Consider the following

Recently I wrote a letter to someone who is planning on majoring in philosophy. I was not trying to discourage this course of study instead I was trying to clarify the path. I thought this letter was somewhat insightful so here it is with a brief addendum.

"I was a Philosophy Major at Portland State and will begin studying law in the fall of this year. I graduated in 2005 and thus have had time to clear or rather solidify my thoughts before taking the next step of law school. As you may well know Philosophy is one of the best majors to take if going into law school, you should certainly take formal logic and really focus mastering formal logic. The rest of the biographical, topical and survey courses serve the purpose of honing ones ability to ingest and analyze complex thought.

Philosophy can also be dangerous. As the Proverbs states bad company corrupts good morals. It does not say unintelligent company... We often think of bad company as wharf-rat, scoundrels who rejected their mothers greens and flunked out of the 6th grade. While those kinds of individuals might easily sway a interlocutor of their own cast, they are not the ones that pose the greatest threat to the modern man (especially the modern Christian man).

The great threat comes from intellectual bad company. This threat is far greater because the foundation of their belief is hatred for God, hatred for Morality and ultimately Self Hatred. These moral scoundrels are far more insidious. They often have gray hair and wear bow-ties, which gives them a grandfatherly aura. The canter of their speech can be mesmerizing, as a parent might tell a child a story. At unexpected moments during these warm feelings, one is taken up above humanity to see all of the failings and misconstrued beliefs of their own kind. If you're, "wise enough" there are new and better ways to believe and hidden in this secret society those ways can, "enhance" (replace) the ways you had previously thought. Over time you feel closer (in belief system) to professors than to pastors and have more affiliations (politically, fiscally, whatever) with faculty than one's own family.

The final and most staggering danger, a dark balm. While one's morals are being corrupted, knowledge is puffing them up, creating graveyard monoliths. Arches Calculated in their thought processes, polished to the proper sheen by the scientific method, but inside full of dead Men's bones. That is the real danger. The exultation of knowledge thus seems a fair trade for moral relativism.

What I have discovered outside of philosophy class is that the world is full and beautiful... and the things that are most potent are not written in text books or discovered in laboratories. They are rather the real, beyond clear and distinct, loves, fears and Dreams of Men.