Monadology

Do we know how rampant recommendation inflation is?

You mean just like the way sexual assault is underreported because the most common social responses include: (1) Alienating skepticism (2) Jumping to defend the assaulter (3) Blaming the victim (4) Implications that the accuser might be crazy or a liar?

Vineyard, you're starting to get more aggressive and it's not going to help anyone. I understand that you're frustrated, but perhaps discussion of Ludlow's innocence/guilt should remain in the thread you started about that issue.

Congrats to the Stanford offers!

I just resubmitted them every time. I'd rather do that than call every department to ask if they had them on file (and then trust that they'd find them).

As far as I can tell, this information doesn't suggest anything (if you meant it in an evidential sense) other than that Ludlow wants us to believe it was all made up. He might want us to believe that because it's true or he might want us to believe that because he wants to avoid legal trouble. In addition, many of the facts cited are consistent with some form of actual sexual assault happening. Victims of sexual assault who are romantically involved with their assaulters may initially try and make sense of what happened to them in more charitable terms because it is a very difficult experience to process and cope with and it's hard to understand why someone you feel very positively about would do something like that. But romantic feelings (before or after the fact) doesn't affect whether she actually consented or was able to consent to what Ludlow allegedly did to her. They are consistent with being negatively affected by the experience: emotions can be ambivalent or waver between extremes. Finally we don't know what 'positive' is supposed to mean. There is also the power dynamic to keep in mind. Also the fact that Ludlow wasn't named in the lawsuit and didn't have criminal charges leveled against him doesn't say much either. Sometimes the experience of going through the legal process in such cases that involve directly confronting their assualter can be frightening and traumatizing enough for the victim that they choose to take more indirect means if they take any means at all.

MApplicant, do you mind contacting Eric Schwitzgebel with your data? Given his post about the effect of undergraduate degrees on PhD admissions, he might find it really interesting and might post about it on his blog, which could get the word out if these trends are genuine (anecdotally I can kind of confirm them, but I don't remember what undergrads all my classmates went to).

I don't think any bombardment scheme is a good idea. I doubt most admissions committees take time sending out rejections because they fail to respect the applicants they reject. There are probably good procedural reasons (and when there aren't good procedural reasons, there are probably good professional and personal reasons: these people have lives). I understand how frustrating it can be (I've been through this process four times previously), but I think organizing some kind of campaign would be a bad idea given how little information we have about the admissions process and why it works the way it does.

If you run out and find yourself in need of more marathoning, I highly recommend the original BBC series which was on Netflix as well this time last year (hopefully it still is).

Congrats to the Yale offers!

Indiana takes its time on wait-lists, they can come out up to two-weeks after their initial offers are sent.

Oh, neat! Last I checked he was at Hiram which didn't have a graduate program. I bet that would be a pretty exciting intellectual opportunity.

[Heidegger is my stand-in philosopher here and metaphysics my stand-in analytic subdiscipline, but it's an arbitrary choice so don't read too much into it] I'm a little surprised at how the issue of overlap is being approached in terms of usefulness. SHP framed it that way ("How could I make use of Heidegger in an argument for X") as did maxhgns (though I think maxhgns has a broader sense of what can be philosophically valuable, the idea that overlap has to do with a certain sort of use seems to be present). I take the issue of overlap or relevance to be something more along the lines of: "Can we understand Heidegger in a way that his position can be articulated relative to contemporary work?" That relationship, if there is one, can be articulated a number of ways among which are: (1) Heidegger gives identifiable arguments for position X in the contemporary literature (2) Heidegger has a position distinct from any of the current positions in the contemporary literature, but is still identifiable in the terms of the debate (3) Heidegger rejects the terms of the debate in the literature but in a constructive way. The way Sellars, for instance, brings Kantian insights to bear on epistemic concerns is either in the sense of (2) or (3) [i'm pretty sure (3), but I'm not familiar enough with the terms of the debates at the time "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" was published]. In either case, there isn't going to be any perceivable 'use' to members of the debate prior to the relationship of the philosopher to the debate becoming clear. This is especially true in the case of (3). All of which isn't to say that metaphysicians should drop working on issues regarding plural quantification and read Heidegger (as a side note, I'm not especially attached to the idea that Heidegger is relevant to contemporary metaphysics, but I'm not ready to dismiss it), but that we shouldn't out of hand dismiss continental philosophy as being irrelevant just because we can't immediately see how we can make arguments with Heidegger for or against positions on plural quantification. Especially not as more and more people are doing work showing just how much continental philosophy does make contact with issues in contemporary analytic philosophy. I do think it's a bad idea to think of philosophical value purely in terms of argumentative use. It's often valuable to understand what we're taking for granted to end up with the debates we have and what novel ways we can approach it. tl;dr I get being pragmatically dismissive of continental philosophy (you can't read everything, maybe it doesn't interest you) but I don't see the point or the need for being theoretically dismissive of continental philosophy (it's irrelevant; it's not rigorous; it's nonsense). Especially when there are plenty of intelligent people who not only find it interesting and valuable but, these days, there are plenty of intelligent people who are showing why it can be interesting and valuable to analytic philosophers.

