Why Philosophy Majors Should Learn to Code (and Vice Versa)

In the hallways of Berkeley, there's often an unspoken divide between the humanities buildings and the engineering departments. Philosophy majors read Kant in coffee shops while CS students debug code in windowless labs. But what if I told you these two disciplines are more complementary than contradictory?

As someone who straddles the worlds of theoretical physics and philosophy, I've come to see coding not just as a technical skill but as a form of applied philosophy. Here's why I think philosophers should learn to code, and programmers should study philosophy.

Logic: The Shared Foundation

Both philosophy and programming are built on formal logic. The syllogisms that Aristotle developed are not so different from the conditional statements in your average Python script: