At Stanford Conference, Humanities PhDs Hope to Storm Silicon Valley - huffingtonpost.com
Excerpt
Among the great successes of this conference is the take-home message: The skills of critical thinking and contemplation should not merely be left to those in the university; rather, they are essential for public life. Sepp Gumbrecht's praise of academic "uselessness" draws on Plato's famous claim in The Republic that philosophers need to be useless in the sense that they should arise above the narrow haggling of everyday life to grasp the larger questions that face humanity: how will we survive? What is the right way to live? What will we teach our children?
The question for the business world remains how best to make use of such a humanistic skill set. Humanities PhDs can surely perform quantitative tasks and help companies increase revenue by instrumentalizing their critical skills, but then the question becomes, what can companies do to better this world? Patrick Byrne had a few answers, including: "You'll find you don't need that much money." This claim, however, has made him by his own assertion, "one of the most hated men on Wall Street."
Ruth Starkman, Professor of ethics and political philosophy, University of San Francisco