Cecinestpasunphilosophe

Admitted to Fordham!

Also, what the hell happened to Johns Hopkins?

This is fantastic! And really cool to look at. Just some initial observations: Cornell and Bloomington have really slid. Notre Dame's been on a downward trend since 2006 or so. WUSTL has been on an upward trend; will be interesting to see if they can continue. More importantly, this seems to emphasize some of the worries that maxhgns' research point out. For instance, Rutgers seems to have consistently been a T5 program for the last twenty-odd years, and yet still isn't in the T5 in terms of tenure-track placements... which suggests that the Leiter Reports, while useful, may not be the most important factor in determining job prospects upon graduation.

If you're talking about Toronto, I know the MA admissions are generally released weeks after the Ph.D. acceptances. Not sure if that's consistent across departments, though!

If only the people writing these emails had such a sense of humour. Would make this entire process much more exciting.

Just got this, too. You hope in vain, Marc Lange. You hope in vain.

Lonergan's one of the foremost Catholic theologians/philosophers of the 20th century - and rather difficult, but incredibly rewarding. I haven't yet had a chance to spend too much time reading his stuff, but he's near the top of my summer reading list. Hope you enjoy him! I have two principal reasons to be interested in Malebranche - one negative, one positive. I think his work brings to its culmination a trend in Christian philosophy and theology that grows out of Augustine and finds itself most fully expressed in the Jansenist and Calvinist movements of the 16th and 17th centuries and that, out of a fear of compromising God's omnipotence, seeks to remove agency (whether natural or human) from world. I think Malebranche represents the culmination of this weltanshauung, and inadvertently performs a reductio ad absurdum in regards to such beliefs through his philosophical system. So I'm interested in exploring his occasionalism, its historical antecedents, and its subsequent reception within the Western philosophical canon, because I see Malebranche's rejection as a rejection of many of the intellectual tendencies that originate with Augustine. On a more positive note, I'm fascinated by Malebranche's notion of Vision en Dieu - I also see it as the re-articulation of a chain of discourse in the Western canon that originates with Plato, is carried through the ancient world by Epictetus and Plotinus, and then finds its Christian articulation in the works of Augustine and Aquinas (among many others). I'm really interested in that entire chain of thought, and Malebranche functions as a relatively prominent link in that chain, so I'm interested in his work! I'm also interested in the understanding of human freedom that seems to bind together many of the rationalists (from Descartes and Malebranche to Leibniz and Arnauld)... But that's probably more than you ever really wanted to hear when you asked that question, so I'll stop myself from going on further!

Fantastic stuff! I'm fascinated by Malebranche myself, and feel like his work has received far too little attention in modern Anglo-American scholarship... Along with Arnauld, and Pascal, and a whole bunch of other writers from the era. But I guess such favoritism is more or less unavoidable in historical scholarship at a certain point, unfortunately. I hadn't noticed just how slanted the PGR review respondents were, though! I've been learning about the analogia entis with the same anti-Scotus approach, though grounded in Lonergan rather than Presbyterian/Reformed circles (I've been studying Thomistic metaphysics through a Jesuit college at my university). Have you ever read Przywara's Analogia Entis? It's on my reading list for later in the semester, and I'm quite excited to dive into it.

Congrats!

Anyone want to claim UNC?

Defrauding an institution at which you're considering pursuing a Ph.D. definitely doesn't sound like the way to put your best foot forward. When do come-and-see visit weekends generally take place? Does this vary radically by department, or are they all normally mid- to end of March?

I feel your pain. 1 assumed rejection from Chicago, and nothing from the rest. What is even more frustrating is that this is the latest both UNC and ND have released for the past three years. I'm trying to look at this as one of those what-doesn't-kill-you-makes-you-stronger moments... but it's killing me.

Yeah, there's no way Princeton released that early.

Although, interestingly enough, they only seem to release rejections/MAPH recommendations (a sad joke) about a month after they send out their acceptances, at least looking at the results posted here for the last few years. I've never really understood why.

Oka cheese is absolutely delicious. Between that and the Trappist beers that come out of Belgium, it's a wonder applications to become monks aren't at least as competitive as four these Ph.D. programs...

Oka?

Got this, too. I can't understand how they possibly thought sending that out now was a good idea. My poor heart.

