The philosopher was speechless in the face of the mathematics because he was not mathematically literate enough to recognize its irrelevance. It all comes back to the issue of why one learns mathematics. Probably, if a student intends to be a physician, an engineer, a lawyer, a businesswoman or a humanist, she will never need to calculate derivatives and integrals. But she must understand that mathematics provides useful tools and language for describing, measuring and predicting all manner of natural and human phenomena. Moreover, she should know how problems particular to her discipline get translated into the language of mathematics, to what extent realism is lost in the translation, and how accurate, reliable and relevant the results of mathematical analyses are to the original problems.
College students arrive having taken mathematics for many years.
Most Penn students who need Calculus for their majors have studied some in high school. These students have missed the whole point of studying mathematics in general, and Calculus in particular. It's as though one learned the conjugations of all the regular and irregular French verbs, but didn't bother to understand the meaning of any of them. We must be using it to solve real problems. Thus, we must be able to translate something from the real world into mathematical language, solve the resulting mathematics problem, and interpret the answer in the language of the real world.