was in college but that changed in law school and after law school. I have been viewed (sometimes castigated) as an "intellectual lawyer." I especially like applying concepts from one area of law to another, like applying civil procedure and constitutional law to juvenile law areas to which these concepts have not yet been applied. Philosophy training makes for pretty good civil rights lawyers. Complex legal cases are much easier to understand than a whole lot of the philosophy texts one reads at Carleton, so while many people find law school and law practice a challenge (law for me involves a lot of writing and deadlines), a philosophy background makes it all much easier. The magic phrase I heard in law school--learning to think like a lawyer--is not much different from thinking like a philosophy major. Philosophy is also a great major for being a parent! My own kids are very deeply interested in philosophy and it is great fun to talk to them about the host of issues philosophers think about. However, they are ahead of me in their understanding of post-modernism, which was not yet in vogue when I was a philosophy major. They think I'm hopelessly old when I tell them that the most exciting recent philosophers I studied were Wittgenstein and Rawls. Now it's Foucault, Derrida, Beaudriard Baudrillard (very interesting stuff--I've learned a lot from my kids' own papers), and Habermas. I'd love to take a philosophy refresher course on the post-1976 philosophers.

Class of 1979

Nancy Burke

Although I believe I would think like a philosopher (whether successfully or not) no matter what I did, my philosophy training is especially directly relevant to the everyday practice of my profession of psychoanalysis/psychotherapy. After Carleton, I went on to complete an interdisciplinary PhD that was essentially in philosophy (dissertation on Freud, Kant and Husserl, supervised by Paul Ricoeur), but managed to squeak through the requirements for licensure in psychology as well. I now teach, write and practice, and am an advanced candidate at a psychoanalytic institute (i.e., will earn certification sometime in the next 20 years, given the rate I'm going). For many years, I was staff psychologist and director of training of a university teaching clinic offering in-depth psychotherapy to adults with severe and persistent mental illness (schizophrenia, sever "character disorders," and the like), and am currently on the clinical faculty of a psychology graduate program in a medical school.
In my experience, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are essentially
Will Hamlin
Although I was probably one of the worst philosophy majors in Carleton history, I managed to graduate with a B.A. in 1980, and I learned a great deal from my courses with Perry Mason, Maria Lugones, Roy Elveton, and Gary Iseminger. After several false starts, I went on to earn a Ph.D. in English, and now I teach Renaissance literature at Washington State University. My most recent book traces the reception of epistemological skepticism in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; it then goes on to outline the connections I see between skepticism and dramatic tragedy (in plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, and other writers). But I wouldn't have known about the importance of skepticism in early modern Europe had I not taken Perry Mason's class on Descartes, Hume, and Kant.

Class of 1980

David Carr

I am a professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. At Carleton I was particularly interested in ethics and political philosophy (my major paper was a socialist study of democratic theory). I got interested in activist Christianity (in the best sense of the word) from meeting a number of socially radical Christians during a college internship in Atlanta, Georgia and so moved a more theological direction for my masters degree. In the end, I got a Masters of Theological Study from Emory with a focus on critical theory and anthropological study of religion. While doing that I got turned on to Biblical study, though it was hard to see how that would combine with my activism. But somehow (after teaching twelve years in Ohio) I ended up here at Union Theological Seminary, working with amazing past, present and future activists, ministers, artists, etc. My philosophy major prepared me to read and analyze anything. Unlike some colleagues in my field, I have no anxiety whatsoever reading highly theoretical material and my BS-ometer is well honed. Also, I learned to write so others could understand.

Class of 1981

Rick Berglund

Philosophy teaches critical thinking, writing, logic, and open-mindedness to alternative positions about life's greatest questions. When I decided to major in Philosophy I "sold" it to my parents as the perfect major for pre-law...though I was never all that interested in law school! Instead, I've worked in business, where I have been involved in software design and development (directed logic), marketing (persuasive argumentation), investor relations (persuasive argumentation backed by math, which is an exercise in logic), strategic planning (critical thinking and persuasion), entrepreneurship (persuasive argumentation underpinned by a leap of faith--think Kierkegaard), and investing (a leap of faith underpinned by someone else's ability to make a persuasive argument). To me, Philosophy is the quintessential Liberal Arts major. It asks you to assume nothing, prove everything, and to exercise your brain at all times.

Jim Schulman

It took about twenty years before I came to clearly recognize how that major in philosophy I earned at Carleton, and the liberal arts experience in general I'd received there influenced my path in life. After blissfully exploring the mental world for four years via Kant, Quine, & Heidegger, I went off to Architecture school to try my hand at influencing the mechanics of the physical world, eventually becoming a Registered Architect. After mastering many of the aspects of professional architectural practice, however, the philosopher-ecologist buried inside me coaxed me on to explore critical issues of community sustainability as a means of repairing the damage we humans are doing to the earth. I credit the critical thinking skills I honed at Carleton with helping me appreciate the inter-relatedness of the social-physical changes required of humanity to allow us to survive our end of the on-going industrial revolution. Though I didn't read it until I left Carleton, the understandings I gleaned from Professors Sipfle, Mason, Elveton, Iseminger, and Lugones helped me appreciate that the final chapter of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac is a radical ethical manifesto, which every inhabitant of the Western world should read. Under the auspices of a non-profit parent organization, I currently operate a one-year-old surplus, Salvaged, and green building materials store in the Washington, D.C. area called "Community Forklift." (www.CommunityForklift.com )

Class of 1982

J.D. Haas

I was interested in being a trial lawyer since I was young. When I came to Carleton I was interested in many majors, (none of them philosophy), but I ended up being a philosophy major. I enjoyed the courses that I took in the Philosophy Department and I believe that it was valuable preparation for my legal career: I learned to analyze written and verbal arguments, premises, and conclusions. I learned to write persuasive and concise arguments, and I even had some practice in public speaking and defending one's arguments from attack. For me, it was very beneficial training for my legal career.

Steven Cash Nickerson

I attended Carleton from 1977-81 and while there I was Editor of Pegasus, the then Philosophy Journal produced by students.

I am an entrepreneur and lawyer and I buy companies or pieces of companies and work to develop them into something more valuable over a few to several years and then sell them. I am a professional negotiator.

I do believe what you study in College has an impact on how you view the world and therefore what opportunities you see and pursue in your life. College is such a formative time for the brain which is relatively uncluttered at that time. Careers are the result of a combination of opportunities. I recall taking a course from Gary Iseminger in Metaphysics - personal identity. It was David Hume who in pure empiricist fashion said that a "person" was simply a bundle of experiences and I think modern careers are bundles of opportunities pursued.

Philosophy taught me not only to think about things in different ways, but also to understand that people approach issues and ideas in different ways. I have found this skill to be extremely helpful as an entrepreneur, lawyer and all around capitalist. I find myself in any given business situation - especially in negotiations - trying to determine whether I am sitting across from a rationalist, a teleologist, an empiricist, a deontologist, an existentialist, etc. I find people really have a predominant view or philosophy and knowing what that is helps in business negotiations, dealing with employees, bosses, banks, you name it. And people by and large are dying to tell you what they are. For example, if someone is an empiricist, they tend to be skeptical and they are going to want to see proof of an idea - not a study - but they are going to want to see it, taste it, touch it. You can present them with as many studies as you want and their eyes will glaze over.

When it comes to how people will act in any given situation, knowing whether they think it is all about the end or whether some steps must be followed is crucial. If you try to sell someone who is a teleologist based on crossing certain items on a list that are important, they won't buy from you. They just want to know how it ends, what they will get in the end and don't bore them about all the details. If you are dealing with someone who believes that certain principles in a deal are sacred and must be followed and don't take those seriously, you will again lose the deal.

The process of learning how someone thinks is basically Socratic - you ask lots of questions. But unlike the Socratic approach, you should not force them down a path. Philosophy helped me hone my ability to get to the heart of an issue by asking probing questions, listening, following up with other questions and coming to a sense of what kind of "philosopher" I am sitting across from.

Not only that, but Sipfle's Zeno's Paradoxes of Motion is still a good bar riddle and having had a Philosophy professor named Perry Mason is bragging rights in my circles.

Class of 1983

Rob Rothblatt

Architecture:
I guess we choose some things in life, and other things choose us. Buildings chose me as a kid, through legos and building blocks first, then through the idea of what architecture is later. But I didn't know how to pursue an architectural design career, and my father was a History Professor, so we knew about Liberal Arts, and everyone assumed that that is what an academic, intellectual kid does - goes to a Liberal Arts college. So I did. Ironically, in my academic family, I had never actually run across Philosophy as a topic, but I signed up for freshman seminar with Professor Roy Elveton...and....well.....I guess it grabbed me and wouldn't let go. I kept coming back (interspersed with geology classes and art and art history classes) because the fundamentals of it seemed to cut to the core of everything: The Self, the Mind, God, Nature of the Arts, Ethics, Knowledge, etc...And what Architect isn't, in the end, interested in the fundamental principles of just about Everything!
We all have a few chances in life to give ourselves great presents, and allowing Philosophy to choose me, without resistance, made college a great treat. I found other friends ahead of me who also became architects with a Philosophy degree, and there are probably many behind me. The Department was one of the great treasures of Carleton in my day: Professors Elveton, Mason, Iseminger and others. When the Art History Department refused to sponsor an architectural club, the Philosophy Department said an instant yes (Roy Elveton - if the club was truly intellectual), and surely that is proof positive to the old adage: What can you do with a Philosophy Degree? Answer: Anything you want. It worked for me.

