Dumbnamechange

Sorry, what I just said is bound to come off the wrong way and I don't know to edit on a phone. All I mean in terms of "sentimentality" and "professional factors" is that it seems like, in your case, you'd be fooling yourself if you let your decision turn on some small technical detail(s) about the two programs any of us might be able to tell you about. That's definitely what I realized when I made my decision at least, and I don't regret it.

It's just an MA. Two years; four semesters; 10 classes? I don't intend this to be some resounding, final judgment, but—not only are you avoiding debt—you are not losing that many years of your life held up in some Gitmo of Analytic philosophy. As far as I was told, NIU's TA position is renewable under certain (albeit unreliable) conditions. Although you're right that it's far from guaranteed for a second year, don't completely rule out the possibility of avoiding debt. If you really are as existentially repulsed by analytic philosophy as it seems (by what you've said and the interests in your signature), then I imagine this dilemma is somewhat pulling away from a purely academic/professional choice anyways. By this I don't mean to say your problem seems sentimental—because that's sorta fine, I completely understand that and was just there myself. Only: I don't see any "professional factors" settling this one way or the other for you; at this point, I don't think they should, let alone could. It's up to you to decide how much you want to pay for the two year ride. (OK, I'm wholly projecting how I thought of it when I was in the same situation, and I decided the kind of passive satisfaction for a short two years I would get at the fit school is not worth tens of thousands of debt.) Also, don't rely too much on working a part time job if you also are supposed to TA or do anything similar at BC. Grad school will be full-time. (This, also, was a deal-breaker fact for me going to a Boston university)

I think you are definitely right in expecting NIU not to fit your more specific interests, however they do offer enough "neutral" classes to probably hold you over for two years (Ancient Ph., Ethics, etc.—it's not all "Kripke's Metaphysics," "Kripke's Implications for Ethics," "Phenomenology-but-only-insofar-as-it-relates-to-Kripke" etc.). When I was deciding between a perfect-fit-but-less-funded program and a funded-but-less-fitting program, a couple of points turn me towards the latter, including: 1. Try to soberly check how courses you would realistically be taking that actually your interests at the fit-school anyway. Is that worth X amount of debt? 2. Most MA students I talked to said they still learn the most from the studying they do outside of their program. Don't expect that simply because you'll be taking a few courses called "Philosophy of Your-Deepest-Life-Interests" that it will be your course-loads carrying your education for you: it' won't—your education only and always falls on you. While I'm sympathetic with your dilemma (I was just there for the past couple months), I will say that looking back, I feel it was unfathomably crazy for me to consider going into debt for a masters. Edit: I would qualify the entire NIU option on how likely it is that you actually will get the funding. The Grad. Director said the TA position was virtually guaranteed for me, but I wound up declining the acceptance altogether before I ever actually received the offer. I don't know how direct you can be, but absolutely make sure this is a certain thing.

This might be a long-shot, but does whatever school you're going to do a joint JD-MA in Philosophy? If so, you could maybe just apply for the master's program next fall. I think when I was looking around, I saw several schools talk about JD and philosophy students opting for a joint degree while one was in progress, so I don't think this is a rare thing, just something to check for wherever you're going. This would be good, too, because your application materials are still fresh. I would myself be very uncomfortable relying on 5 yr old professors for the strongest letters of recommendation; as Die_Kurator said, better to just go with whatever political theory professors you might latch onto while your there if you don't go for the joint JD-MA.

Well, the results would make as much if not more sense if you were making the completely wrong assumptions: 1. I wouldn't say people's hopes were exclusively reserved for their single top choice; I imagine most, like myself, just hoped to get in anywhere (or mostly anywhere). This is because... 2. If TGF were comprised of what I'll tactlessly call "the losers" (but you know what I mean—underdogs), by communicating and sympathizing with other "losers", the general standards here for what is hoped for could be pretty low—namely, "pretty much anything". (Again, I'll wholeheartedly admit I'm projecting here; I'll leave it to you to take it or leave it.) Basically flip everything about your explanation/speculation on its head and I think it comes out aright, with no interesting questions leftover. P.S. Seriously congratulations isostheneia. Fingers crossed I'll be joining you there in a couple years.

