isostheneia

My paper's now on the other thread. In terms of secondary literature, I cite a lot of the major commentators who address the issue. I think the one noteworthy one I skip is Stephen Houlgate. He has a couple responses to McDowell in which he emphasizes the Spinozan aspects of Hegel's project. I didn't find it particularly useful for my paper, but you may find it interesting.

Great idea for this thread. My sample is on my academia.edu page: https://www.academia.edu/9947431/The_Logic_of_Self-Consciousness_in_Hegels_Phenomenology_of_Spirit I'd appreciate any comments anyone has, since it's something I'd like to continue working on - these papers can always be better, after all.

It's both about the "Self-Consciousness" chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology, which contains the master/slave dialectic, and about the way the secondary literature on the chapter has developed. Basically, there are two overall readings of that sections - master/slave as distinct individuals and master/slave as parts of one individual's mind. I argue that both readings have significant merit, but interpreters are wrong to think that these readings are contradictory. So I provide a strategy for reading this chapter (really for reading the book as a whole, but I'm only concerned in this paper with the one chapter) that allows us to see these readings as consistent, and in fact as interdependent. My strategy focuses on the role of logic in the relation between stages in the Phenomenology. I see that you've started a writing sample exchange thread. I was initially nervous about making my paper (and identity) public before admissions decisions, but in retrospect, I can't really think of any good reason for that. So I suppose I'll share mine in that thread once I finish (or "finish") tweaking it.

If Hegel counts as continental, then he's definitely the most influential on me from that philosophical genre. If not, I like Foucault and Merleau-Ponty as well. There are a lot of continental philosophers that have been influential on me in that I've learned a lot from attempting to engage seriously with their texts. Attempting to work through, for instance, Being and Time or Truth and Method have been important parts of improving my interpretive skills. But in terms of influencing the views that I hold, and the debates that I'm interested in working on, I think analytic philosophers have been a lot more influential. Sellars and McDowell are particular favorites of mine, but I love Evans, Davidson, and Brandom as well. So I totally agree with your assessment of Davidson, Nastasya!

I know there was a similar poll last year, but I'd be interested to see what this year's pool of applicants is interested in studying. I wish I could've added a few more categories, but polls on TGC are limited to 20 answers. Hopefully the "other" option will suffice. It'd probably be helpful if folks only select their main areas of interest, but hey, I'm not the boss of you.

Welcome, yoink. Glad to have you with us.

Cutting out sections is so emotionally distressful. I don't need this discussion of this part of the secondary literature, right? I mean, who cares about making the paper seem relevant... Let's shorten this exegetical section! Everyone can understand Hegel's argument in four pages, right? Who cares about this framework section! Everyone will surely already know the jargon that I use... Ugh. Why did I use such a long paper. I think it worked well as a 35 page paper directed toward those with heavy background knowledge, but I can just see adcoms looking at the 20-25 page version and being like "What the hell is this kid talking about." After acceptances/rejections, I'll post my writing sample. I truly have no idea whether it's a great paper or totally incomprehensible, which is terrifying since it's the most important part of the application.

It's worth noting that there are a couple other reasons their placement record could look bad. First, it's a fairly small department, so fluctuations from year to year can look worse. They currently have <30 grad students. It also looks like they don't update their website very often, so their listed placements may only be initial placements - they might not update when students find TT jobs. Hard to say though, I haven't looked up their graduates to see where they currently are. It's certainly not encouraging, but I would be unsure how much weight to put on their (apparently) bad placement in recent years. Charles Larmore is another prof there who does some great work on German Idealism. Edit: According to this (http://www.philosophynews.com/post/2013/10/02/Will-I-get-a-Job-Graduate-School-Philosophy-Placement-Records.aspx) study, Brown has placed 58% of its PhDs into TT jobs since 2000, which is 27th among graduate schools.

Also, has anyone seen this? It's Rick Grush of UCSD talking about the admissions process, both at San Diego and in general. A fair amount of what he says is probably common sense for folks on TGC, but there's a lot of useful info as well. If you're willing to watch nearly two hours of him talking about grad apps. His overall position on how best to approach philosophy applications is roughly that the weights of the various parts of an application vary considerably from person to person, so the best way to ensure that you get in to any given program is to improve all aspects of your app as much as possible. Personally he doesn't seem to place much weight on letters of rec or statements of purpose.

