Griswald

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a great (online) resource, and it's free. Each entry is written by a professional philosopher who is an expert on the entry's topic. And the bibliographies are usually quite good, so you can use those for further reading references. I usually prefer the SEP to introductory textbooks, and most philosophers that I know use the SEP whenever they start to learn about a new area. Looking now, there are entries on Consequentialism, Deontological Ethics, Contractualism, Feminist Ethics, and Virtue Ethics, which would collectively provide a nice introduction to normative ethics. They also have an entry on Metaethics. As for applied ethics, there are many entries that look interesting: Business Ethics, Theory and Bioethics, Ethics of Stem Cell Research, Feminist Bioethics, and many more.

As a 2nd year PhD student, my advice is: don't underestimate the importance of a department's being interested in its graduate students. Many programs, even top ones, simply aren't; and grad students suffer for it. I think that x's courting you counts strongly in its favor, though it's not decisive, of course. Try not to settle on a program until you've visited both places and talked with the students there.

Of the reputable MA programs in the US that I'm aware of, none would require that you take more undergraduate courses before being admitted. Many MAs (in the US) explicitly welcome applications from people in your situation, with some exposure to philosophy but with undergraduate degrees in other fields. If you don't have letter writers from professional philosophers, however, then I would advise you to take some classes (you could just audit; I did this) with the aim of impressing the instructors enough that they'd be willing to write for you. That's speaking more towards graduate school applications though, and your question was about preparing for graduate school. Here, my advice is: read as much as possible in your areas of interest, but also take time to read outside your areas; write often, seek feedback, and revise; learn skills that are relevant to your areas of interest (e.g. foreign languages, mathematics, sciences).

For what it's worth, I didn't submit GRE scores to a very highly regarded program that didn't require them two years ago, and I was waitlisted there. I wasn't admitted in the end, but I don't think that had anything to do with the GRE. I was told that most of the people who received first-round offers accepted.

If it's not a huge financial burden, I see no reason why you shouldn't apply to the programs you mention. I won't try to estimate your chances, as this is an impossible exercise. Like most other applicants, your application has strengths and weaknesses. Based on what you've said, it seems like you'll have good letters of recommendation, but, as you mention, your grades might be slightly below average. Rather than trying to estimate your chances, I suggest you focus your efforts on your writing sample and the GRE. The writing sample, especially, is where you should try to outshine your grades.

You should ask the department that offered you admission exactly what "waitlisted for TAship" means. It's unclear as stated whether you can assume a tuition waiver. The salient difference between these two results is that you now can choose to attend the first university, possibly without funding, whereas it's still possible that you will be rejected by the second university. If you can afford to pay your own way through the program at the first university, this is very good news. If you can't, and if the funding doesn't come through, then you will be forced to either decline the offer or find another source of funding, such as external fellowships or loans.

No decision you make at this point will "secure" you placement in a top PhD program, so you needn't worry about that. Also, I'm puzzled by your judgment that GSU's program doesn't fit your interests. It's well known that the program there is quite strong in philosophy of mind. Anyway, my own opinion is that you should allow for the possibility that your interests may change during your MA.

Tough decision. Regarding the consideration that UMSL is close to WUSTL, let me chime in with just one piece of advice, on the assumption that you plan on applying to PhD programs. While working with faculty at WUSTL may be intellectually rewarding for you, be careful not to overestimate the value that that will have when it comes to PhD applications. In my experience, having gone through an MA, the most important thing is doing really well in your program. Sometimes (not always, but often enough) students who pursue too much stuff outside of their department end up stretching themselves too thin and extra-departmental activities end up having and adverse effect. A two year MA goes by really quickly--you'll need to start thinking about your PhD applications during your first summer. It's hard enough to forge good relationships with faculty in your home department in that time, let alone make meaningful connections in other departments. Admittedly, I don't know much about the situation at UMST and WUSTL, but I will say that the most successful MA students that I know put most of their effort into doing really well in their home departments (i.e. standing out in seminar discussions, writing excellent term papers/writing samples/theses) and tended to minimize extra-departmental activities.

I think that an attempt to provide valuable information to those participating in this otherwise opaque and sometimes alienating process shows a good deal of integrity and sound judgment.

The story so far is consistent with you being number 2 on the wait list, which would make your chances pretty good. Don't despair! Also, I really doubt that the department is trying to mislead you by telling you that you might have to wait until the 15th. This is just how wait lists work: your fate depends on the decisions of those already admitted, and those decisions often happen on or around the 15th. It's absolutely common to get rejected from schools ranked lower than the schools that admit you. The explanation is simple (I assume by rankings your referring to the PGR). Your chance of being admitted depends on many factors, most or all of which don't correlate with faculty reputation, which is what the rankings track.

I agree that AOI is important. I'm not sure I agree that it's more important than previously thought because, as far as I know, it's always been considered very important. Anyway, I think it's basically impossible to determine anything conclusive from such a small data set. There are lots of other explanations of what's going on. Maybe applicant 1 had a particularly high GRE score and Vanderbilt really cares about GRE. Maybe the reader of 2's glowing letter from Professor X is close friends with Professor X and knows that her students have always been good in the past. Also, do try to keep in mind that the application process contains a lot of randomness. Maybe the reader of 3's very solid writing sample was just sick of reading essays on Nietzsche that day.

I doubt that all of the acceptances are fake. Ianfaircloud's close friend was admitted and told Ian about his phone call from Chalmers.