I know this question's susceptible only to speculation, but what do y'all think is value of specialized philosophy tracks when it comes to PhD admissions? Positive, negative, or null? By specialized tracks I mean, e.g., master's programs that offer Neuroscience/Neurophilosophy or Linguistics tracks. I know in philosophy culture generally, for instance, it's increasingly frowned upon to do philosophy of science without some kind of science background. Do you think a student who professes an interest in Ph. of Language taking a linguistics-oriented track would look better to an admissions committee, or does the impure transcript just look weak? One of the reasons I ask is because I noticed they tend to have strangely minimal requirements. For example, GSU's Neurophilosophy track only asks for 2 electives to go to Psych/Neuroscience courses; UW-Milwaukee's "Language and Linguistics" philosophy track also only differs from the straight-and-narrow by needing 2 electives to be in Linguistics, and since the regular option affords up to 3 electives anyways, if those were in the right courses, all the sudden this special name could be slapped on their transcript. Do you think anyone would care? Lamest kind of bragging rights?

I know this is a stupidly obvious point, but I'm surprised no one has mentioned it and it seems worth considering: Some great students just suck at exams, and this seems especially true in philosophy, which is enormously ill-suited for the format. So if you're deciding between thesis v. exam options, it might be better to go for the thesis (in some cases) just so long as you aren't a test-taker type. (But then again, I don't know what MA exams are like; if they're easy A's, this is a moot point.) Right?

As someone from Baltimore, I might just chip in that—as with every city—it all depends on the neighborhoods you live in. Obviously, the gentrified streets have only been getting more expensive (especially right around JHU, Charles Village), but it's not like you'll be significantly safer or anything living there—it just looks nicer and that's about it. I strongly recommend moving towards the outskirts of the city, where some decent-enough apartments in decent-enough neighborhoods open up at pretty great prices. Three friends of mine just grabbed a large three story townhouse for ~$1.2k collectively; three others pay twice that to live in an one-floor apartment that's half the size, roughly as nice, and closer to the city. The cost of living is dynamic: you can live very cheaply if you want to (well, in most aspects, I suppose).

How forward are you all with professors you hope will be your thesis advisor? I feel like it would be equally weird to field the related questions nonchalantly.

I have one related question: what should you talk to faculty about? I've seen a lot of advice on what to ask current grad students about (climate, supportiveness, well-being, TAing, real costs of living/attending, etc.), but if I want to meet with specific faculty...? I feel like once you eliminate the blunt questions it would be too tactless to ask (and so you instead get answers from students), all that's left on the table is, "Hi, my name is ____." Any advice on useful talking points?

Thinking of this as an empirical hypothesis as you say, would there be any empirical difference between there being a second "wide" sense to 'philosopher', and there just being a habit of applying the univocal title metaphorically (as in the Dylan example), under the varying assertability conditions of loose-talk?

Update: approaching 5,000 words. If we keep this up for a few more days, I can maybe edit this sucker into the first draft of my thesis.