Class of 1984

John Estey

[John Estey is Chief of Staff to Edward G. Rendell, the 45th Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. As Chief of Staff, he serves as the top advisor to the Governor and manages the day-to-day activities of the executive branch of state government, including 18 cabinet agencies and the Governor's Office. For more information, visit the web-site: www.governor.state.pa.us/governor/cwp/view.asp?a=1110&q+437965]
My training in philosophy taught me the importance of critical thinking, which was invaluable in my experience in law school and is a key skill (probably the most important skill) in my current position.

Class of 1985

Mark T. Gilbert

Anything can be done with a philosophy major. It's just like life. You can make of it whatever you want. I became a philosophy major because I wanted to learn what the philosophers said. It taught me how to think, how to grow and started me on the path to finding out what is important to me in life. That's the beauty of a Liberal Arts education: It teaches you how to learn and how to communicate. With those two skills you can become whatever you want. Just follow your passion and it can lead you to amazing places.

Class of 1986

Susan Hammel Joyce

What a great question. I think my mother asked it when I was a sophomore and changed from maybe majoring in physics or math to philosophy. Her exact words were "what are you going to do with that?".
Here's my answer 20 years later:
1 Think big thoughts--learning philosophy makes life infinitely interesting
2 Bring analytical rigor to every conversation, project, and book
3 Ask "why" all the time (although not quite as much as my kids...:)
I thought you might like the following excerpt from my standard project proposal. I'm a strategic and financial consultant working mainly with nonprofits. While regular financial people tend to be so deep into details that they can't see concepts, a philosophy major combined with financial expertise has proven to be an effective and winning combination. From my proposal:
My approach: I combine a bottom line focus on results with the big picture brain of a philosophy major and the heart of someone determined to make the world a better place. I left the mainstream financial industry long ago to pursue my passion of helping nonprofit entrepreneurs achieve more of their mission. I bring cutting edge skills to help the nonprofit community strengthen their management capacity around financial issues. Having worked at the Prudential Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and consulted for the Minneapolis Foundation, I'm familiar with the funding community. As a consultant I've worked with many organizations to help them assess their financial position, design effective reports and pursue new funding strategies. I invite you to visit my website to see case studies of nonprofits I've helped become more effective: www.cogentconsulting.net. Most recently I've been named to the Selection Committee for the Washington Post Awards for Excellence in Nonprofit Management, a project of the Center for Nonprofit Advancement.
Last, what can I say except it is true what they tell you at Carleton: if you're trained how to think you can learn anything. How else could a philosophy major succeed in learning finance along with accounting, finance and econ majors from Wharton, the Carlson School, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford, etc. in a management training program at Prudential Financial?
Good luck to one and all. It's a great major no matter what career you choose.

Class of 1988

Christopher Grundy

I teach worship and preaching at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis. A couple of weeks ago in an introductory worship class, I led a discussion about liturgical language. I was trying to help students begin to see the limitations of language, and the metaphorical nature of all liturgical language, as they began thinking about composing prayers. I chose to use Wittgenstein's theory of language games, and his metaphor of language as a raft, as a way of helping to explain this difficult and, for some, unsettling perspective.
When I was a philosophy major at Carleton, I took a course that was on nothing but Wittgenstein. I have used that knowledge numerous times along the way.
Best wishes for your studies.
Grace and peace,
The Reverend Dr. Christopher Grundy

Class of 1989

Stacey Jones

How did philosophy play a role in my life after Carleton? The question brings to mind a recent dinner conversation with a friend's uncle, a good-humored lawyer who enjoys sailing and learning all he can about the French Revolution. We discovered that we had both majored in philosophy, and we both agreed that the subject was completely useless. I think that philosophy may be useless at age 40 (me) and 60-plus (him). But I have no regrets about majoring in philosophy. It was very useful to me at age 20. I think many of us philosophy majors spent our teenage years reading deep books and listening to dark music, trying to solve the mysteries of life, death and the universe. For us serious and logical types, studying philosophy is a way to get all of this out of our system (less serious types watch Woody Allen movies). You realize that so many people over so many centuries have been tortured by the same questions, have tried to answer them, and have failed brilliantly.
Then it's time to do something useful. I know one guy from Carleton who started his own window-washing company, one who defends people on death row in the South, and another who designs web-sites. You could become a philosophy professor and guide tortured adolescent souls through the same rocky passages. I went on from Carleton to graduate school in economics. I now teach undergraduate economics at Seattle University and do research on women's education and employment. I also spend a lot of my time with my children and husband simply living.

