lyellgeo

I had a 4th letter from an English professor (since I had worked with them on some things), but submitted 3 philosophy letters for those schools that only accepted three. Unsure whether it helped or hurt

Well, yes and no, mostly because very very few people have a "reasonable shot" with things being so competitive. I would place less pressure on a sample/letters being "excellent" (though of course they should be) and more on how your specific research interests and/or project syncs with certain people at universities you are interested in going to. This is hard to fake—usually you have to have read and/or at least be aware of the recent work of the people you are interested in working with, and have developed your some of your own thoughts on it. GPA and everything else is about 20% of the battle (most applicants will have very good GPAs and letters)—the other 80% will more or less come down to fit, which is mostly articulated through the writing sample and statement of purpose. Imagine applying to a job that 200 people are also applying to (and maybe 5 of whom will be accepted). Probably 100 of them are excellent all around applicants, but the vast majority of them will be rejected. And department fit (which, like "excellence," is difficult to pin down) will determine most of that.

Two other MA programs to check out are Miami Ohio and LSU. Both are funded and could be a good fit for your interests. SUNY Stony Brook also has a MA program focused more on aesthetics, though I don't think it's funded.

From my limited experience, there are plenty of people in "continental" departments who aren't particularly interested in Derrida or Lacan. (If anything, I feel like Derrida is falling more out of popularity, though that could be my own bias.) More generally, there will be a huge amount of difference from department to department about which particular people are studied and focused on, and which are ignored. For example, programs like Penn State, Stony Brook, Villanova, and Boston College each have very different approaches. But, especially given that there's at least a couple of hundred years of European work to sort through, including many diverse philosophical traditions across several different languages and countries, that shouldn't be too surprising. It's also a testament to why grouping those programs all together as "continental" can often be more misleading than helpful.

I don't know much about Plato, but I don't think there's anything wrong with having a narrow set of interests, provided that you can articulate them to a broader philosophical community. However, if that is the case, you should be able to demonstrate a good knowledge of the current state of scholarship and the problems people are working on. What readings are the most recent, and of those, which are standard and which are controversial? What universities have the strongest faculty working on topics you're interested in, and how do you feel about the work of various specific faculty? How has the field developed over the last 10-20 years, and where do you see this going in the future? What do you find to be the most important books and essays on your topic published within the last couple of years? Which people in your area do you think are doing great work, and what work do you think is not so good? Those are the kinds of questions you should want to have an answer to, if you don't already. With regards to research interests, my sense is that Plato (if not also the Timaeus) is too narrow in one sense, but also too broad in another. Rather than honing in on an entire philosopher (or even just one work), it's often more compelling to develop an arc where you show how a small part of a person's text (e.g. a reading of term X) informs a common reading Y of their theory, and how a Z reading might avoid the problems of Y, but that Z also has its own problems, etc. That's for the writing sample. The statement of purpose will be less specific, but should nonetheless exhibit a similar kind of movement: e.g. maybe you're interested in how a specific aspect of Plato's work informs something else, or you'd like to explore how other textual tensions work to address a certain philosophical problem. Maybe there are other problems you find interesting as well. My guess is that there are enough departments with people studying Plato, that you shouldn't be worried being about ostracized because of that alone (I did run into that problem with my WS on another philosopher)—but you do need to focus on how to articulate those interests in a way that shows what kind of scholar you might develop into. Aside from that, I would try to solicit as much feedback as possible from faculty and grad students working on ancient philosophy. Going to conferences can be a good way to do this if you don't already have connections, and is often a good way to meet people and get a sense of how the field is progressing.

I agree, but even just including just those 4, that's almost 25% of evaluators (4/17), which is quite a lot. And if we were to ask instead how many of those scholars primarily work in 20th century continental, you would get an even higher percentage. That amount of ambiguity just doesn't seem to hold true of any of the other specialty rankings. Yeah, I think it's an interesting problem, and I'm not sure how to work through it myself. When it comes to writing and reading I just ignore it (I've taken plenty of coursework in both "traditions"), but it's harder to ignore the sociological division when making decisions that ultimately will impact one's academic career. If anything, I do think it is helpful for applicants to know that there are a number of unranked programs (e.g. Stony Brook, DePaul, Villanova, Penn State, etc.) where a lot of 20th century work is being done, and that those programs are often both extremely competitive to get into and occasionally have good placement for teaching (i.e. non research) positions. I also think there's quite a lot of good work being done at these programs, though that's my own personal bias. At least in my own case, it would have been helpful to know just how competitive some of these programs are, despite their "unranked" status. (And, to be fair, many people on this forum did warn me, I just didn't quite internalize it until afterwards.)