[1] OK--that's interesting. I used to say MLK was not really a philosopher: I said that in a room full of my undergraduate faculty and was roundly bucked at. Because I'm a proud jerk, I thereafter researched into why they were so adamant that he was a philosopher ("in their sense," even though "their sense" is the same sense as everyone else's but with tighter assertability conditions). That's where I came into pretty much everything and every point I've made in this thread. Especially (i) the evidence I've already linked into this thread, and (ii) the post mortem canonization into the history of philosophy--I think--justifies the title. [2] This is what I tried to introduce several posts above. From the start (you can check), I've only been relaying a certain position that I think is most common in academia. I'm interested in going down the other road, where "philosopher" is an inherently normative term, and everyone should be held up to it to better or worse degrees. (Well, actually, because of my Wittgensteinian tendencies, I'm more inclined to say that everyone has philosophical impulses/neuroses, and these are a bad thing, which "philosophers" study/cure like a cancer.) This would force philosophy departments to be less cloistered. [3] No, I said popular understanding [i.e. that one sense as a matter of fact is quantifiably more popular than others] is empirical. [*] Ian, you might be interested in this too. I think one way to clarify the position I've defended is with an analogy to epistemic pragmatism/behaviorism, wherein there is no distinction between "truth" and "assertable beyond reproach," or the like. I think this kind of pragmatism fails in epistemology but fares a lot better in language (between "correct usage" and "utterable beyond reproach"). I think it is just a historical, empirical fact that popular usage of a term bows to expert usage, not the other way around; this is part of what makes expertise expertise. But, qualiafreak, I think you've already stipulated too much in your example to say, "In another sense, they are speaking nonsense because no one around them understands them." The fact that, as a matter of contingency, a bunch of people (but not everyone around them, only 90%) don't yet understand them but in principle could, I think, shows that they are by definition not speaking nonsense. Nonsense has no sense, but not only does their speech have a sense--which is sufficient enough for not being nonsense--but that the public could readily interpret them, pushes your example into overkill. Also, on "hello" and the performative utterances: No, they in fact can communicate the intentions of the speaker perfectly well but become meaningless/nonsense/infelicitous for, as you yourself mention, contextual reasons--not for a failure to reveal intentions; which is to concede that the communication of ideas/intentions is not the sole criteria for meaning -- my entire case. I chose "hello" because the relevant intention is so simple that it cannot fail to be communicated and understood, so it fails for other reasons; understanding intentions =/= understanding meaning (which should be obvious because "meaning" can mean "use," "purpose," "role," "consequence," "felicity," "representation," "extension," "intension," and a bunch of other things; "intentions" is just maybe the weakest but fairly intuitive reduction to go for, hence why I call it naive). That said, I have said from the start that we should pay attention to what kind of linguistic mistake is being made. **What I've been saying all along** In the case of the "philosopher" example, applying the term can be a conversational mistake even when the extension is correct, so long as it suboptimally implies the speaker's intentions (which it does in the "broad," complimentary sense of "philosopher," since the "broad" sense is equally if not more often used as an insult). My whole point is that we should not (over-)think but look at the way people actually use the term "philosopher," see that it's often in fact derogatory (has been for millennia), and then we can agree that whatever "broad" sense we're talking about does not even maximize effective communication but promotes misinterpretation/disregard--whereas some nearby, intended compliment would work perfectly; the mistake, then, is not going for the nearby compliment (this pretty deductively follows). So, yeah, I think we agree on a lot, so I'll just point out some things to see what you think. On (1), there are clearly people writing on the exact same historical figures, participating in the exact same dialogue as academic philosophers, who nevertheless aren't a part of academia; "philosopher," then, can include both them and the academics. For example, Richard Rorty was "excommunicated" from academic philosophy, but remained a philosopher (in part), and remains a key figure, staking out a key territory of the philosophical landscape (even if just as a punching-bag, but hey, that's what most philosophers become). Alain De Botton, I think--I'm not sure if he holds a position in a formal institution--would be another example. On (2) and (3): I mostly agree, and have already said as much. I mean, it's a PR strategy, plain and simple; one that is probably failing. You later say stuff like "Derrida is a charlatan, not a real philosopher" is an evaluative use of the term, but I think it's actually performatively constructing a descriptive use of the term, to just demarcate the kind of respect-for-the-arcane academics want apart from what (i) the public is more liable to ridicule and (ii) academics don't want to spend their time studying/attacking. (I know the terms "respect" and "ridicule" suggest evaluative, but I think if you think it through, you can see what I mean; it's a detaching from any evaluative application of the term.) I think we are still very much in agreement here. But seriously, come on, guys: "the exemplary philosopher being someone who lives well and does not just research well." You're just being a mouthpiece for Plato here. You are not talking about exemplary philosophers but exemplary human beings. What has anything about philosophy characteristically have to do with effectively making you a better human being? This is pure rhetoric -- maybe necessary in the time of the Sophists, but it's been laughable nonsense for the past two centuries at least. I don't know what kind of education forms an ubermensch, but we should hold ourselves to some modicrum of integrity and screen-off the philosopher's bias in ethics. ("Look, I'm a philosopher, I study what it means to lead a great life, and I can tell you with an expertise you'll find nowhere else that I alone hold the key.") No one who hasn't sipped the Kool-Aid of PHIL 101 equates "philosopher" with "great person". Period. Go through your history books, look at all the great figures, and see whether "philosopher" even seems, even on a stretch, apt. How many will you find?

