I arrived at Princeton intending to major in Politics, which is our equivalent of a political science department. Now, I’m closing out my junior year in the Philosophy Department.
Like many high schoolers who end up here, political involvement was integral to my body of work and identity coming into college. Princeton is in the nation’s service and in the service of humanity. Civic engagement is one of the application essays. Naturally the University coalesces a group of civically conscious citizens who are interested in politics. In virtue of the subject matter, I defaulted to Politics. I didn’t know much about other fields and figured learning my interests was the point of being here.
Yet immediately, I felt disconnected with studying politics in the formal and academic sense. Political science as a discipline leans quantitative, empirical, and descriptive. Research in the field often attempts to analyze and establish causal relationships between phenomena. Income and voter turnout. Ideology and protest. Lobbying and legislation. I didn’t know at the time, but the science part meant actual technicality, at least to an extent. Political science primarily attempts to understand politics in provable, generalized ways. It asks what happened and why.
This was unsatisfying to me. My background was, and is, in political movement organizing. In a movement, the members mostly agree on what is wrong and why, and then organize in politics to do something about it. The task is not just to understand the world, but to change it, a renowned philosopher once said. By contrast, I wanted college to teach me how to effectuate political progress in my matters of interest. I was inspired by the suffragettes and civil rights crusaders who brought about what they wanted to see. In the modern day, I didn’t know everything, but I knew enough to see the basic arrows of effect driving the worst problems we face. Unlimited corporate electoral spending. Hateful rhetoric and divisive politics. Erosion of trust in science. These are the problems. How do we fix them?
I did try to make it work. Freshman year, I started a student research group and tried to deploy the objective of optimization to determine which political mechanisms were actually effective in affecting legislative change. I touched on other related questions as well. But ultimately, I realized I was trying to shove political movements into the Academy, when really, movements aren’t made in the Academy. It’s not to discount the work of political scientists—understanding the world is important—but insofar as you want to figure out how to achieve something in politics, you have to get out there and do it yourself. While movements and academia are related, they are separate, distinct domains. And that’s okay. As I came to find out, an undergraduate liberal arts education need not directly cure every ill of society tomorrow to nonetheless be meaningful. Learning is intrinsically valuable. I just had to find the right thing to learn; a field I could get an intellectual kick out of.
Sophomore fall, sprawled out across four social sciences and lacking enthusiasm for my classes, I decided something had to change. While the extent of my exposure was reading The Republic by Plato before college and knowing a few upperclassmen in the department, I had a moment of revelation and decided to pivot to Philosophy while in an Upper West Side cafe at New York Climate Week. Call it a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. If I didn’t seek out ideas and learn something new, then why study at Princeton, a liberal arts university?
I threw some philosophy courses into my spring schedule and declared into the department a few months later. By then, I had fallen in love with philosophy. While it’s a field too deep and expansive to sufficiently summarize in one breath, I found my main interests in the triangle of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Metaphysics—the nature of things; epistemology—how we justify knowledge itself; and ethics—how we ought to be. My immersion in these first principles of intellect felt both stimulating and out of my comfort zone.
I find these topics substantive, contestable, and fundamentally challenging. In Introduction to Metaphysics and Epistemology with Professor Gideon Rosen, we considered and debated arguments for God’s existence. In Philosophy, Religion, and Existential Commitments with Professor Lara Buchak, we weighed the merits of utilitarianism as a moral doctrine. In Introduction to Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy with Professor Norah Woodcock, I studied Aristotle’s virtue ethics in Nicomachean Ethics and learned my first philosophical account of what constitutes human flourishing. This is just a glimpse into what a semester in the Philosophy Department feels like.
It was then that I understood why social sciences and humanities were two different disciplines. While social sciences concern the world as observed, the humanities reach into what is called a priori cognition: human reasoning irrespective of external knowledge. For me, this is where the most vivid and compelling ideas lie—imagination unbounded by empiricism. I also began to understand the relationship between the philosophical humanities and the supposed outcomes of a liberal arts education, such as critical thinking, effective argumentation, sound judgment, and moral sensitivity.
Of course, the right field of study depends on the person. However, I feel strongly that the Philosophy Department offers the most effective program at Princeton to ensure your degree comes with an adaptable, sharp mind capable of tackling any problem with efficiency and rigor. Trudging through the impossible questions, the ambiguous resolutions of philosophy teaches you, paradoxically, how to think with certainty and spar with argumentative heft. You can’t test the limits of your rational clarity and evidential resourcefulness until you try to answer something that does not have an answer. Religion, morality, origins of matter: these classroom debates are laboratories of intellectual progress because without a right or wrong, what remains is the strength of your defense—standing only on its merit in the vast cosmos of logic and truth.