Just to clarify, is the meta question whether you can promise that, if she's unhappy, you'll apply for UK programs which start in 2016? In order to make that promise you'd have to be prepared to apply out at the end of this year, right? And that means you'd need to start asking for letters from your new professors during your first semester in the program. Also, it gives your partner just a few months to decide whether she would rather return to Europe. It might be more sensible to plan on spending two years in the US, reserving the possibility of applying out again in 2016 for programs that begin in 2017. This would give you enough time to get an MA from your US institution and strong recommendations from the professors there, and your partner would have enough time to make a really informed decision about whether she can live in the US long term. Of course, this advice completely depends on the details of your circumstances, so take it with a grain of salt.

Yeah, it was Yale. I think I might disagree with your last sentence, ian. But it depends on how much is a lot and what you mean by "follow." I'm inclined to say that, at least fairly often, not a lot of people post when a department releases. I only see two acceptances to Brown posted, but they must have made around 10 first round offers. That's just one example, though, and I'm sure for other schools you could make the case that there are a lot of posts. I don't know. Anyway, here's what might be a better argument. Let H stand for "Harvard has released first round acceptances (at time t)" and A stand for "There's a Harvard acceptance posted on TGC (at time t)". We want to know P(H|A). I claim that P(A|not-H) is very low: the base rate of fake acceptances is very low. Then, by Bayes' theorem, P(H|A) is close to 1.

The "induction" in the first link doesn't work. Arguments by induction establish that certain properties hold for all natural numbers. And while it's true that 0.1 > 0.09999... with k repeating 9s, where k is any natural (hence, finite) number, it's false that 0.1 > 0.0999... with infinitely many 9s. This is why teachers of freshman calculus are always saying things like, "Remember, infinity is not a number." The claim you're trying to refute can be made quite precise using the definition of a limit. That's where you should be directing your arguments.

I know at least one person who's in at a very big name school (not Harvard), but there aren't any posts for this school on TGC yet. A lot of people just don't post on TGC, so it's really hard to say when a post is fake if your only evidence is TGC.

Does anyone know if Stalnaker was on the faculty list for MIT? I know he's retiring very soon, and if he wasn't on the list, that would be a noteworthy fact. EDIT: just checked and Stalnaker was included as part-time faculty with a note about his upcoming phased retirement.

This is good advice. Also, the Georgia State philosophy department has George Graham, who specializes in mental disorder and philosophy of psychiatry. It looks like GSU has a new neuroethics program as well, though I've only just glanced at the website.

First, let me say that all of the questions mentioned so far are good ones. I would add--and this seems to be something that doesn't get mentioned enough when this topic comes up--that it can be very informative to engage faculty and students in philosophical conversation. For example, you might find that, in response to a generic question like "How's the philosophical atmosphere here?" people answer, "Oh it's quite good, collegial, etc." That's reassuring but doesn't reveal much about the unique character that each department has. So, in addition to a question like that, you might also try to strike up a philosophical debate, e.g. to a faculty member whose work you know: "I know you've defended such and such view, but doesn't that run into the following objection..." It's interesting to see how discussions like this can confirm or disconfirm answers to the generic questions. Again, I'm not saying that you shouldn't ask the questions mentioned above; I'm just adding that a very good way to get a feel for what it might be like to be a member of a department is to do a lot of philosophy when you visit.

My advice would be to dive in! Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" is a classic and should be less intimidating than the Aufbau, though I'd also encourage you to not be afraid of the latter. You might find the SEP articles on the Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism helpful too.

I was accepted by Tufts a few years back without any formal background in philosophy. (I did manage to audit a graduate seminar at a different university the semester before applying, however, and the professor helped me with my writing sample and wrote me a letter. I imagine that helped me somewhat.)

Your intro needs work. First, it doesn't seem obvious to me that a hammer is disposed to drive nails. It seems more natural to me to say that a hammer's function is to drive nails. Since your essay intends to treat "dispositon" and "function" as technical terms you might not want to begin with unsupported, implausible assertions. Second, it's not clear from the first paragraph what your argument will be, and then the second paragraph begins very abruptly with "I proceed as follows." I think these sort of game plan paragraphs are nice for writing samples but they need to follow at least one paragraph that sets up the debate very clearly and lets the reader know the main thrust of the argument. Also, your second paragraph doesn't so much state the game plan as it makes more vague gestures at what the argument might be. Fix these two paragraphs and the essay will be much more engaging.

(1) It could conceivably be days after the 15th. I'm not sure about weeks, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's happened before. (2) If you haven't heard from X by the night of the 15th, you should accept at Y. If X then admits you after the 15th, you will have to get a written release from Y in order to accept X's offer. My understanding is that it's not difficult to get written releases. Also, if you get an offer on the 15th from Y, and you're not sure you want to accept, you should just ask Y how long you have until the offer goes to someone else.

I hear you, and I'm sorry you're having a difficult time. My suggestion was just that you might avoid making things worse for yourself by being more discreet here. I have no idea who you are, but my impression was that if someone from CUNY read your posts, they might be able to figure out who you are. I might be wrong about that though. Anyway here are two more things you could try. Contact someone in the department who knows you and will respond to your emails--one of your letter writers, perhaps--and ask them to introduce you to the professors you're interested in working with, or ask them to help you arrange a meeting. Another idea, since your in NY/NJ, is to try to network at nearby departments. Maybe you can sit in on a class at NYU/Rutgers/Columbia/Princeton and see if anything comes of that (EDIT: I see this has been mentioned above, so I'm seconding perpetualapplicant's advice)

Logos, I don't mean to sound preachy or anything, but you might want to be more careful about what you say on these threads, especially given that you've made yourself easy to identify. I remember you saying some pretty inflammatory things about your department awhile back when you were worried about being admitted. It's not uncommon for faculty and current grad students to read these forums. If people in your department read your remarks, I imagine they could be offended, and that, as a consequence, they would not want to work with you. I'm not saying that anything like this has actually happened, but it's something to keep in mind, I think.