To Ian Not quite: I have never been talking about a term as it's used by an entire community (100%—even though I could maybe push this way if I wanted to); in these particular cases it's the status of a term used by a large or majority population, whose usage might be subject to correction by people who might then have the role of "linguistic experts". (Chemists on "water" meaning H20, Physicists on "heat" meaning mean kinetic molecular energy, and so on, up to Philosophers on "philosophy" as XYZ ——the metaphilosophical problem is obviously big right now, so I'll leave that one open; the point is the epistemic authority involved.) The majority could very well be persuaded that they've been using it not necessarily wrong but without understanding; I should note that while you've been focusing on "misuse", that's been confusing the problem as to why the term is meaningful and when it is meaningful. Going back to MLK, the point there was that people could truthfully call him a philosopher without understanding why he's a philosopher. On dictionaries: again, not quite—especially on your own terms. Dictionaries take on an explicit status as descriptive v. prescriptive: some dictionaries throughout history have actually tried to say, "This book is prescriptive," failed, and then later backtracked; every other dictionary (or dictionary committee) explicitly says that the book records only how words are used, not how they ought to be used—the latter is what style-books are for. I don't see how you can, on your own terms, argue that the self-proclaimed descriptivist dictionary writers aren't ipso facto descriptivist. So, if this is up for grabs at all, it's because it's an empirical question, but with loads and loads of evidence in my favor. And, if you want to say, as you seem to do, that dictionaries have authoritative power — not because they claim it for themselves (they empirically don't) but because we grant it to them regardless (in which case I and many others will be your empirical counterexamples) — then it would hurt your own point that "beg the question" is regularly targeted in prescriptivist, descriptivist-prescriptivist hybrids, and descriptivist-with-prescriptivist-intentions (OED) dictionaries. And again, you should be able to think of easily enough on your own the multitude of philosophical problems that would follow from meaning being solely words on the right side of dictionary entries (Derridean paradoxes, the resulting fickleness of meaning, that terms would be overdetermined by the multitude of sources saying different things, that I could write a dictionary to make everything you've said so far show agreement with me, the meaning-status of tribes without dictionaries...). You say, "You see a separation between how ordinary speakers use words to successfully communicate their ideas, and how they ought to use words." Again, I've already tackled that in this thread, but this presupposes an extremely naive view of meaning on your part, that meaning is solely the communication of ideas (wherein successful communication of ideas = successful use of words). How a person ought to meaningfully say, "I promise..." or, "I love you" seems to be determined a lot of other things than ideas in the person's head, words in a dictionary, etc. ("Hello" spoken no matter how intentionally mid-conversation is meaningless.)

There are some circularity mistakes in there (e.g. "They have whatever meaning they have because and only because people understand them to have that meaning"—a meaning is precisely that which is understood, so you can't use understanding to ground meaning). But to quickly address what's arguably my most controversial but I think wholly justified point, re: "I don't even see how anything but popular understanding of a term determines its meaning". Premise 1. Popular understanding/usage is an empirical fact about what is the case. Premise 2. Meaning is a normative concept: there are correct and incorrect ways to use a term; equivalently, definitions of meaning are about what ought be the case (regarding utterances). Premise 3. ~Naturalistic Fallacy: facts about what is the case can't in themselves justify facts about what should be the case (if you even want to call these latter "oughts" facts, anyway). Concl. Popular opinion can't determine the meaning of any given term. (It's a rather safe instance of Kripke's Rule-Following Paradox, which more widely tries to show that no facts whatsoever determine the meaning of any given term. (My use of it is ironic, since Kripke's own solution to the problem was to appeal to majority opinion; virtually every commentator has pointed out this ironic flaw in Kripke's solution.) I recommend seeing it it as saying less about the nature of "meaning" than the nature of "determining," in the particular case of meanings. (This turns it into just a general philosophical problem of normativity: wtf?)) P.S. I specifically said "I don't pretend to know" the right theory of meaning here. But my "nonsense" remark was just a lame joke about the "decay of language" or whatever (although it is a plausible reductio ad absurdum of the majoritarianism view: all it takes, on the view you've offered, for this forum to literally become nonsense is enough people to start talking differently). And your words-represent-mental-concepts view, I take it, is basically Jerry Fodor's. Just mentioning that in case you didn't know / are interested; but it's a notoriously sketchy philosophy with a lot of problems: if the words represent the concepts, then what are the concepts doing? Representing external objects? Then why aren't the words representing those objects? What has the middle-man of mental understanding-states done but kicked the can down the road, displacing the burden of explanation? Is all meaning just "representation" anyway? (Certainly not.)

