objectivityofcontradiction

I'm dying to know more about a potential Riverside (also UCSD) wait-list as well....

You're right Vineyard, and I know there was no way of avoiding my sounding like I was nurturing the students, and treating them like children. But, no, I don't think I will rewrite it and swap 'professor' for 'student.' The point I was making would apply anyways; if the student comes onto the Professor, under the principle I was advocating, they would be met with a swift rejection, end of story. If the student continues to think it is a good idea to get involved with professors, well, I don't know, report them to the administration?

Sorry for the bump, but I just read this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2568586/Oxford-student-hanged-splitting-boyfriend.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490 My initial reaction to these sorts of stories regarding sexual harassment in phd programs and the like has always been this: It is just so much easier NOT to get involved with a student in an intimate way, than it is to start such a relationship. Why bother getting involved with a student? For love? Pff, love some one else. Not your students. How is it that some academic professionals cannot seem to abide by a self-imposed rule that is as simple as: 'Hey Self, don't have sex with your students. Thanks, Self. That sounds like a great idea.' How is it that the intimacy that results from a student-professor relationship is so often misinterpreted by one side or the other? Maybe I sound naive, but I simply do not understand how for some it is so difficult to NOT have a relationship with their students. I don't much care for principle-based ethics. But shit, that seems to me to be a pretty minimal moral requirement, one that all who proceed along this career path should abide by.

Slum Village - Evolution = excellent newish rap release.

I really would recommended avoiding this website, at least until this time of year. I found that very early in the admissions season, aka late January and most of February, I was constantly being disappointed seeing so much news come up and not hearing anything myself. All the while it was just a fact that the schools I applied to all tend to release info later than others. It was a lot of unnecessary stress. I say TGC is great before you apply, and great once you start to hear some news via email, phone, etc. But it can be totally disheartening to find out about your potential chances from this site, and not from the departments themselves, in that in-between period. This is just a way of saying that so many unfounded and problematic inferences can be made based on what you find on the results page, without actually hearing any legitimate word form departments. This leads to you taking guesses at your admissions status, which, like I said, induces unneeded stress. I have some wait-list offers out and am still waiting on a few schools. But if i strike out this time and decide to apply again, I will not be back here. Why don't I just get off now, you ask? Well, because I am already enmeshed in this admissions cycle, that is why; can't pull the plug now. It'll be easier to do that if I have a summer to reflect on the shortcomings of my application.

There is an April 15 deadline for a reason. I agree with those above that we should stop with the pressing and pushing of others to make decisions. Even if you are half-joking about asking some one to remove themselves from contention at one school for your benefit, and thus have good intentions, I don't think we should be encouraging this practice. I have already resigned myself to the fact that I may not hear good news from the schools I am wait-listed at until right up until mid April. So be it. It is part of the process. Those lucky enough to have multiple choices should be able to revel in their success for as long as they see fit.

a joke I assume...

Would any one like to venture a guess as to how confident/worried one should be if they are informed they are on a wait-list, but not told that they are near the top of said list? This is the situation I am in with two schools, both of which I'd love to attend, but I am not sure what the chances are that I''ll make it off the WL. In my mind, a reasonable estimate for the number of students on a 'short wait-list,' which is what most schools seem to keep, would be in the 8-12 range, or even smaller. But, then again, we can see from the results page that wait-list numbers at various schools are high, even though all of us that are 'waiting' are told the lists are short........ Oh the stress....

You are correct. They require MAs at most places in Europe. The MA tells them that you have performed the requisite graduate-level course work and are prepared to jump right into the dissertation, which is what you are expected to do, for the most part.

I applied based on: fit (there had to be at least one Kant scholar in every department I applied to), placement record, and location. Then I began to look at the 'fluff,' i.e. size of stipend, availability of summer funding, is this school an active conference hoster (hostess?), cost of living, music scene in the city, etc. I spend an uncanny amount of time researching where the author's of the papers and books I enjoy teach, and have put in a serious amount of CV perusing over the past 2+ years. So my list of schools was very well researched. I think it is good advice to look up where a philosopher you enjoy teaches, and see what they are writing about and have written about in the past; then, maybe see where they got their PhD., then you think, well, maybe I should apply there, given that that school produced this philosopher, and so naturally may have people I'd like to work with. That is, only if the original philosopher you researched works somewhere that does not seem all that conducive to your interests. Things like that. My MA supervisor and I would often talk about my list as well. I'd drop names of people and institutions, and he'd give me his thoughts. It was through this process that I added schools to, and subtracted them from, my list.

Just had a quick look at last year's results pertaining to UC Riverside. Based on what I saw, it looks like wait-list offers should be out this week. I am anxiously awaiting one of these.

Might look into the Universities of Groningen and Amsterdam in the Netherlands; Freiburg im Breisgau and Frankfurt in Deutschland house world-famous philosophy departments, though I am not sure what the majority of the faculty at these places are working on these days. Freiburg has a reputation for phenomenology (duh, it was Heidegger's home uni) and is an awesome city, I spent the summer there in 2009. Also, many Scandinavian universities offer substantial funding for PhD. positions, and usually require their PhDs. to work in English. I recently looked into an open PhD. position at a Swedish university, that was for four years, and paid the equivalent of 43,000 USD per year. Sick, right?