Does your laptop use Windows 8? The iteration of Windows may make a difference. The tablet will have Windows 8, which is very recent. Most laptops probably don't have Windows 8 installed. EDIT: This page has instructions for Windows 8, so it looks like it should be able to handle it: http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/greek-fonts.asp?pg=3 But there are also differences between Windows 8 for computers and Windows 8 for mobile devices and tablets. Some tablets have the same Windows 8 a computer would use, others don't. So the answer isn't definitive.

Congrats to the Indiana offers!

Thanks! I'm not familiar with Pinkard and I didn't think of Rorty.

I listed several authors who have written precisely on how continental authors are relevant to analytic debates. Maybe you just didn't look into any of them. Here are some examples with further details: Paul Katsafanas has a book (Agency and the Foundations of Ethics) out on Nietzsche's relevance to ongoing debates about constitutivism in agency/metaethics. Lee Braver has a book (A Thing of This World) on the relevance of continental figures such as Heidegger and Foucalt to the realism/anti-realism debate. Graham Priest in Beyond the Limits of Thought shows how Derrida and Heidegger are relevant to paraconsistency and semantic paradox. Samuel Wheeler has a book (Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy) connecting Derrida to issues in analytic philosophy of language. In his book Heidegger's Analytic, Taylor Carman connects Heidegger to contemporary debates about semantic externalism. By the way, Adrian Moore's book The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, places thinkers in the continental tradition in a narrative of the development of contemporary metaphysics. That might be of most interest to you (though I doubt you'll take an interest, you seem dismissive of the possibility of overlap). Also Kris McDaniel is a contemporary analytic metaphysician (who does technical work in the field) with an interest in Heidegger.

I created a separate thread to continue this discussion. EDIT: And I have now posted a response to your most recent post in that thread.

As a poster pointed out, the thread about least favorite philosophers was hijacked by some of us to talk about the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy. As penance and reparation, I've made a separate thread to discuss that topic.

So let me get this straight: you claim their is no overlap between continental and analytic philosophy. Your evidence for this is to pick parochial, highly specific (and technical) issues in the context of contemporary analytic philosophy and then point out that no continental philosophers have made contributions to those issues? Are you serious? That's not the only level of meaningful overlap, first of all. Second of all, it's disingenuous to expect the person you're talking to to be familiar enough with four technical and highly specific problems in philosophy to the extent that they could provide a refutation in all four cases (as a matter of fact, I am familiar with none of them because you picked topics in four of the areas of philosophy I am least interested in). But here, I can point out to some more general overlap just off the top of my head: As mentioned above, Lee Braver has written a book on how continental figures fit into the realism/anti-realism debate. Philosophy of language (Habermas, Derrida, Deleuze, Heidegger, structuralism) Philosophy of science (Deleuze, Foucalt, Bergson, Michael Polanyi, Catherine Malabou, Ernst Cassirer) Epistemology (Any phenomenologist, Michael Polanyi, Foucalt, Cassirer, Gadamer) Metaethics (Nietzsche, Deleuze, Derrida, Levinas, Sartre) Metaphysics (Heidegger, Deleuze, Bergson, Badiou, Tristan Garcia, phenomenology depending on one's interpretation of it) Ethics (Levinas, Derrida, Habermas, Sartre, Adorno, Arendt) Political Philosophy (Habermas, Marx, Agamben, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucalt, Arendt, Adorno) Now, if you want to find the relevance of Continental philosophy for particular issues within those fields you're going to need to actually read the continental philosophy or read people doing work on that very subject (some examples: Lee Braver, Hubert Dreyfus, Ray Brassier, Paul Katsafanas, Paul Livingston, Samuel Wheeler, Adrian Moore, Graham Priest). Sometimes the relevance will be oblique, sometimes more direct, and sometimes you won't be able to find any. Obviously you might not find it worth your while and would rather stick to analytic philosophy, since you'll have to do a lot of reading of unfamiliar authors. That's fair. But the claim that there is no overlap is just false.

Similarly, if Husserl is lacking in rigor I'm really not sure what the word is supposed to mean then.

If you don't find any overlap, you're clearly not paying attention. At this point there has been plenty of work showing just how much overlap there is in each tradition (Lee Brave is an excellent example). I also think there may be some meaning to a stylistic distinction, but I don't think it has to do with rigor and I don't think it has to do with clarity either. Analytic philosophy is as capable of being just as obtuse to the uninitiated as continental philosophy. EDIT: And there are plenty of big-names in the analytic tradition that are obtuse even to the initiated: Davidson, Frege, Michael Thompson, Wittgenstein, Anscombe, McDowell. Judging philosophy done in France or Germany by the style of Derrida is the equivalent of judging philosophy done in the States by the style of Michael Thompson.

U Chicago has no wait list, they just take whatever students accept. So there is precedent for that method. I don't know if UCSD has a wait list or not, though.

Wow! You're doing very well so far. Congratulations!

I think the idea was that they were reading Descartes for some other reasons while they were becoming frustrated with their thesis, and the frustration bled over into their experience of reading Descartes.