I hate when people do this quote-by-quote thing, but I think it might help. ianfaircloud, on 18 Mar 2015 - 11:57 PM, said: My position is more that there may be a Gettier-style false lemma in play as to what justifies people calling him a philosopher. That is, (1) MLK is in fact a philosopher (of such-and-such calibre), in virtue of (2) his contributing to a particular historical conversation (even if the significance of his contribution owes mostly to a post mortem canonization, as I think it does). Had (2) not obtained, (3) common reference to MLK as a philosopher would be a misuse of the term, but since (2) did obtain, in whatever sense people intend by calling him a "philosopher," the label fits (because of (2)). Their referring to him as a philosopher is something of a lucky shot, if they aren't aware of or causally related to (2). (How you want to split the hair is up to you, whether they use the term in the right way for the wrong reason, or however.) But the point is that the term's correct because of a certain correspondence alone. I hope this clarified misunderstanding preempts some of the other points you made / questions you raised later on. Woah, woah, woah: I put that in aside-brackets, put "arguably philosophy" in parentheses (though I guess I put a lot of things in parentheses), and even just said "arguably", all to suggest I was not going to defend this point. But here goes my apology: from my experience, theology is a branch of philosophy, but if I'm wrong about that, I am, as you should suspect, more than willing to admit that I'm simply misusing the term. (Or more appropriately, misdescribing the connection.) When I nail down the standards of correctness for the meanings of terms, I'll hand my doctoral dissertation to you. As for now, I can just give you these http://wsuonline.weber.edu/wrh/words.htm, http://listverse.com/2011/06/07/top-10-misused-english-words/, and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/01/commonly-misused-words_n_4652969.html. I don't pretend to know what metaphysically determines the correct way to use a term, but it sure as hell ain't a popularity contest, lest we've all been speaking nonsense. (Really—I wish I could put this more diplomatically—but this is such a trite point in the philosophy of language. First, dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive: they record what people do say, not what they should say. Second—and I know you haven't said this yet, but it's commonly paired with your position and the kind of appeal your making—any appeal to the evolution of language will necessarily become a moot point, because of (1) the naturalistic fallacy and (2) the fact that, on your own terms, it's wholly indeterminate what will or should then be the correct way to use a term, now or in the imminent future (e.g. "philosopher" might go your broad way in a few more decades, but then again it might not; you can't say it has already gone gone the broad way, because that's precisely what's up for grabs).) Yeah, yeah, I've seen that kind of send-off before. ... So, this has all become pretty disappointingly narrow (largely my fault). I think a more interesting (but still stupidly philosophical) question is whether everyone is more-or-less philosophical (if not a philosopher) but just to better or worse degrees, or whether there are—as I've been working with so far—more-or-less clear-cut, humdrum criteria in play, demarcating the philosophers from everyone else. The latter position I've expressed seems more prevalent among academics (who maybe are desperate to carve out their own little corner of cultural expertise—it's easier to say, "Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher," or whatever than to actually charitably represent and debunk him). But I think it would be a novel PR strategy to shift to the pseudo-egalitarian approach—y'know, go on the offensive and say, "You're all doing it wrong!" rather than breaking any common ground by saying, "Eh, that's not really what we do." (Which, to be clear, is a division even your broad sense/narrow sense conception sustains.) I know Putnam has said something like, "Philosophy isn't dead. It's just that more people than ever are doing it badly." I think it poses a weird but novel dilemma.

