Cecinestpasunphilosophe

As a Canadian, I think you all need to suck it up I've been trying to keep myself as busy as possible with coursework... but that still hasn't prevented me from refreshing the forum and the results page every hour or so. I got a couple emails from UChicago today, which nearly gave me a heart attack. Apparently, there was a glitch in their system that made them accidentally send out requests for GRE score transcripts, and then they had to send out another email explaining the glitch. My poor heart.

And by untranslatable, my sleep-deprived mind of course meant untranslated. To my knowledge, only Religion of Reason and some excerpts from other essays of his are available in English. What have you been reading of his work?

Cohen! I read his Religion of Reason last semester. Fascinating stuff. How's your German? So much of his work is untranslatable - I think working on Cohen was the first time I encountered an important modern voice who was almost entirely untranslated into English, which was a terribly frustrating experience.

Some of these made me chuckle. Sadly, the author doesn't seem to have read much Wittgenstein. To compensate, this is one of my favourite philosophy jokes/pastiches: http://stevepetersen.net/personal/wittgenstein-fog.html

Oh, such suppositions have already been systematized (https://philosophyadmissions.wordpress.com/predictions/) To my knowledge, though, there's not yet a site for betting on which schools will release when. Maybe I just found my fall-back plan if I'm shut out this round...

Another person interested in phil of religion! Fantastic. Any particular areas/thinkers you're hoping to focus on in grad school?

How encouraging - I've already applied to three of those four programs! It's good to know that students at Chicago have already been doing good work on Kierkegaard in the recent past, too. And the summer program at St. Olaf's mentioned in the article is definitely something good to keep in the back of my mind for the coming years. This is also really good to know! I guess I would need to read more about their exact method before passing any sort of meaningful judgement, but I can only imagine how damaging having a second set of eyes "polish" a piece would be for the textual integrity of the work translated. That's worrisome.

I've seen a handful of professors who will list Kierkegaard among their interests (John Hare at Yale, for example), but I've yet to find many in major departments who list him as their major research interest. It may just be that I'm not looking hard enough, though! It would be rather upsetting if leading Kierkegaard scholars didn't at least have some reading proficiency in Danish, though. I can only imagine what it would be like writing a book on Aristotle while only using English translations! Quick question for you, given that Kierkegaard is your major historical interest (and I'm assuming you're not purely reading him in Danish): which translations do you use for his major works? I just got my hands on the Hongs' translation of Either/Or, which looks good at first glance, but I haven't yet compared it with any other versions! Also, Angier's book sounds fascinating. I shall have to add it to my (ever-growing) summer reading list!

Sidevans' prediction site is a good place to start: https://philosophyadmissions.wordpress.com/predictions/ He's with Overoverover on OSU and Duke, but UNC is also quite likely. Riverside and Chicago have also released early in the past few years (https://faircloudblog.wordpress.com/history/), so they're possibilities, too. Sometimes, I feel like a sports fan making calls on teams' first draft picks, which is rather disconcerting..

Never too late to declare Kierkegaard as an AOS

Kierkegaard is fascinating - though it's rather frustrating to see how the state of modern Kierkegaard scholarship. There seem to be a few pockets of specialists (Fordham and St. Olaf's, for instance, both have a handful of people working on him), but in most major departments you're lucky to find a single professor with even a passing interest in him. Though it's understandable, I guess... Danish isn't exactly a critically important academic language.

Rosenzweig wrote that Nietzsche was the first philosopher "to see God face to face - even if only to refute him." Rosenzweig himself is a bit of an outlier in many regards, but at least I'm in good company!

There are seven more votes for philosophy of religion than I had expected to see. How encouraging! In terms of philosophers who have had an important influence on me thus far, a lot of them are historical (Plato/Aristotle/Augustine/Aquinas/Kant/Nietzsche etc.). As to more modern authors, Wittgenstein's later works roused me from an early dogmatic slumber in my junior year, Vlastos and Hadot have profoundly shaped how I read ancient philosophy, MacIntyre and Anscombe have both had important roles in forming my approach to ethics, and Swinburne's work on analytic philosophy of religion has been inspirational.

Well, you convinced me. I've been lurking for the past few months, but figured I'd sign up now that my applications are submitted and all I have left to do is worry for the next couple months.