overoverover

Yeah, this is a really odd sample of the profession! You'd think there'd be fewer math/logic types, and the dearth of (meta)ethics is strange.

Timothy Williamson's retrospective or whatever on the development of analytic philosophy in the last 50 years or so has some great Dummett stories (and happens to be a great piece)!

Thanks! I don't consciously realize how indebted to Evans I am sometimes, but then I'll make a point in class or in a paper and say to myself, "Damn, I read that in Varieties of Reference!"

Weird. I wouldn't sweat it. It'd be strange if they assumed all GPAs were on a 4.5 scale, and if they care about GREs they'll check the official scores.

In reference to the GRE scores: I don't remember having this issue. What browser are you using? If I recall, doesn't Berkeley have a place to say what your GPA scale is?

Oh, and Bob Stalnaker may be the most profound living philosopher. The man is a genius.

Frege, hands down. But after that, Evans, Russell, and David Lewis. I have a super soft spot for early Heidegger. A few living philosophers I've found super insightful as I've worked through issues: Mark Schroeder at USC, Seth Yalcin at Berkeley, Scott Soames at USC, and Agustín Rayo at MIT.

Well, I can't speak to the placement, but Brown's faculty is quite strong. Richard Heck is a great logician, philosopher of language, and Frege scholar. Jamie Dreier and Nomy Arpaly are both quite good, and of course Paul Guyer is a top knotch Kant scholar, so it isn't baffling that they're highly ranked. With that kind of faculty, I'd guess that placement is problem a structural issue rather than a departmental strength issue.

I submitted all of mine at the same time, including those due in January. I figured if my sample was good enough for, e.g., University of Southern California, it was good enough for everyone.

Like Nathan said, I visited UConn earlier this semester. It's a really nice department with a wonderful environment—the professors and the grad students were all very friendly and happy to answer questions and just talk about philosophy. Visiting departments is great since you really get a feel for what work is being done and what everybody is excited about, and my visit to UConn was especially helpful in that regard. I got to attend a Logic Group meeting as well. If you can visit, I highly recommend it!

It's probably fine, but try to get them to submit the letter ASAP (but you probably already are doing that!). I don't think there's any reason to worry so long as it's submitted promptly.

3 pages? Is that around 900 words? 3 feels really long to me. At least a few schools I applied to gave sample and statement lengths in terms of word count, which I agree is much better.

That's similar to the strategy I followed, though a bit modified. Basically, I took a semantic theory and showed that some intuitively false sentences were predicted as true by it, thus providing a range of counterexamples. Then I tried to generalize the objection and point out what in general the theory was getting wrong, and my proposed semantics tries to avoid making the same mistakes (at the cost of having to 'explain away' some of the purported data).

I can beat that! My oldest source was from 1980!

It happens, but I don't know how often. The only other person I know of who has been in a similar situation was, coincidentally, my old advisor. Luckily, the potential horrors were mitigated due to pretty much unanimous support from my current institution's faculty—not only were they all sympathetic to my situation, but they were willing to give lots of advice, too. Just a quick glance at Leiter Reports can give you a sense of how fluid the profession is. Faculty leave all the time. If this had happened to me a little later in my program (I'm only a second year, so this was about as early as it could've happened), there's a chance I would've been stuck. The best thing you can do is go to a department with a few faculty in your AOI—that's the only real safety mechanism.

My sample is very much in my main area of interest. It's on the semantics of generic sentences, e.g. "Birds fly", "Ravens are black," "Dogs have four legs." I start by giving some pretty thorough counterexamples to a kind-of-new, kind-of-popular view, then sketch a new semantics w/ motivations from some psychology stuff. It doesn't attempt to survey all of the literature—though I'd like to expand it with that in mind after this process is over. My only worry about my sample is that, if you were to read it without knowing that just as many philosophers have written about generics as linguists, you might not realize that I am in fact a philosopher—basically, some people might think I'm 'not doing philosophy.' I'm a graduate student transferring from a PhD program due to my advisor leaving, so my situation is a bit different. Basically, when I found out in April-ish that I'd no longer have an adviser at my institution, I started writing one of my term papers with the idea of using it as a sample (I already had some half-baked ideas and I knew the literature fairly well). I wrote it, got a ton of comments from various profs, and then revised all summer. I found that writing a sample with the intent of using it as a sample was really helpful. I knew from the beginning I'd be writing for a broad audience, but also that I didn't want to sacrifice depth or detail. It's a hard genre, but it's easier when you have it in mind the whole time. BTW: There's an older thread from August/September about this, in case you'd like to see more answers.

Obviously it was a bit hyperbolic. Any decent professor won't care, so long as it's charitable (about 1/3 of my sample is a detailed criticism of a competing view, and I think that it shows that I actually took the time to understand the nuances of the position), because that's what it's all about. There is, of course, the risk that Professor X holding position A will know the view so well that she'll be able to tell if you've woefully misunderstood A, and that could hurt you (but there's a good solution to that: write a paper that doesn't misrepresent the view!). But really, at this point of the game, there's no point in worrying about this.

1. No professor cares as long as it's charitable. Be careful to avoid misrepresentation. 2. Nobody expects the sample to be completely up to date on the literature. Don't worry about it.

There's a chance that any scores reported after the deadline won't be taken into consideration. If that's the case, why bother taking the test again? Honestly, while your quant is a little lower than you'd probably like it (it wouldn't hurt for it to be at least a few points higher), your verbal is really excellent. I'd say don't worry. Look over your sample again or something.

I figure Cornell is still a solid place too—Bennett is staying, like you said, and they still have some strengths in language (plus affiliated linguists, which is important to me). Plus, there's a good chance that with Sider gone they'll be able to hire some new people, or make a senior hire to replace him. Either way, not the end of the world (so maybe 'much less attractive' was a bit strong on my part).

It can take a little while for the scores to arrive. On top of that, they're probably swamped right now, and they probably weren't open most of this week due to the holiday. I'd recommend shooting an email to the graduate admissions office (not the philosophy department!) in the coming week and seeing what's up. People in the admissions office are nice enough usually and don't get annoyed—they understand we're nervous and want to make sure everything works out well. Also, reixis, how're you feeling about Cornell now that Sider got hired by Rutgers? I know Cornell became much less attractive for me after hearing that.

Optimistically, I assume the questions about other schools is just so departments/universities get a sense of what schools are seen as similarly attractive to certain kinds of candidates. Pessimistically, I can't help but think that it would somehow hurt me to list schools.

I don't know how true it is that most grad conferences are harder to be accepted to than most professional conferences, but that doesn't really matter. Going to conferences is a wonderful way to get feedback on a project. Plus, after attending a conference or workshop, I always feel incredibly motivated to work out my ideas in more detail.

It's not generally expected that you're applying for external fellowships, as those don't really exist in philosophy. Don't worry about that part. And yes, they want a liter of blood and a pound of flesh in addition to $27 for the GRE scores!

My scores are 164V/154Q, and last time I applied I was waitlisted at three departments and admitted to one (all top 50, one waitlist at a top 25). So your scores at least won't take you out of the running.