Fair enough on the vagaries. He does give distinct Natural Law arguments and distinct positivistic arguments (and, if I remember right, he even draws the distinction rhetorically, but not in the technical terms). But I suppose it was something of a cheat for me to give that argument: he doesn't make (those) explicit references, and according to my own criteria, that's what's required for my point to go through. Nevertheless, I stand by the position, and have to say that you're just wrong. He studied philosophy formally at Harvard and Boston University. (A quick google search shows the list of courses he took.) And in other literature he references staples like Marx, Mill, Rousseau and Locke — which might be "easy" but I don't know how that defeats my point on what exactly made him a philosopher. (And I think your dismissal of his writing on Augustine is a little condescending, approximating a denial of the counter-evidence for some weird ulterior reasons.) I mean, MLK is clearly called a philosopher. What I would be interested in as counter-evidence to my position is some similarly influential political figure, who has no substantial place in the historical dialogue we call philosophy, being called a philosopher. Lincoln: great man, made great, clear and well-reasoned points about the nature of political rule and so forth — but a philosopher? I don't hear it often. (Then consider, e.g., Jefferson, who is sometimes called a philosopher: he implicitly and explicitly drew upon Locke.) I'll be honest and say that I'm not familiar with any of Gandhi's writings. He's clearly called a philosopher, and if that's not in virtue of his knowledge of and references to past philosophers, then I am wrong. I simply don't know enough on that point — except that we was a trained and excellent lawyer, and I imagine he must have had training in political theory (of course, from the British-run universities), so, even if it seems ad hoc, there's probably the philosophical, Lockean background there too. P.S. It's not on Hart, but here's evidence of him on Hegel for you: http://ethicistforhire.blogspot.com/2015/02/martin-luther-king-jr-and-continental.html P.P.S. Another thing I think you and Ian might be skipping over is the fact that King and Gandhi have been brought into the dialogue of academic philosophy ex post facto (i.e. made relevant to academic philosophy by contemporary and later philosophers drawing upon their work). I think it's an easy point (in my favor) that these figures in fact are a part of current curricula in academic philosophy. Which, tying this back to the original post, might mean that if the OP writes a good enough paper, he can make Pollan a bonafide philosopher after the fact, simply by inserting a sufficiently systematic version of his ideas into the cultural conversation. But I think with, e.g., MLK, we're fumbling with a kind of political correctness anyways: since he's a cultural hero, anything respectable he ever did gets thrown in under a long list of titles, even if his work therein was amateurish (which I'm not saying it is, only that it would be hard to tell the difference).

Sorry for all the long posts. I've been out of school for a year and have grown antsy, jumping on any chance I have to get back into the swing of things.

