dgswaim

Congrats on Rice! Boy I'd love the chance to study with Grandy and Crowell...

Can anyone claim the Wyoming acceptance? I'd be quite interested in any information regarding this notification.

My status is identical to yours. I take it to mean nothing, really, except that probably no offer is forthcoming.

This is absurd.

Interestingly enough, the author refers to the quant scores as "non-predictive" of success... but adcomms sure as shit look at em. Sucks for me because I suck shit at algebra, and the 3 courses I took in advanced symbolic logic will never make up for that fact. EDIT: I'm well convinced the main reason for the programatic use of GRE scores is that they affect departmental funding. They shouldn't, but they do.

Seems like it.

I have a growing suspicion that as acceptances to UT start rolling in, it will turn out that none of them is in my e-mail inbox. I'm not fond of this suspicion.

Totally agree.

I suppose I can see why some committees would place so much weight on the GRE. It seems plausible that the GRE might be seen as a useful bit of information in comparing applicants that have otherwise comparable stats. There's a certain assumed objectivity in it as well, I suppose, given that everyone who has taken the GRE has taken the same test as everyone else who took it, whereas GPAs from University A might not be as reliable an indicator of philosophical talent GPAs from University B. But then I don't think the GRE necessarily has much to do with philosophical talent at all. I know that my quant score will be a liability, but it seems odd to me that one should think this has any bearing on my ability to do top-notch work in philosophy. I suppose this is all simply to say that I understand the use of the GRE as an evaluative tool, but at the same time I don't think it's telling anyone very much.

UT Austin application site has been slowed to a crawl.

Rejection Devil, philosophe. Rejection Devil.

I was really expecting more from this week in general. If the admissions process is teaching me anything, it's that I shouldn't trust my intuitions.

My guess is that it's through the Divinity School. The Divinity School has a track specifically in philosophy of religion.

Maybe there should be a thread devoted to what it means to say that one is "cut out for philosophy."

"My thumbs are not opposable... Yet I oppose everything." I almost died.

I'm disappointed mainly because Baylor and Notre Dame were my two top choices, and I've now been rejected by both. Baylor in particular would have been a great fit for my research interests... plus I would have really like to have studied with Pruss. It is interesting to know that their process is so idiosyncratic. I wonder what causes them to weight the quant portion so heavily... especially considering the number of Kierkegaardians in the department.

Just received a rejection from Baylor. I'm confused and depressed.

Do they pull names out of a hat? Maybe they have one of those super windy glass phone booth things and the DGS grabs at pieces of paper with names on them...

I guess you might include something like the view of Michael Ruse, Stephen Pinker et. al., which holds something like the idea that ethics is a brain system developed through selective pressures. I guess this would be equivalent to saying that ethics are (in some sense) not "real," but that ethics does have a cognitive corollary.

I have a sort of "sensus divinitatus" about these things, apparently.

When I awoke this morning, I had the sense that it would be a busy admissions day. This, of course, is based on no evidence whatsoever.

I guess I would too... if the traffic lights in my town didn't have those stupid cameras...

I voted 'Other.' I guess in some ways I hold to a combination of many, and perhaps in some more significant sense I find them all lacking. If pressed, my view falls under something like Levinas' ethics of encounter... but I don't know.

So........ can you put in a good word for me with Linda Zagzebski?

Just out of curiosity, are you a skeptic relative to ethics on all construals of the subject, or just relative to metaethics and its ambitions toward securing the theoretical conditions that satisfy ethics? Put another way: do you still hold to something like a form of substantive ethics, or do you think people are simply reporting psychological preference when they talk about ethical/moral frameworks?