Something that’s weirdly stuck with me (even though he’s not my favorite philosopher) is Kant’s Categorical Imperative which says, briefly, do only the things that would still be okay if everyone did them.

I think it fills in a nice gap left by the golden rule (treat others as you’d like to be treated) in drawing attention to how some things which don’t seem to do much harm would be a major problem if broadly adopted.

The idea of "correlation does not equal causation" allows me to find a better understanding of how things are connected. If you notice two phenomena often coincide, you might assume one causes the other. However, just as likely is that the two phenomena are each distinct effects of a common cause.

that you are making a big mistake to view the present or past events only from your current perspective.

The Veil of Ignorance informs my political philosophy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

I disagreed with one of my Philosophy course instructors vehemently regarding religion and pushing religious views on others.

Due to my inability to "suck it up and shut up" during class, I was frequently at odds with the professor.

Due to that, my papers were graded more and more harshly. At the middle point of the semester, I had a D.

What my shitty professor taught me was that sometimes you just need to regurgitate what the person in power believes just to survive. I quit raising my hand or arguing during class, and I just word vomited his BS during assignments and tests. He smuggly thought he won me over to his views by the end of the course.

I walked with a B at the end of the course. After the final grades were official, the professor wanted me to join an advanced Philosophy course with him.

In some terms or another, I told him that I would not join the additonal course. I also mentioned that I felt that he used his lecturn as a pulpit to push his views on a younger generation. I told him that he didn't have a convert, but he did teach me a lot on what not to be.

I studied philosophy. It helped me form my own worldview and ask the big questions most people ignore or let manipulators answer for them. It gives you freedom to have control over what you think. If you don’t figure it out for yourself, someone else out there would gladly do it for you in a way that serves them.

The biggest thing I learned in philosophy is that there are a significant number of people that are just fine with terrible things being done to a person if they didn't take any precautions against it. Apparently it's fine to rob someone if they didn't lock their door.

Knowing how many people are apparently incapable of basic abstractions has been eye opening.

Being able to break down arguments into syllogisms in AEIO form. There are 256 distinct forms and 24 of them are valid logical statements.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_valid_argument_forms

Plenty. Learning how to define and identify common fallacies is maybe the most immediate thing that comes to mind.

I didn’t major in it but took a few courses. I think just learning different frameworks to analyze situations is most helpful. When something in the world is complex, you at least have tools to approach an understanding of it.

Cultivating and sharpening the ability to distinguish between what actually happened vs my (or others’) narrative about what happened is one of the more valuable tools I have acquired.

My philosophy class turned my vegan, no one else in the class was to my knowledge nor something I expected. But when discussing the social contract, it felt so arbitrary that I had a moral obligation to not harm humans but nothing for animals. Both of their suffering is understandable to me, so why is one permissible and the other forbidden?

Anyways, like 8 years ago now and still vegan. I'm very much not an "animal" or "nature" person. Just someone interested in philosophy and came across something that bothered me deeply. Obviously it was the most impactful class I have ever taken.

Took an intro.

Logical fallacies, which lead me to the informal ones. Those are highly useful in corporate settings. Suck cost, circular reasoning, and ought from an is.

Not every day but pretty much any time I hear or read someone say something about Kant or Hume I know that they are wrong and not bother. I would say the same about Plato but he doesn't really have any modern apologists.

Harvard has made Sandel's "Justice" course available online for free. Definitely worth a watch.

Almost all philosophical conflicts boil down to people using slightly different definitions of a particular word. The trick is to find out which word it is, though, and it's often not trivial.

Over-determinism of the subject

Philosophy was part of our curiculum at school, it was only one term, but it did introduce the concept of philosophy to me.

And made me realize that I had been doing it for years before.

It made me realize the importance of reasoning and how to apply critical thinking.

Learned and use in which senses of the terms? 😜

"This is why everyone hates moral philosophers."

-Henry the pointy boots aficionado

While I didn't take any philosophy courses in college, I took most of an intro to one as a high school elective (long, dull story involving school district boundaries) one of my roommates and childhood friends was a philosophy major, and I too was an insufferable twat*! I had that textbook, read Bertrand Russell's history of Philosophy, Robert Pirsig, some Socrates and Plato, and essays and excerpts here and there. We had lots of self-important discussions that would have been much better if I actually had been drunk or high. That said, I hope I always had a certain humaneness that let my edges soften over the years.

I have found that a simplified and a bastardized version of the Hegelian dialectic is a pretty good way to approach many everyday conflicts. I'm not rigorously analyzing every little thing (see quote above), and for me the influence boils down to little more than being open to the idea that the "truth" at least might lie somewhere in the middle of two diametrically opposed viewpoints. Even if it doesn't, there is value in the analysis, to understand people's experiences and motivations, and if they must be dismissed or opposed, why and with what level of vigor.

* - Still am, probably, but also WAS.

Lol this is a weird one but I took a business philosophy course and "the 30000 foot view perspective" is something I started doing with everything it's helped break me out of a singular model of thinking

Simply put: Not a thing. What the teacher taught was mostly text work (he was primarily a language teacher), and as such, topics like logic and deduction were not his strong points...