Just to be clear, I think we're in agreement though you phrased this as though it were otherwise. When I said, "Can you really not just accept that he's not a philosopher" I meant it in the practical sense: does something actually turn on whether you can call him a philosopher; will the paper not go through if you cannot convince your professor? It seems (in the same post from which I quote) that you actually can accept, in this sense, that he's not a philosopher. That's all I meant (there). But I do think it is inconsistent that if (1) you can practically assent to not calling him a philosopher and, as you claim, (2) you are not loading the title with value, that (3) you still care as to whether or not he is a philosopher. It seems to follow (from 1 &3), almost analytically, that you are just trying to bestow an honorary title on him — cast a sidelong glance and wink saying, "I respect you even if no one else does." Again, it seems the only reason you would want to call him a philosopher "over and above" journalist/author is because you are carrying normative baggage with the term — e.g. insightful, wise, deep, far-reaching — when it's simply a (possibly linguistic) mistake on your part to overlook that journalists and authors can be insightful/wise/deep/far-reaching as much as philosophers can, if not more. Philosophy has no exclusive right to any normative praise — it's just another humdrum academic field. Again, since there's 100% agreement on the pragmatics here, I'll only kindle what might be the spark of a debate. I think the MLK ("counter")example is a wash, since — in addition to being a theologian (arguably philosophy) — MLK was in fact very well versed in what students of analytic philosophy consider philosophy. Take a look at "Letter from Birmingham" and he's riffing on legal positivism and (a kind of proto-Dworkian) Natural Law all over the place. So, it's not plainly clear that the meaning has changed (i.e. it's not a misuse, not because the sense has changed, but because it fits e.g. the criteria I mentioned above of participating in a historical dialogue). And it would be increasingly strange to persist in calling him a philosopher the less he spoke about such things. But seriously, again, this is a case where calling someone a philosopher is almost insultingly selling him short. IDGAF whether MLK was a philosopher (because that's just a humdrum title for someone who has a certain humdrum profession/hobby). He was A LOT more important things that that: he was a great political leader — who cares at saying anything more than that? Unless you are extremely attached to equating "philosopher" with, say, "visionary" (or some other compliment), I really can't see the point in pushing this fact. (Just call him "visionary" then, which implies only "visionary" whereas "philosopher" can equally imply "uselessly speculative," "pseudo-intellectual," etc. as much, if not more than "visionary".) Even speaking as a fan of ordinary language philosophy, I think there's some sensible way in which people can systematically misuse terms (e.g. "begs the question" when they mean "beget"/"raise"). We don't have to make overwrought, backlogged assumptions in each case that some kind of sense-variance has shifted. In particular, what I have been arguing, is that if (1) in every single case (all nearby possible worlds) of term-utterance X having particular sense X2 there is some nearby term Y with the same meaning & (2) X controversially applies (because X1 =/= X2), then use Y instead. This goes for the philosophical/poetic distinction, where I think most people can admit they are just conflating terms that can better be held distinct ("Philosophy" is what bored most non-majors as freshman; "Poetry" is what they were too embarrassed to sign up for). If by "philosopher" someone intends some compliment, then it is as a matter of fact better for them to just use the compliment instead, since as a matter of fact "philosopher" is often used dismissively/insultingly. By communicative norms, there is a mistake being made here. (I'll leave it as an exercise to see how many Gricean maxims are being violated.)

Relativism! Boo!

My advice won't be nearly as helpful as the others, but for ethics (broadly construed to include political and legal philosophy), GSU clearly trumps NIU in terms of faculty. An absurd percentage of the professors at GSU specialize in some form of ethics, whereas NIU has ~3.5 (incl. the part-time emeritus prof.). If you're really full-go on ethics, and the options are pretty much financially equal, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend GSU. Especially because of the diversity of ethics taught at GSU, you might be able to explore more specifically what branch of ethics you want to specialize in. As far as I see it, if there's one clear-cut variable between the PGR MA programs, it's that GSU is the ethical/political program, whereas NIU is the epistemology/metaphysics (of all of the variables to consider, this one has really the starkest difference). Looking at NIU's placement record, not only are theses in ethics rare -- they don't place anywhere. But like I said, that's kind of holistic. Unless you have a really secure, well-thought-out plan to work with prof. X at university Y to get into program Z, GSU is an extremely safe bet.

