Philhopeful

I'd recommend starting with broad historical works or low level subfield introductions. The "Contemporary Introduction to.." series is a really good place to start. You can also try using syllabi of courses you haven't taken as reading lists. A lot of primary source books and articles will draw on past debates and terminology without flagging it, and it can completely change the way you read even the most basic parts of the source. I'm generally of the opinion though that one can't honestly identify interests until they have some grasp of the big picture though. I read in terms of time based goals, 360 focused minutes a day. If that sort of thing appeals to you, google paymo. Its an easy time tracking app. I think I read about 60:40 in favor of independent reading.

I just put philosophy courses too. I barely put down anything for textbooks because so few of my courses even centered on books though.

Leaving it blank too. It gave me pause though. Also how annoying is MIT's "subjects taken" section?

Does anyone else feel really uncomfortable about writing, "I would be interested in working with X..." I feel like these people are rock stars and have no reason to want to work with me ;_;

I'll drink to that.

Every one is responsible for moving forward in life, and that may require us to make psychological generalizations and justifications to live with our path. However, as a "pursuer of truth" you shouldn't give yourself the luxury of making utterly ungrounded generalizations based on your own biases.

"what do we find the most successful academics doing? research and commentary on historical and contemporary figures. there is value in this, but as a means to an end -- not as an end in itself." This is simply false. There is a branch of philosophers who are mostly occupied by commentary and exegetical debates, but most philosophers at higher departments are creating their own work, challenging paradigms, and engaging in recent debates. The model of the single "genius" philosopher who appears once every 50 to 100 years is just wrong. Even historically that just isn't how it happened. Even Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and so forth had contemporaries with which they were engaged. The fact that history hasn't remembered them all in the same light doesn't undermine that. I for one have no philosophical idols, nor do any of the professors with whom I have come in contact.

Mind blowing right?! I just read him for the first time less than a year ago. I did it in small chunks with the help of some commentaries and online lectures over about two months. But yeah, a lot of people in my department would call him the most important philosopher behind Socrates and Descartes. Fichte is also often categorized under the broad label of "Post Kantian Philosophers". If you like lectures, I know that Oxford has an 8 hour introduction to the main ideas of the first critique for free on itunes. Also, for a unique take on it, you should also check out Heidegger's lecture series collected as The Phenomenological Interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason ISBN 0253332583.

I am too. Still need to complete my statement though. Its hard to know what they find relevant.

GPA and maybe letters of recommendation. I have a few B+s that really worry me. Also, because I studied abroad for a year, I only have a few multi year relationships with professors. Oh--and CV! I have like nothing to put on my CV.

This is my biggest cause of paranoia too. So many emails back and forth obsessed about. I just don't know exactly what they will say.

Good luck Hopephily! Love your name!

I have a few lower ranked phd programs on my list, but nowhere that doesn't have a good placement record. If I only got into those and good MA programs though, I'd definitely go for the MA with the hope of getting into a top program from there.

400 pages a week is really only a little more than 50 pages a day. Completely doable if you're disciplined about it. 1. A lot of articles, but no books in their entirety this semester. 2. For analytic phil of mind, Modularity of Mind by Fodor is a fun yet foundational read. Origin of Concepts by Susan Carey is a good cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy mixture--available on Oxford University Press Online if your library has access to it. It's not generally considered analytic, but I'm also a big fan of Ideas 1 by Husserl. 3. Still not sure. 4. Everything is going well but the thesis. My adviser is really helpful and supportive though. I'm really going to miss my department a lot next year. 5. I'll maybe take a few days off, and will then focus on finishing my thesis. In I'm usually more productive during break than during the semester. 6. I feel as though when I am interested in other fields, its because I see philosophy in them. And here's another question. What is the most controversial philosophical position that you feel sympathy for?

