Glasperlenspieler

Georgia State is also strong in Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy. It also has a pretty good placement rate and is one of the Leiter T-7.

I'm going to bump this. As someone else mentioned in another thread, this could be a really important resource, both for people on the wait list so that can make a quick decisions if they get an offer and for future applicants.

Congrats! What are you leaning towards?

Thanks for your insightful response MarXian. I've definitely started looking into Northwestern lately (partly due to your posts on other boards actually). I am certainly aware that I need to focus down my interests for AOCs and AOSs and my dissertation in particular (I also probably need to focus them more specifically in my SOP, I think that may have hurt me this time around). I guess what I meant be that comment was a little different. If someone were to write a dissertation on Hölderlin and philosophy (just an example and one that is in itself too broad) or something of that nature, my worry is about placement down the line. I could certainly imagine philosophy departments seeing such a potential candidate as to literary or historical for their tastes, while the lit department might find her too to have too much emphasis on the philosophy and not enough on literary criticism, and so on. Language departments seem like an exception to this, although my German skills are probably not quite good enough to be seriously considering that option. RS departments seem to be another instance of not being as concerned with disciplinary boundaries. So I guess what I was getting at, is that it may make more pragmatic sense to pick AOSs and a dissertation that are clearly within disciplinary lines. It's concerns like this, that make me wonder how wise it would be for me to apply to places like Chicago's Committee on Social Thought or JHU's Humanities Center, even though I'm really interested in such programs. Good points Johannes. Intellectual history does seem to be somewhat on the margins of history these day (social history is more and more on the rise). I'm definitely going to be needing to look closely at the climate of philosophy department for this sort of thing. Glad to know that Columbia is strong in this respect.

Good point on McGill, I will look into that. I don't know too much about what that department's like right now.

Thanks for the response Johnannes, I ended up not applying to Columbia this time around, but as I look back I recognize I probably should have. Maybe I will next time around if I don't get off the waitlists. I'm not familiar with Bilgrami's work, but from a quick glance he does look very intriguing. I think what I'm most interested in about Taylor's work is not so much the subject matter itself (although that is quite intriquing for me) but his methodology and approach. He has a tendency to work on the border of intellectual history and philosophy proper in a very intriguing way. Similarly I'm very interested in people who border between philosophy and literary criticism (Nussbaum and Cavell are interesting to me here.) Generally I'm very interested in the role of historicism in philosophy and appreciate work that sees contemporary thought as being heavily rooted in its varying intellectual traditions. Personally, my primary interests are German Philosophy, and its intersections with ethics, aesthetics, and religion. Although, I often conceive of German philosophy as beyond the traditional canon to include sociologists (Weber), theologians (Schleiermacher, Rahner), and literary artists (Hoelderlin, Kafka, Goethe), etc. While these tend to be somewhat "continental" figures (although I don't really like that term) I also have great interests in analytic philosophy and hope to use its methodologies and goals. Although, even given these broad interdisciplinary interests, I wonder if it might by more pragmatic to pursue a more specialized field in grad school (say 19th C German philosophy) and span from there after established, since I know it can be hard to get a tenure track position with such wide ranging interests (heck, it's hard to get one no matter what).

Does anybody know anything about this: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/university-of-california-grad-student-works-on-strike.html ???? I'm wondering if this has affected philosophy departments at all and whether or not those of us who have offers or wait-lists from UC schools should be concerned.

Have to commit on whether or not to renew my lease by tomorrow. Won't know on waitlists until the 15th... Screw this waitlist hell!

So, I'm coming to terms with the fact that I've probably probably been shut out this round. I do have two waitlists, but I don't want to get my hopes up, and it looks like the professor who is my main reason for applying to one of those schools is not teaching courses in the fall, and thus is probably not even on campus, so I may not even accept that offer were it to come through. In the meantime, I've been reassessing my options, and I've also begun to purse a goal I've had for a few years now, which is to read Charles Taylor's A Secular Age from cover to cover (I've read sections before). This is not my first exposure to him, but this time around I'm realizing more and more just how brilliant and well-read he is, but also how significantly his methodology, approach, and the types of questions he asks differ from the philosophical mainstream (or at least the philosophical mainstream as I perceive it from a heavily analytic department). So my question is this, what type of a graduate program should someone go to, who is interested in studying the work of Taylor and his interlocutors and/or to pursue the sort of research that he does. He come from a philosophy background, but is a philosophy department today really the best place for that sort of work? Would a history department be better? A religious studies department? A comparative lit department? Some sort of interdisciplinary program or even a sociology department? Or is it a mistake for a young student to pursue such broad and interdisciplinary pursuits this early in his/her career? Should he/she instead specialize in a more sepcialized/traditional track, and begin to pursue other more adventurous pursuits once established in a field? This seems to be what people like Nussbaum or Cavell have done, beginning in ancient philosophy and phil language respectively, but branching out significantly from there later in their careers. However, Taylor and Habermas seems to have been fairly broad from the get-go. Thoughts?