There are two specialty rankings, one for 19th and one for 20th. I was specifically talking about 20th century continental. Of course there will be some overlap, but it's still a hundred or so years of differences to sort through.The 19th century rankings are much more helpful than the 20th century ones.

Also, it's sort of odd that they still include Leiter's original "analytic vs. continental philosophy" guide, even though it's misguided about a whole range of points, e.g. that analytic philosophy is about style. (A much better explanation can be found here.) And, to use another example of poor thinking from Leiter's guide: Whatever the limitations of “analytic” philosophy, it is clearly far preferable to what has befallen humanistic fields like English, which have largely collapsed as serious disciplines while becoming the repository for all the world’s bad philosophy, bad social science, and bad history. Surely humanity “celebrities” like Stanley Fish and Judith Butler are fine contemporary examples of “the man of letters who really isnothing but ‘represents’ almost everything, playing and ‘substituting’ for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated.…”) Regardless of whether philosophers even agree with this statement, is this really the kind of thing we want to be telling undergraduate students? That English and History have collapsed as serious disciplines? That Judith Butler—one of the more influential feminists of this century (regardless of whether one agrees with her work)—is a fraud?

The specialty report ranking is more or less useless when it comes to 20th century continental, mostly because many if not most of the evaluators aren't even working in that area. Methodological problems aside, one would think that would be at least a basic criteria for including someone as an evaluator. So it would at least be nice if that bias—namely, that many people in the analytic tradition don't consider it to be "real" philosophy (I even had one professor compare them to a group of androids)—was more explicit rather than providing a ranking for 20th century continental that includes programs (e.g. UC Irvine) where essentially no one is even working in that area.

I wouldn't pay much attention to the Leiter ranks for continental programs, unless you plan on applying to a ranked (i.e. mostly analytic) program in the U.S afterwards. But I don't know anything about Kingston's program itself except that they have some very well known faculty.

Other people on here may have more experience, but my sense is that Y would be better. But if you're less sure about your current interests and think there's a good chance they might develop into other areas (or if you want to develop a strong competency in other areas), then you may want to go with X, as the higher ranked school may have more options in those other areas.

Depending on the program, those are good odds. Usually MA applicants are more likely to decline than phd applicants, as many if not most are applying to PhDs as well.

It's sort of odd, because there are several more analytic places with someone working on Heidegger, even though he was for a long time (from what I can tell) viewed as mostly continental-gibberish from the perspective of analytic phil departments. Also, there's becoming more of a tolerance for Foucault—e.g. Leiter excludes Foucault from his list of French "nonsense," and Chicago has a person who works on Foucault (while still outside the mainstream strengths of that department). Meanwhile, continental programs have been (often for good reasons) moving further away from Heidegger, and are much more focused on critical race and gender than they were (at least compared to 10-20 years ago). Foucault is obviously still extremely important, but Deleuze (for whatever reason) is also increasing in popularity. Or at least that's my vague impression—obviously those are huge generalizations that aren't super helpful when actually deciding where to study. It's kind of funny to think about what programs will look like in 10-20 years. Will we have a new Brandom-style program working on Deleuze, or even, say, Irigaray or Butler? Will continental programs further adjust their interests to compensate? Or will certain program interests start to mesh, making the (sociological) division between the two less extreme? Hard to say.

Yeah, the 20th century rankings are especially odd. Partly this could be because many of the reviewers—e.g. Guyer, Leiter, Novakovic—seem far more at home in 19th century continental, and in some cases don't even appear to be publishing or engaging with 20th century figures at all. It's sort of as if they had a bunch of early modern people evaluating Kant departments

While this is definitely true, there is one caveat to this as a strategy. As an applicant, one will likely have very little sense of whether any specific faculty member is accepting new students, planning on transferring to another institution, is viewed favorably by the other faculty members, is just difficult to work with, will even be on the admissions committee, and so on, all of which could affect the program's decision. But if one can make their application demonstrate a close fit for 2-3 faculty members (i.e. more specific than a broad area of interest but not specifically tied to one person), that can alleviate some of those concerns.