Class of 1994

Tom McGeveran

I found this question difficult to answer for several years after my graduation from Carleton. But I think what I have found since is that the question is wrongly phrased. Undergraduates seeking a liberal arts degree should not ask what can be done with a major in philosophy. After all, isn't the meaning of the word "liberal" in the liberal arts to distinguish it from vocational training? It's a period of liberation from professional concerns, and those who are lucky enough to be able to have that time shouldn't squander it learning how to be anything but a good student. If you enjoy philosophy, devote yourself to philosophy and become a good philosopher. When you get your job at the widget factory, worry about being a good widget-maker then.
But students may well ask what, if not widget making, they can do that will gratify a person with a love for reading and talking about philosophy and philosophers. It's an obvious option to return to academia, get an advanced degree in philosophy and become a professor. For me, over time, the prospect of retuning to school started to seem unattractive and expensive. I applied to one program, only to be rejected and told that there was no point in reapplying: there were so few jobs available that, on principle, they had reduced the size of their incoming Master's Degree students to two or three at most, so that the admissions percentage rate was around .12 percent. (The decimal point is intentional.)
I began to work in journalism as a fallback, having worked on the college newspaper while at Carleton. I found very quickly that the job suited me, and that my degree in philosophy was more relevant to the work than my experience at the student newspaper. Reporters construct arguments, by reporting out individual facts and building them into a story. They work with editors on questions of whether the evidence supports the thesis of the piece--and what surprised me is how often this turns out to be not a purely pragmatic, evidentiary exercise but a philosophical one.
Over time as I became an editor, and than managing editor, my main work was to convene groups of editors arguing and debating: Was Hillary Clinton's position on the war in Iraq cynical or merely practical? Does the city of New York have a moral obligation to provide affordable housing to its workforce? What is Alan Ball saying, and what is the point of "Six Feet Under"?
Being able to construct logical arguments helps, but in terms of satisfaction becomes secondary to the pleasure one takes in that exercise. The same goes with the desire to apply those arguments to material of a fundamentally human nature, and the desire to move the terms of discussion about life and society forward rather than backward or sideways. These are all basic parts of my daily routine. I was not hired because I had been a philosophy major. But I love my job for many of the same reasons I loved majoring in philosophy.

Class of 1997

Nate Chiappa

Weirdly, everyone in architecture thinks that studying philosophy is a great jumping-off point for the field. They’re wrong and right. If the study of philosophy is more concerned with the art of asking good questions (rather than the diligence of finding good answers), then it's a great jumping-off point for any field that requires inquiry. Architecture and design are such fields, to a point. Anyone creative (whether in engineering, the humanities, or design) has to ask "what if,"--and then have the tenacity to test the hypothesis. The nuts and bolts of design, especially a technical field like architecture, have to be learned outside the discipline of philosophy. Luckily, the field of architecture understands this and provides numerous masters of architecture programs for individuals without a prior degree in design or architecture. I took that path and found that the people that studied something other than architecture (including those who studied philosophy) were far more interesting and intellectually balanced. And besides, after you've struggled with passage after passage of Derrida, a technical manual on soils is a piece of cake.

Class of 2002

Kurt Kohlstedt



I am currently enrolled in the Masters of Architecture program at the University of Washington in Seattle. At Carleton, I majored in philosophy, but took additional courses in physics, math, art and art history.

I have found that building a 'visual argument' for an architectural object (e.g. a building) bears a number of fundamental similarities to the process of developing a 'philosophical argument,' in theoretical terms. In fact, contemporary design pedagogies emphasize beginning with a 'design concept' from which the design is generated - a theoretical object, not a physical one. Beyond that, the pragmatic ability to defend a building design is critical when it comes to dealing with clients and citizen design review boards. To some extent such defenses rely as much on verbal as on visual arguments.
One of my professors is fond of the following anecdote, passed on from a practicing architect: It is easy to find a new employee who knows how to design and/or render well, but amazingly difficult to find someone you can trust to write a letter to a client.
Increasingly, graduate programs in architecture see people who have liberal arts backgrounds, rather than strictly architectural ones. After all, architecture synthesizes many fields and requires more than mere technical or graphic skills. It also involves developing theoretical frameworks for understanding spatiality and temporality (Foucault and Heidegger have come up more than once in my coursework).
Because of my background, I have excelled at architectural theory, ultimately developing both a professional and academic portfolio in graduate school. In turn, this experience will serve as the basis for potential future work as both a practicing architect and, potentially, a professor of architecture.

Class of 2004

Joseph Graly

One thing you can do with a philosophy degree is have a second major. For two years I worked as a professional geologist after college. I got a little tired of this, so I am now teaching English in Inner Mongolia. But I think I may use philosophy yet. I hope to go to graduate school in a year or two, hopefully doing something with philosophy or philosophy of science. And epistemology and metaphysics will always have a place near and dear to my heart.