2. I'm still working on my writing sample too--still doing significant restructuring even. I hope it gets done on time. It's a general essay on the epistemology of perception. I feel like I'm wading through a never ending mine field of subtly different views just to ground the question I want to ask. 3. I'm interested in philosophy of mind most broadly, but also epistemology, language, and metaphysics. The stuff I plan to work on professionally is pretty much purely analytic, but I'm also very interested in the phenomenological tradition and continental treatments of intentionality and I think that it influences a lot of my intuitions. I'm okay with continental, but after Derrida it starts to get iffy. 4. I think that my statement of purpose is just doomed to be boring. I'm having a hard time dividing it up between descriptions of my interests and personal history. The last paragraph is school specific. Hopefully the writing sample works out. I'm in kind of a pessimistic mood today. 5. I'd be thrilled to get into anywhere on my list. I think one of the things I'm most looking forward to about graduate school is having a stable departmental affiliation from which to initiate correspondences with faculty. 6. I assume that my dissertation will be on philosophy of mind. I don't see my interest in it fading away, and the market for philosophers of mind seems pretty lively. I'm hoping to graduate a specialist in the philosophy of language too though, and would like a well filled in background on the history of analytic philosophy generally.

So for some reason or other, I feel like every US top 20 department that I look at cites that there are roughly 300 applicants for their Phd program per year. That's a LOT of philosophy students. Who are all those people? Given the lack of transparency of the application process, I have a hard time believing that they aren't lurking the web talking about admissions somewhere. Where could they be? How many of them do you think are actually competitive?

I'm going to give some advice that presupposes that the work has the potential to be just as historic as Dfindley thinks it is. Whether or not American academic institutions are right to prioritize the abilities of a professional student over pure originality, the fact remains that basically every philosophical work that has gained historical prominence has been published through academic institutions or by people who were members of these institutions. Further, these institutions are the ones with the money to fund research. Even if you disapprove of them--you're going to need to engage with them. Applying for a graduate school is the right start. The difficulty is that the feeling that I and I think a lot of other people here share is that the people deciding about whether to offer you a position may not give your work enough attention to realize it for what it is if the other parts of your application aren't in order. Most likely they are going to see few recommenders, a low gpa, read a page or two at most and move on. Just reading your introduction, it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that people will get from a few pages. Like Heidegger and Hegel, it seems like you make a big promise about where you'll end up, but then need the readers patience to even get to the thesis that you ultimately will want to defend. What I'd recommend you do is postpone your application until you can get a few more recommenders and find some new ways of distinguishing your work. If you are really confident in your ideas, then maybe try condensing one of your best chapters into an article showing the promise of your ideas against contemporary schools. If you can get the article through double blind selection into a leading journal, then you'll be in a great position to start conversations with faculty across the country, who could support your application, and the honor of the journal by itself would go a very long way towards getting you in. I think that this is probably compatible with the Heideggarian type of investigation you seem to be gesturing at in the introduction--just try writing on some small issues that you think motivate your argument or that you have something interesting to say about without too much requirement that people buy into your whole system. If asked to do something like this, Heidegger could have exploited his interesting phenomenological observations even without his just as interesting ontology. As a disclaimer--I don't think that people on here are giving you enough credit. I have a hard time imagining any ordinary undergraduate producing what I read. I was a little concerned that you didn't motivate the importance of your primary question--perhaps especially important because a lot of people would dismiss it as nonsensical out of hand (maybe even Heidegger). However, I'd be really interested in seeing how you develop "positive nihilism". If I wasn't literally scraping up every dollar I have on applications, I would consider buying it. You know you might also consider just trying to get some faculty to read it from outside departments and seeing what they say. If you send this to someone who works in the tradition as opposed to whoever happens to be the grad point person that year, you might get some interesting responses.

I'll give it a try. Graduating this year from a top 3 US university with one year abroad in the UK. Home university gpa is around 3.65 with major gpa around 3.75. Abroad gpa is 3.8-9 range. The difficulty of my course load is unusually high, with a significant number of graduate seminars. Writing an honors thesis. No awards or presentations. GRE: high 160's verbal and quant, but 4 writing Areas of interest: Mind, Epistemology, Language, Analytic/Continental Connections Places I'll apply: Berkeley, Stanford, NYU, Pittsburgh, Cornell, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, CUNY, UNC, others probably