Makes sense. As I was tidying up my sample for last week's deadlines, I noticed a way of clarifying a concept that I use for a few pages, so I'm going to see if I can fix it up a bit more. Plus tailor my statement of purpose to my remaining schools. But I agree, once the first deadline is past, there shouldn't be too much more to do on the other apps.

Thanks. That's what I used for most of my applications so far. Still have another seven due between January 2 and 15 though, so the end of the beginning isn't quite yet here for me.

No doubt Wagner's work is an interesting topic capable of supporting plenty of work. As for what topics are acceptable for a dissertation in aesthetics/philosophy of music, I'm afraid I'm just not the most knowledgeable person, as it's not my field of study. I could perhaps confirm with decent reliability a topic that would be acceptable ("Does music present a challenge for Kant's aesthetics?"), but I wouldn't feel confident saying that a particular topic isn't acceptable. Perhaps try emailing a professor or two who works on aesthetics and whose work looks interesting/relevant. They would certainly know better than I. Also, here's a link to the philpapers page for papers in philosophy of music: http://philpapers.org/browse/philosophy-of-music. This should give you some ideas for the sorts of things people do these days in philosophy of music.

I feel ya. Thought of something I should've included in my statement of purpose a few hours after turning in one of my apps. Nothing crucial, but would've been good to mention. Also going through a constant debate whether to use "my current philosophical interests" to acknowledge that they may change or "my philosophical interests" to sound confident. These apps have a way of making minutia seem tremendously important. Incidentally, have other folks already turned in apps with January deadlines, or are you still working on them? I know I'm definitely in the latter camp.

Not exactly, no. To my knowledge, there are circles of a few professors + grad students working in some particular area (so, for instance, a circle doing Aristotelian philosophy of action, or a circle doing German Idealism, or a circle doing Wittgenstein), but I don't get the sense there's any animosity between them. I think that professors are generally quite happy when a grad student who hasn't done a ton of work in their area expresses an interest in learning it. But I do think that there are groups who tend to associate with each other more heavily than with others. So I don't think there would be any difficulty working with professors in circles that one isn't already in. That said, I don't think one could waltz into a graduate seminar on, say, Hegel's Science of Logic without any background in German Idealism and expect to have one's opinions taken very seriously. But as long as students are knowledgeable and/or eager to learn, I don't get the sense that there would be any difficulty. (Of course, since your former professor graduated from Chicago (PhD I'm assuming?), s/he could very well know things that I don't.)

The idea doesn't seem inherently unphilosophical to me, but it's not the sort of thing that's typically done in philosophy of music (at least to my knowledge). Questions pertaining to, for instance, how meaning is conferred on musical pieces, the relation between temporality and music (as opposed to atemporal art forms), or the role of concepts in the experience of music, seem to be more commonly discussed in philosophy of music than the views of particular musicians. So I suppose I don't see what would make your idea more philosophical than musicological, but then again I don't know very much about what you would be planning on writing. In terms of a statement of purpose, the advice I've frequently heard is not to tell an adcom what you want to say in your thesis, although you certainly want to give them an idea of what you're interested in working on. Most people's interests and views change in graduate school, and adcoms want "teachable" students. I've only heard this in the context of American schools, though, so it's possible that it works differently in other countries.

This is true. Social Thought accepts ~3 students per year and is fully funded, whereas MAPH accepts students from all humanities departments (though students still specialize in their intended area of study) and is unfunded, and is really expensive at that.

Absolutely! I think it's a pretty small field in general. Though I haven't read the books you mention, so I take it you'd recommend that I do. Totally, I didn't mean that Frege pioneered the use of symbolism in logic (since it goes back to Aristotle at least). I'm interested in the sort of elucidation Frege thought we could receive regarding the structure of thought by translating ordinary language into symbolic propositions. I think there's an intuitive answer that goes something like "Well, it's easier to see what's going on - what is being quantified, what the predicate is, etc." But I think the answer is both more complex than that and is somewhat important for his overall project. You're totally right though, it's not like the symbols themselves are important in any given symbolic proposition.

Yeah, I can't really imagine needing 2-3 pages of single spaced text to state your research plans and interests in faculty. So I would assume double spaced.

