ZiggyPhil

I'm an extremely informal person, but I address all faculty as Prof.______ until explicitly told to do otherwise, which has only happened with one professor. Even the professor I currently TA for I call by last name, despite the fact that he signs emails with his first name. I'd prefer to use first names with everyone, but until I hear "Feel free to call me John" or some such, the risk of offending (even if that risk is quite small) outweighs the benefits of informality. I just think how I would react. Since I really want to be addressed by my first name, if someone addressed me as "Mr. Phil" the first thing out of my mouth would be "please, call me Ziggy" (that's not my real name of course).

Of course teachers should be reasonable, but I think it's pretty obvious that "I have to prepare for combat" (your example) and "I just forgot to turn it in" (the OP's situation) are fundamentally different, and that the former merits a special exemption while the latter does not.

You're not going to like hearing this, but I think it's important enough that I'm going to say it anyway. I looked up Wipf and Stock, and I read through their (rather lengthy) "Author Guide". They are clearly a vanity press. It appears they publish some works on a more traditional model in order to achieve some "credibility", but a wolf in sheep's clothing is still a wolf. They make their money by charging authors for copy editing and/or typesetting (depending on which imprint you use). After a very small initial print run of 20 or so books (which all go to the author, and which are funded by a part of the fees authors pay), they operate as a print on demand service with no marketing and essentially no distribution system. If you're happy to have your book printed in this way that's fine, but please realize that philosophy departments will not view it as a serious work of scholarship published by a legitimate academic press, and that including it with your applications will be devastating to your chances of admission. For any admissions committee who receives it, I'd estimate there's (at most) a 0.1% chance it will be seen as a positive. It will near-universally be seen as a black mark against your application, and many (most?) departments will reject your application based solely on its inclusion. I'm sorry if this is upsetting, but I am trying to be of help. I suspect you will want to contest my characterization of your publisher, but I will not argue that point further. Of course you may well be admitted somewhere you didn't submit the book, but if you are not admitted and decide to apply again next year, I strongly urge you not to include or make any mention of the book on your application.

My conception of what philosophy as a discipline was was largely the continental tradition (including of course the ancients and early moderns that are embraced to some extent by both traditions). As someone who had never really studied it, philosophy was for me characterized by the likes of Plato and Nietzsche, and I wasn't particularly interested in that stuff. I took an intro ethics course late in my (first) college career, and loved it, but thought it was too late to change directions. After graduating I was listening to a lot of courses that are available free from the likes of Yale and Berkeley (which are awesome by the way if you have broad interests), and stumbled across John Searle's Philosophy of Language class. I was blown away. I never knew philosophy was anything like this, and I've been all-analytic since. Went back to do an undergrad phil degree, and now I'm in an M.A. program. I avoided continental stuff in my second undergrad, but I just finished my first continental seminar, and I'm sure I made the right choice. We read Nietzsche and Foucault and some others, and while there was some interesting stuff there (mostly in Foucault), it doesn't grab me the same way analytic does, and I can't stand the writing style. I may dip into it from time to time (like I said, I have wide academic interests), but it's not something I want to devote a significant part of my life to studying. I'm not sure I buy this idea that the distinction between these schools is breaking down. My department is quite pluralistic - we've got a couple analytic people, a couple continental people, a couple who do applied ethics (which I sort of think of as outside either of those two, but I'm not all that familiar with the field, so I could be wrong), a eastern phil prof, a christian phil prof, a phil of race prof, etc. Still, I get a bit frustrated with the way philosophy is done in my continental seminar, and the continentally oriented students get a bit frustrated with what we're doing in the analytic seminar. There are of course going to be people who like both, but my admittedly small sample leads me to think that's a minority.