Yeah, I'm going to side with the professor on this one, for multiple reasons, though I'm pretty much just seconding Dontfly and isostheneia. First, the safest criteria for what counts as philosophy and what counts as being a philosopher is that one works within a certain discourse or historical dialogue. Obviously, this is just a rough standard, and triggers a bunch of false positives and misses a lot — but it's nonetheless extremely relevant. The less someone is responding to philosophers of the present and past, the more justified it is to not consider them as being a part of the practice. This is the reasoning behind academics who distance themselves from "mere critics" and, say, Zizek (who's accordingly more of a philosopher when he's writing about Hegel, less so when he's "philosophizing" about the connections between Batman and the financial crisis). It also, I think, explains what I think is a needed separation of poetry and philosophy. I'm not saying this criteria is the end of the matter, but rather something one simply can't ignore on the grounds that it doesn't gel with an ideal world where everyones a philosopher. Second, your professor is just doing a good job of looking out for your academic career. Following the point above, even if you are capable of writing an edifying piece on this guy, most other philosophers won't care and might even consider it a joke if they aren't familiar with his work. Hume and Nietzsche are, in this sense, safe (again, if only because there is a certain tradition in place). Third — I don't know how to be less blunt about this — can you really not just accept that he's not a philosopher and incorporate his work in some other way? Like what's really at stake here, is there some actual obstacle to referring to him as a journalist/critic/writer? I really can't imagine a professor a priori dismissing any reference to a non-philosopher, so long as you qualify the source's occupation, and — again, no offense — it just seems like a weak rhetorical mistake on your part to not just bend on this point, choosing instead to cite the author's work under some other name. (That is, simply don't call him a philosopher then but instead cite him as a supporting part of one of your arguments with evidence or as phrasing some thought in a clear and distinct way, or extract your own philosophical argument from his text — say, e.g. his writing seems to represent such-and-such a philosophy...) So those are the practical arguments. As I've probably betrayed my own theoretical position on this by now, I might as well say that — as a metaphilosophical matter quite apart from the above — I disagree with the tenderhearted sentiments that seem to be on offer here. If everyone's a philosopher, then it becomes a vacuous term, and no one's a philosopher. I also would be wary of b.s. etymological arguments. They're pretty much always a wash because of some inevitable untranslatability. (Also, I would generally just run a fast as I can from anyone obsessing, "Love of wisdom, love of wisdom. Are you a lover of wisdom? Is he a lover of wisdom?") It's a kind of cheap rhetoric. (I remember in primary school, teachers saying to my class, "You're all teachers! You're all scientists!") But—and this is my biggest point—I think this is all stemming from an unduly value-laden conception of the term, i.e. seeing "philosopher" as a compliment or an insult. The term is no doubt used this way often but I would say it's used invariably mistakenly, or at least inconsistently. For instance, "philosophical" tends to be a compliment for a film, art-piece, novel, etc., but people always just mean "poetic" (which we avoid saying because it tends to sound too sentimental but is nonetheless felicitous). Really when's the last time you saw a film or read a novel that was remotely anything like Critique of Pure Reason, First Meditations, Republic, etc. — in style or substance? Conversely, "philosopher," usually is an insult, as in a crank or a charlatan (because a philosopher who's actually doing their job well is just speaking "common sense" or the "plain truth" — i.e. has no need to philosophize). My recommendation is to just deflate whatever value you are for some reason attaching to these terms (i.e. don't use them as a compliment or insult — we don't even often use "philosopher" to mean "wise"), instead see it as a name for a certain kind of professional/practitioner, and the cases in which the terms are appropriate will become less controversial/interesting. My bet is that this guy probably won't be one of them; even if he's a tricky case, who cares if there's some other way you can just get around it.

All other things being equal, definitely NIU.

Quick update on this: I talked to the financial aid services at Brandeis about funding for part-time students. You can still get the full $20k through a $2,500 discount off each course you take, up to 8 courses. However, you can't complete the one year residency until you have taken 8 courses; a year's residency is measured in courses, not time (how's that for bad philosophy?). (I've seen other programs where, so long as you enroll half-time, a part-time student can get post-residency status.) This defeats everything I said above. (I expected this, and forgot to mention that I expected this in the original post; I also tried to just edit it, replacing what I wrote with this update but it seems I can't do that. So, to anyone reading this a year from now: sorry for the run-around.) But there is one upshot of all this: no matter how you cut it, Brandeis's "50%" remission just ain't 50% remission. Part-time = $31,642 (8+1 courses over 3/4 sem.) (deducting untaxed TA-funding) $21,442 total cost Full-time = $31,638 (3 semesters) (deducting untaxed TA-funding) $21,438 total cost Given it's Taxachusetts, the untaxed funding should be taken as implausibly generous; the real total cost of just tuition, then, is likely a couple thousand higher. In terms of opportunity cost, Brandeis would then cost—assuming all scholarship/assistantships are sustained—~$45,000 more than NIU's 2 year program (incl. tuition waver and $12,000 annual stipend). All of this does not factor in the "real cost" of attendance (fees, course material, room-and-board, etc.).

I know this is an old post, but the film that best embodies philosophy is The Act of Killing. It's the greatest film ever made, and is on a par with Philosophical Investigations (greatest book) for the most vicarious, most intense, and most transformative "philosophical experience". Upstream Color was alright. I really admire the director, but if you look around and hear him describe what we was trying to do with that film, I think it's undeniably a failure. Admirable, though, and awfully pretty. If you just want Youtube videos of lectures, look up Brad Younger. I have no idea who he is, but he uploads pretty much every philosophy lecture on the internet.