I see. So you were informed of your exact position on the list? I am just curious, as this relates to the other thread. If I am to get a wait-list offer some place, I'll want to know if it is appropriate to ask about where I am ranked. And I am still unsure of how unranked wait-lists function. Any one know or have a guess?

Judging by submitted results, it is almost as if Indiana Bloomington has offered more wait-lists spots than actual offers.... given how many people have posted a wait-list on here, seems to me like it is going to be an awfully daunting task getting off the WL and into the acceptance pool there, even if loads of first rounders decline offers. How do those Wait-Listed feel about this?

Re: Wait-lists, I have been told by friends already in PhD. programs that it is okay to ask questions about the wait-list generally, and I suppose you could ask where you are 'ranked' if they do such a thing. But I think some times Wait-lists aren't ranked by 'best student left,' and more along the lines of this: 'Well, we just had 3 students with interests in epistemology choose elsewhere; these two on the wait-list have an interest in epistemology, and we do want students in that area from this class, so lets go with them, over the students who are interested in moral, because we already have three confirmed accepts from that contingent.'

Congrats Georgetown. My phone has been quiet, I've had no news in a week plus, and I'm down to only 2 schools that have not released any decisions (according the TGC results, anyways), with now a handful of presumed rejections. This is fun. Looks like I'll be treated to the good old radio silence throughout the acceptance period, which will take me right into the late March slew of rejections that departments will finally 'get around to.' Gotta love that 4.0 MA GPA. Boy, my writing sample (from a first class honors thesis) must have either really sucked or really pissed some Kantian committee members off.

Weltgeist, Neuhouser and Goehr (not so much Honneth, his book on reification left me very unsatisfied, although of course I'd love to take seminars with some one of the Frankfurt School lineage) are on my dream team as well. Good luck.

Come on. It's insulting that you think I would not know the difference between moral realism and political realism, and the fact that you laid out definitions is a bit ridiculous and seems quite patronizing to me, I'm not an 18 year old college freshman. This response may seem juvenile and again, I do not want to waste time bickering on here, but that was insulting. I sketched a sketchy comment on a discussion forum. I think moral realism can relate to Geuss' political realism (or at least what he takes to be practical realism in a very general sense) in a very simple way, and that is basically just insofar as his political realism is so much the more historically informed than a lot of political theory, and this very basic motive, I think, is something that much metaethics could do with understanding. So much metaethical theory suffers from being wholly ahistorical. I don't care if it is a highly theoretical branch of philosophy, and if in the realist case they are dealing with the existence of objects of moral sentiments. Such objects have a history, are formed by history, and are reacted to in historically mediated terms. I understand the difference between moral and political action, but I often find that one of the three big 'political' question that Geuss likes to ask, 'Who Whom?' is not asked enough in metaethics: to Whom do those objects of moral sentiments belong? And it is not merely enough to answer 'to rational agents.' That is ethics in void. That's all I mean when I cross the gulf between Geuss and the more analytical moral realist jargon.

I (and I hope most) could careless about your comments, its a stressful time, and this is the internet, people say stuff, whatever. Just stop creating thread after thread...jesus. Relax with this stuff. I edited to be a bit more understanding, but I stand by my sentiment. Enough with the threads, they seem like blatant appeals for attention.

Nice. I am making no inferences based on previous years as to when results will trickle out. But I also applied to Columbia, so I guess I look forward to March 5th as well.

I've been influenced on this issue by the work of William Fitzpatrick at Rochester. He argues for a non-naturalistic, robust ethical realism whereby 'ethical standards and facts are independent of us in the sense that they are not constituted by the actual or hypothetical results of any ethically-neutrally specifiable set of conditions or procedures applied to our beliefs, desires, attitudes, etc.' Currently I am interested in arguments that call into question the existence of anything like a 'moral' or 'practical' point of view or stance that is independent of certain metaphysical limits placed on values and the notion of moral truth. I am vehemently opposed to any kind of constructivism, but I am not sure why just yet. I also tend to think of myself as a moral realist but I am more influenced by the 'realism' of some one like the political philosopher Raymond Geuss (I'd highly recommend his Outside Ethics), and less the very dense metaethical realism of people like Brink, etc. Then again, my MA supervisor instilled in me the belief that the best moral philosophers are never a something-ist, but rather are usually independent of any particular camp.

What happens on March 5th?

'Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.' ...with that being said, among the current metaethical lit, I find myself reading loads in the avenues of moral particularism and moral [normative] realism, both of which seem to me to resonate with the general thrust of several of Adorno's minimal ethical prescriptions.

I am one of those it may help, as are a few others on here. So, thanks! Consider this me virtually buying you a beer to say thank you.

I am assuming a rejection for myself. But a quick look at last year shows posters not receiving a rejection notice until 3-4 weeks after the acceptances went out. So, given when they were released this year, I'll guess rejections come out next week or the week after. Unfortunately, I think we can expect such examples of poor tact from several schools. But hey, maybe they are still working on a wait-list as well.