Human_

I don't know how you can be applying to philosophy grad schools without ever having studied Kant. He is one of the pivotal figures in the history of philosophy due to his copernican revolution. He changed the entire metaphysical paradigm and I'm not sure there is another philosopher outside of the past century that has had as much impact on philosophy as Kant. Kant > Aristotle > Socrates > Spinoza > Leibniz > Descartes Everyone has their own opinion though.

How is a 159 going to keep you out of any program? You've taken it three times already and have a respectable score, I would just leave it at that.

So basically you're saying space and time are a priori intuitions? How is this any different than Kant? What does gravity have to do with anything? Many of your premises are also illogical. 1/10 would not read again.

Fix the passive tense. for example: I was able to take -> I took The paper will read much better. Also, using a slash is too informal in this sentence: This paper sparked my interest in neuroendocrinology/sexuality. A slash doesn't connect the two words. Instead, say something like: This paper sparked my interest in the intersection between neuroendocrinology and sexuality. ​Also, "sparked my interest" is a colloquial term and should probably be avoided in this type of writing: This paper intrigued me to examine the intersection between neuroendocrinology and sexuality. You get the idea.

I don't think it fits. You can work with story 1, but story 2 is very general and boring and your phrasing in certain areas could be interpreted as offensive. They want to see why you have a passion and drive for success, not that you're a nice person.

If you have the bibliography then you might as well include it. I wrote a 60 page thesis with 40-some citations and it only took up 3 pages, so I can't imagine that it would make any difference to consider it part of the page count or not.

If you still want an opinion I would be glad to look over it. I don't think it's long. I would think that most serious applicants for Harvard would have enough experience to easily fill 1000 words.

From what I've been reading, it is very possible that people with worse scores than yours are in top programs.