Yeah, I'm very familiar. I'm not exactly sure why they're so strong in placement, but they put a heavy emphasis on pedagogy and making sure students hit the market with excellent teaching skills. That way job candidates don't have to rely solely on research skills. Perhaps that helps. The professors who run the placement program are also just very well connected, and perhaps that's more important. In terms of admission practices, they emphasize the writing sample even more than usual. I'm under the impression that if they really like your sample, not that much else matters very much. I do think they're looking for students who are "teachable" - that is, they don't want folks who have already decided all their positions on all philosophical topics and know what they're going to write in their dissertation. They're indeed strong in German Idealism. They're also big on ancient (Aristotle especially), philosophy of action, and Wittgenstein. They've lost a few professors in recent years (Forster to Bonn, Schechtmann to Wisconsin, Frey to South Carolina, and Cohen died last year), but they're doing three job searches this year, so they should be bringing some new faces in coming years. I'd be more than happy to answer any other questions about the department as well.

There are a few topics I'm interested in. The primary one is tracking philosophical conceptions of logic over the past ~250 years. There's often assumed to be a pretty big break between how folks like Kant and Hegel conceived of logic, and then folks like Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. I think there's more continuity than is often realized. There's been some good recent work comparing Kant and Frege, but I think Hegel has an interesting role in there as well. Part of this interest involves the significance of symbolism - what we today would recognize as logic looks very little like what folks from the history of philosophy recognized as logic. A lot of that has to do with Frege's emphasis on using a Begriffsschrift, and I think it's interesting why that's important for his project. I'm also interested in logicism and neo-logicism, or more generally the relation between logic and math. A lot of this pertains to the relation between metatheory in logic and foundations in math. Overall, there's a tradition in thought about logic that conceives it as something like "the form of thought as such." Taking this conception as a starting point, an understanding the relation between mind and world would thus put heavy emphasis on the significance of logic. So logic is interesting in connection with general conclusions and methodology of epistemology and metaphysics.

Cool stuff, sounds interesting. Are there people who specifically argue against that position? Or is it more that others are implicitly committed to denying your claim? In any case, spelling out the reasons in favor of the body as a moral boundary seems fruitful.

I can't comment on most of your questions, unfortunately. But I can say a few things. First, I've heard positive things about the relationships between advisers and students, though I've heard it regarding a few professors in particular. Davis, Kukla, and Lance are all good to work with, from what I heard. Possibly Pinkard too. Don't know about other professors. I've heard nothing about the atmosphere among cohorts or how competitive the students are, but I did hear that the climate is really good for women/minorities. I don't know anything about teaching/mentorship, but I have seen some data that suggests that their placement rates are good. My exposure to the sort of work they're interested in is anecdotal, but some of their faculty seem pretty big on Sellars/Pittsburgh school epistemology, and integrating that material with work on truth. As in, I heard a few of them get into a 2 hour long conversation at a conference about how absurd deflationism is. And there's Pinkard always doing his Hegel stuff. I haven't really asked about other subjects, since these tend to be the ones I'm interested in anyway.

I don't exactly have inside info at Georgetown, but I took some summer courses in the phil dept there a few years ago, and some of my professors from undergrad are quite close with some professors there and have talked to me about the department. So I know at least a bit about the kinds of work some of the faculty are interested in doing/promoting, but not with any intimate detail. Do you have any particular questions that I might be able to answer?

Hi folks. I'm wondering what kinds of papers/topics other people are using for their writing samples, just because it seems interesting to know how other applicants are approaching this all-important aspect of applications. Is your sample on one of your primary areas of interest? Does it fall more on the side of reviewing a debate, or introducing a new argument? Is it on historical or contemporary issues? I'd love to hear whatever you're willing to share, understanding that some folks might not want to be too specific for sake of anonymity. Also, I'd be interested to hear what people who applied in previous years used as their writing samples. Personally, I'm submitting a version of my BA thesis. Part of it is reviewing the positions in and stakes of a debate concerning Hegel, and part of it is suggesting a new interpretation which tries to bring out the best of both sides. One of the biggest struggles I've had is to avoid using too much "Hegelese," so hopefully adcoms find it clear enough.

Nice list you've got there, a_for_aporia. What are your areas of interest? Currently procrastinating hard for Monday deadlines. Given the amount of stress I'm enduring while submitting applications, I can only imagine what it'll be like while waiting to hear back.