Stanford's Philosophy and Literature initiative has a list of good resources, including links to a number of published articles that are free online, which may be a good place to start, so that you can figure out which philosophers, topics, and approaches relate most to your interests before forking over a lot of money for anthologies, which can often be quite expensive: http://philit.stanford.edu/library.html If your university has access to it, there's a journal devoted to Philosophy and Literature, which would be another good place to see what is happening currently in the field: http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/ Personally, I'm very interested in the work done by Martha Nussbaum, Alexander Nehama, Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, Gregory Currie, Richard Moran, and Ted Cohen, but that's just the tip of the iceberg and represents my own favored approaches to the discipline. If you're interested in truth and fiction, there's no better place to start than David Lewis's seminal essay "Truth in Fiction" (1978) availiable here: http://andrewmbailey.com/dkl/, whereas if you're interested in emotions and fiction, the best starting place would be Kendall Walton's "Fearing Fictions" ( http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2025831?uid=3739960&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103757518357). So a lot depends on what within philosophy of literature you're interested in. Also, while not specific to literature, I'm a big fan of this anthology: http://www.amazon.com/Aesthetics-Ethics-Intersection-Cambridge-Philosophy/dp/0521585139 I hope that helps. Feel free to let me know if you have other questions either here or over PM. It's great to have someone else interested in Philosophy of Literature on these boards!

You're right that if it were never allowed to question the presuppositions or certain facts were always kept off the table, then that would be a bad thing. But I don't think that's the issue here. Rather, the point is that there are certain times or places, where it doesn't make sense to be always questioning certain presuppositions. Even if you are convinced that there is no afterlife, you're probably not going to argue that point to someone whose best friend has just died. Likewise, sometimes it's important, even in philosophical discussions, to take certain presuppositions as given. It would be completely pointless to have a discussion with a moral nihilist about applied ethics, if she was continually pointing out that there are no moral truths. Instead one of two things happen. Either you learn to avoid such discussion with that person (because they come to no good) or that other person learns to set aside her metaethical views temporarily for that sake of the conversation (this happens all the time in philosophy when critiquing others views, and indeed moral anti-realists are often more than happy to argue for or against particular moral claims). So just because a group deems that it may be necessary to take certain assumptions as given does not mean that they are being unphilosophical, just that they deem it to be beneficial for the sake of the discussion, either for certain interpersonal reason or for the sake of being able to have a fruitful discussion.

I got waitlisted at 2 schools and rejected at 8. In all of my statements of purposes I basically just changed the last paragraph or two and made it specific to each school. Interestingly though, the two schools I got waitlisted at were the only two statements of purpose where I talked to some extent about the work of a particular POI, and how it related to what I wanted to do. So take that for what it's worth...

All very good points. It wasn't clear to me what the westontd's methodological preferences or preferred theoretical frameworks were, so I figured I'd throw this option out there.

In a lot of religion departments, you have to declare a primary focus, and often one option is philosophy of religion. This might be a good option for you, since you'd be situated in a religion department, but a lot of your coursework would be philosophy focused. See for example Chicago (http://divinity.uchicago.edu/philosophy-religions), Yale (http://religiousstudies.yale.edu/philosophy-religion), and Harvard (http://studyofreligion.fas.harvard.edu/pages/philosophy-religion).

If I remember correctly, everyone on these boards who got a BU wait list solicited a response, but I could be mistaken. I emailed them back to see where on the wait list I am, but I haven't heard anything back yet. If I were you, I'd go ahead and email the director of graduate admissions. I got a pretty quick response when I did that. Good luck!

Got a waitlist from BU today. It was solicited. That's my last school to hear back from. 0a/2w/8r out of 10

Did they admit anyone? I only see rejections for this year on the results page.

For comparison, this is what the classics forum is doing in regard to this kind of stuff:

Undergraduate minors? honors? Language abilities?

Thanks for the info (although I don't really like that sort of scoring method). Is it worth a retake just the AW score? Or is Ian's point about diminishing returns operative here?

This may be the wrong place for this question but, do you have any idea as to how they grade the writing section? I felt really good about it walking out of the test, but I ended up only getting a 4.5. Aside from that I would say that my experience has been similar to yours Ian, despite high scores (167 verbal, 168 quant), I've only been waitlisted at one place and rejected from 7. (Still waiting on 2 more, but those are looking more and more like rejections too).

Someone reported a rejection via phone from University of Oregon???

Thanks for the responses! My interests are primarily focused on intersection between the history of philosophy, religious thought, and literature. I tend to focus on figures in the German tradition, but also have strong interests in ancient Greek thought and other individuals in the European (and occasionally American) tradition. My BA has focused on analytic philosophy, but I'm very interested in doing interdisciplinary work in the vein of people like Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell, or Arthur Danto. I've definitely been looking at complit programs, including Notre Dame and Duke. Last time I looked at Stanford Modern Thought and Literature or UC Santa Cruz History of Consciousness, they didn't seem to quite offer what I was looking for, although I might need to take another look. How concerned do you think it's worth being in regards to the less than stellar placement rates at interdisciplinary programs? Does it make more sense to begin one's career in a more disciplinary topic, and then expand your research once you become more situated in the field? That seems to have been the case for most of the people I mentioned above. Or does it just depend on what exact interests and situations. Also, I really like your user name derewigestudent.

Thanks for the response czesc and Carthage, especially in regards to faculty movements. The kind of stuff Peter Gordon is doing aligns up more or less perfectly with a lot of my interests. I especially like the kind of borderline approach between intellectual history and history of philosophy (with a close eye to literary and religious influences as well, the kind of work Charles Taylor has done in this respect is fascinating to me). I'm also really interested in the influence of ancient Greek though on German thought, as well as the rise of modernism, modernity, and secularism. Full disclosure: I have actually applied to philosophy programs this round, but things haven't gone so well (although I do have one waitlist, so maybe that will pull through). So given my somewhat eclectic interests and my tendency to want to look at philosophical thought from a more historical and interdisciplinary perspective than most (although certainly not all) philosophers do, I'm looking to expand the type of programs I'll be applying to next year. So I've been looking at intellectual history, comparative literature, and interdisciplinary programs like Chicago's social thought or JHU's humanities center.

I stand corrected. Thanks!