Anyone looking forward to the (full) new PGR?

[prtrbd]

Will this affect anyone's decisions? Does anyone even care about it anymore?

[Metanoia]

I think most of the relevant parts have already been published piece-meal on Leiter's blog, though perhaps not all the specialty rankings are out yet. For my own purposes, the new rankings won't play much of a role since I'm largely ignoring general rankings in favor of strengths in my AOIs. I did find the ancient phil specialty rankings to be useful though. 

[maxhgns]

I am, although I suspect that the problems with the ranking in my subfield will persist, despite being easily fixable. I also expect most non-American programs will continue to be undervalued, which is too bad.

 

But I like keeping up with the PGR.

[thehegeldialectic]

No, because I do not believe that the PGR should exist nor do I think it provides any significant indication of the merits of philosophy programs.

 

Edited March 6, 2018 by iunoionnis

[shifgrethor]

13 hours ago, Metanoia said:

I think most of the relevant parts have already been published piece-meal on Leiter's blog, though perhaps not all the specialty rankings are out yet. For my own purposes, the new rankings won't play much of a role since I'm largely ignoring general rankings in favor of strengths in my AOIs. I did find the ancient phil specialty rankings to be useful though. 

Agreed with this, except still waiting on the Early Modern specialty rankings

[Schwarzwald]

1 hour ago, shifgrethor said:

Agreed with this, except still waiting on the Early Modern specialty rankings

Same.

 

I didn't know there was a new one to be published it? When's the release date?

[prtrbd]

10 minutes ago, Schwarzwald said:

Same.

 

I didn't know there was a new one to be published it? When's the release date?

Within the next few days: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/philosophical_gourmet_report/

[Swann]

looks like its up now. except, there doesn't seem to be breakdown rankings for 19th-century, 20th-century, and Kant (maybe others are missing, but those were the ones i noticed)

[hi_hello]

12 minutes ago, Swann said:

looks like its up now. except, there doesn't seem to be breakdown rankings for 19th-century, 20th-century, and Kant (maybe others are missing, but those were the ones i noticed)

Can you post a link?

[maxhgns]

On 3/5/2018 at 6:22 PM, maxhgns said:

I am, although I suspect that the problems with the ranking in my subfield will persist, despite being easily fixable. I also expect most non-American programs will continue to be undervalued, which is too bad.

 

But I like keeping up with the PGR.

I stand corrected. It looks much improved on all these fronts.

(BTW Is there anywhere we can look to see the list of evaluators for each subfield, or is that entirely gone now?)

[Swann]

11 minutes ago, hi_hello said:

Can you post a link?

philosophical gourmet report

 

Edited March 9, 2018 by Swann

[poppypascal]

The specialty rankings in 19th/20th century continental are quite interesting. To be ranked in this section (e.g. Harvard) you don't appear to need any members of faculty or graduate students who publish in the area or indeed even cite it as a specialty on their webpage. At Harvard, there's one member of faculty who cites "French and German philosophy" as an interest, but his most recent work appears to be on cognitive neuroscience and he doesn't mention any research current research in the area. Irvine is a heavily analytic department. The list goes on. Some other major places for continental aren't even mentioned. Does anyone else find this bewildering? Harvard is probably raking in thousands in application fees from people who want to study continental philosophy just because they managed to get their name on these rankings, when there's no one there studying the subject.

Here's the list for 20th century:

Columbia, BU, Georgetown, Oxford, UCL, Warwick, Harvard, Northwestern, Rice, Syracuse, Irvine, Riverside, Chicago, Notre Dame, Sheffield

Additional ones not evaluated (why?): Boston College, Loyola, New School, Penn State, Stony Brook, Dublin, U of Essex, U of Kentucky, U of Memphis

 

[lyellgeo]

3 hours ago, poppypascal said:

Here's the list for 20th century:

Columbia, BU, Georgetown, Oxford, UCL, Warwick, Harvard, Northwestern, Rice, Syracuse, Irvine, Riverside, Chicago, Notre Dame, Sheffield

Additional ones not evaluated (why?): Boston College, Loyola, New School, Penn State, Stony Brook, Dublin, U of Essex, U of Kentucky, U of Memphis

 

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

Edited March 10, 2018 by lyellgeo

[big modality]

4 hours ago, poppypascal said:

Irvine is a heavily analytic department.

Also note that although Irvine is ranked as a single entity, there are two philosophy departments at Irvine. One more continental (Derrida was there!) and one heavily, heavily analytic, Logic and Philosophy of Science. So that's another quirk of the rankings. If there are multiple departments at one school, they're ranked as one, which makes Irvine look like an especially strange place. 

[ThePeon]

As much as I defend the PGR, the way they treat continental philosophy is really indefensible.

[poppypascal]

1 hour ago, big modality said:

Also note that although Irvine is ranked as a single entity, there are two philosophy departments at Irvine. One more continental (Derrida was there!) and one heavily, heavily analytic, Logic and Philosophy of Science. So that's another quirk of the rankings. If there are multiple departments at one school, they're ranked as one, which makes Irvine look like an especially strange place. 

Yeah that is confusing... But even just restricting it to the non-LPS Irvine philosophy department, having just done quick check of the faculty's cited areas of interest, not a single one cites 20th century continental. There's interesting stuff going on at Irvine, but if you want to specialize in continental, it's not really the place to go. First, who there is going to be able to be your thesis advisor? And second, if you want to specialize in something, shouldn't a fair amount of the coursework also be somehow related to said topic? If you want to study Ancient philosophy, you apply to places with at least a few people doing that, where you have the opportunity to do Ancient phil coursework. The PGR rankings for other areas probably bear this out. But for 19th/20th continental, large departments with a lot of faculty working on it aren't included, and small departments with one or no faculty working in the area are ranked. Makes no sense, it must do more harm than good at this point. People are guaranteed to be mislead by this and waste their money and time applying to places they either have no hope of getting into, or where they'd be miserable if they ended up enrolling.