The specialty rankings really help demonstrate how much these rankings are contingent on small interdepartmental changes. For instance, if you compare the 2015 rankings for philosophy of religion (http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/breakdown/breakdown7.asp) with the 2011: Group 1 (1): rounded mean of 5.0 (median, mode) University of Notre Dame (5, 5) Group 2 (2): rounded mean of 4.5 (median, mode) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (4, 4) Group 3 (3-5): rounded mean of 4.0 (median, mode) Oxford University (4, 4.5) Purdue University (3.75, 4.0) #St. Louis University Group 4 (6): rounded mean of 3.5 (median, mode) Cornell University (3.75, 5) Group 5 (7-16): rounded mean of 3.0 (median, mode) *Baylor University *Fordham University Georgetown University (3, 2.5) Indiana University, Bloomington (3, 3.5) Rutgers University, New Brunswick (3.5, 3.5) University of Colorado, Boulder (3.25, 3.5) *University of New England (Australia) #University of Oklahoma, Norman University of Virginia (3, 3) Yale University (3, 4) --- You'll notice some radical changes. Perhaps most strikingly, UNC-Chapel Hill was the second highest ranked program in the world in 2011, and has completely dropped off the charts by 2015. Why? Because (as far as I can tell) Marilyn McCord and Bob Adams have moved from being faculty at UNC to being part-time professors at the new Rutgers Centre for the Philosophy of Religion. But that means that, in 2011, UNC's ranking as one of the best places in the world to study philosophy of religion was contingent on two people. Whereas places like Notre Dame, Oxford, SLU etc. have a number of faculty working int he field, large institutional support for the area of study (specific Centres for the philosophy of religion, for instance, or sponsored conferences etc.). Yet they still ranked below UNC on the force of two individuals. It's fascinating. I'm also surprised that Cornell and Duke weren't included in the philosophy of religion rankings - especially Cornell, as they have a number of people in the department working in the field and a major research grant from the Templeton Foundation.

The site had been updated since mid-December (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2014/12/philosophical-gourmet-report-2014-15-now-updated.html). I'm glad you made this thread, though - I was wondering why no one was talking about it!

Damn it. Now the song's stuck in my head.

Certainly not an insinuation I wished to make! I merely wanted to gesture at the same fact as you did, that writing samples cannot be viewed as providing pure insight into a candidate's academic ability, since there is a necessarily unjust playing field when one compares an applicant's writing sample out of an MA program and, say, a small liberal arts college. The MA candidate is likely doing philosophical work to the best of his or her philosophical ability at the time of his/her application - but the students without the same level of institutional support generally aren't performing at the same level because of differences that have everything to do with their institutions and nothing to do with their individual intellectual merit as a future academic. I worry that we often gloss over those institutional differences when we refer to writing samples as the best (or, often, the only) way of meaningfully evaluating a candidates "pure" academic ability.

Because, I worry, many writing samples are not an individual applicant doing philosophy - or, at least, not that individual uniquely. There was a discussion elsewhere on this forum about the benefits and drawbacks of attending MA programs in philosophy, and one of the salient points of the discussion was that most top MA programs devote significant resources to ensuring that graduates from their programs produce the best writing sample possible. This means, however, that many of those writing samples have received the input of numerous professors, have (likely, I imagine) been the principal focus of the student during much of their first semester in the MA program, and so forth. I think it's too simplistic to argue that the writing sample is simply a candidate doing philosophy. A candidate from a prestigious MA program will have had much more support in producing their writing sample than any given undergraduate, and a candidate from a T20 school's undergraduate program will in turn likely have had far more institutional support than from a small liberal arts college. So yes, GPAs can be skewed through course selection, and often demonstrate organizational abilities as much as "pure" academic ability. GREs often are only really representative of one's ability to write tests well. But I think one ignores a lot of the underlying factors at play when one claims that a writing sample gives admissions officers a pure insight into a student's academic ability. I once had a senior professor at my department tell me that when he sits on admissions committees, the first thing he looks at is transcripts - but not for the marks. Instead, he looks at the courses an individual has taken. He said that seeing an individual's choice of courses over four years (the difficulty thereof, the breadth and depth of interests both within philosophy and in other disciplines, an so forth) told him more about the candidate as a person than pretty much anything else in the application. I've always quite liked that idea.

I'm always terrified when I'm reminded of those statistics. 300 applicants for 6, maybe 9 positions. 900 letters of reference. 4,500 pages of writing samples. And I expect the committees to notice me? It feels incredibly arrogant on my part to think that I somehow might be better than 97% of the other people who applied. Oh well. Guess I just have to keep that out of my mind. Think UNC will release tomorrow?

I once looked up the the University of Hawaii's philosophy department for this very reason while choosing schools to apply to. Never have I more regretted choosing to not focus in Chinese/Hindu philosophy. (http://hawaii.edu/phil/ for anyone who wants to imagine what life would be like earning a Ph.D. in Hawaii...)