Michael Prinzing, Michael Vazquez (2025), Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 11(4), 640ff. (issue dated 2025-12) — DOI-10.1017/apa.2025.10007
Key takeaways
- In HERI longitudinal data on over half a million US undergraduates, philosophy attracts students who are already verbally stronger and more curious and open-minded, yet after adjusting for freshman-year baselines philosophy majors still outperform all other majors on GRE Verbal, LSAT and a Habits of Mind measure.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-167. What follows is what the work says about itself.
The authors test the empirical premise of a traditional argument for philosophy’s value: that studying it improves people’s thinking. Using freshman- and senior-year survey data on over half a million undergraduates at hundreds of US institutions, they find self-selection — students with stronger verbal ability and more curious, open-minded and rigorous dispositions are more likely to major in philosophy. After controlling for those baseline differences, philosophy majors still outperform every other major on verbal and logical reasoning tests and on a self-report measure of intellectual habits. They present this as the strongest evidence yet that philosophical study causally improves thinking.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 95 seconds of active reading over 2 sessions. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-167 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the largest baseline-adjusted observational study of what studying philosophy does, and it is candid about its design; but its causal claim rests on covariate adjustment with self-reported scores, and a reader should take “philosophy causes better thinking” as well supported for verbal-test gains and weakly supported beyond that.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-167, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — t=95s over two sessions is high for this batch, and the method deserves a check, but the skim captures the findings.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-167 is that reading):
- A clean example of causal inference from observational data using baseline adjustment; check how much weight the self-reported test scores and the unobserved-confounder assumption can bear.
- Check the effect sizes in §5.2 and whether the gap on GRE Quantitative is also reported.
- Philosophically the payload is metaphilosophical (the value of philosophy, intellectual virtue); tagging is cognition/social-science because the vocabulary has no metaphilosophy or epistemology word.
Access when seeded: Fetched the Cambridge Core article page with curl; it carries the full text (open access). Read the abstract, §1, the opening of §§2–5 including §§5.1–5.3 and the Figure 1 caption, and §6. Online date 2025-07-11 from citation_online_date; issue date 2025/12.