[Stencil]

On 3/10/2018 at 12:12 PM, poppypascal said:

Yeah that is confusing... But even just restricting it to the non-LPS Irvine philosophy department, having just done quick check of the faculty's cited areas of interest, not a single one cites 20th century continental. There's interesting stuff going on at Irvine, but if you want to specialize in continental, it's not really the place to go. First, who there is going to be able to be your thesis advisor? And second, if you want to specialize in something, shouldn't a fair amount of the coursework also be somehow related to said topic? If you want to study Ancient philosophy, you apply to places with at least a few people doing that, where you have the opportunity to do Ancient phil coursework. The PGR rankings for other areas probably bear this out. But for 19th/20th continental, large departments with a lot of faculty working on it aren't included, and small departments with one or no faculty working in the area are ranked. Makes no sense, it must do more harm than good at this point. People are guaranteed to be mislead by this and waste their money and time applying to places they either have no hope of getting into, or where they'd be miserable if they ended up enrolling.

Sven Bernecker works on German idealism, and David Woofruff Smith works on Husserl and phenomenology. Admittedly, I don't know much about how continental philosophy is studied today, but don't both of those qualify as continental philosophy, the latter being 20th century continental philosophy? Also, another factor which may impact their ranking is that Martin Schwab is a professor emeritus there, and his primary research interest is 19th and 20th century continental philosophy. I don't doubt that the PGR rankings for continental philosophy are not entirely accurate, but it's not like they just picked names out of a hat in order to determine those rankings.

[Cogitodoncrien]

6 minutes ago, Stencil said:

Sven Bernecker works on German idealism, and David Woofruff Smith works on Husserl and phenomenology. Admittedly, I don't know much about how continental philosophy is studied today, but don't both of those qualify as continental philosophy, the latter being 20th century continental philosophy? 

Actually, Husserl and others who did phenomenology (like Merleau-Ponty for instance) are being "claimed" by analytic philosophers and cognitive scientists as being in the purview of analytic philosophy of mind.  This is mainly do to theories of embodied cognition, interest in the possibility of nonconceptual mental content, and work on the distinction between perception and cognition.

[Stencil]

4 minutes ago, Cogitodoncrien said:

Actually, Husserl and others who did phenomenology (like Merleau-Ponty for instance) are being "claimed" by analytic philosophers and cognitive scientists as being in the purview of analytic philosophy of mind.  This is mainly do to theories of embodied cognition, interest in the possibility of nonconceptual mental content, and work on the distinction between perception and cognition.

Ah okay, that actually makes a lot of sense. I appreciate the clarification, contemporary continental philosophy is definitely an area of relative ignorance for me.

[Cogitodoncrien]

5 minutes ago, Stencil said:

Ah okay, that actually makes a lot of sense. I appreciate the clarification, contemporary continental philosophy is definitely an area of relative ignorance for me.

No problem.  It seems to me to be similar to Brandom and others taking an interest in Hegel and making that respectable for study by analytic philosophy.  I think it's a good sign that analytic philosophers are taking notice of late 19th and 20th century philosophers who were pejoratively deemed continental.

[maxhgns]

22 minutes ago, Stencil said:

Sven Bernecker works on German idealism, and David Woofruff Smith works on Husserl and phenomenology. Admittedly, I don't know much about how continental philosophy is studied today, but don't both of those qualify as continental philosophy, the latter being 20th century continental philosophy?

Like Cogitodoncrien said, Merleau-Ponty is gaining in popularity in phil. of mind/cog. sci/neuroscience circles, largely with respect to embodied cognition and the extended mind thesis.

As for Husserl... he's always been a sort of liminal figure. He's long been well-known to logicians and philosophers of mathematics, especially for his mathematical work (his PhD was in mathematics, after all!), his work on the philosophy of science, his correspondence with Frege, and his critique of psychologism. Continentalists, by contrast, have tended to focus on his work on intentionality and the phenomenological epoché, since that's a big part of what was transmitted to the later, thoroughly continental, major figures.

[lyellgeo]

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. 
 

Edited March 12, 2018 by lyellgeo

[prtrbd]

9 minutes ago, lyellgeo said:

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. 
 

Hope not.

[ThePeon]

5 minutes ago, lyellgeo said:

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 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. 

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. 
 

It'll be interesting to see. The division these days seems based less on active hostility and more on a mutual ignorance borne of institutional inertia and laziness, which is in theory more tractable. Still, the divide is still pretty vast even on that basis, in my experience. I've run into multiple analytic philosophy graduate students who hadn't even heard of figures like Derrida and Heidegger, for example. At the same time, I ran into a non-philosophy humanities graduate student who seemed to sincerely believe that logical positivism was a major current in contemporary analytic philosophy.

[Cogitodoncrien]

11 minutes ago, lyellgeo said:

 

4 minutes ago, ThePeon said:

It'll be interesting to see. The division these days seems based less on active hostility and more on a mutual ignorance borne of institutional inertia and laziness, which is in theory more tractable. Still, the divide is still pretty vast even on that basis, in my experience. I've run into multiple analytic philosophy graduate students who hadn't even heard of figures like Derrida and Heidegger, for example. At the same time, I ran into a non-philosophy humanities graduate student who seemed to sincerely believe that logical positivism was a major current in contemporary analytic philosophy.

I will say that Michael Friedman is giving good reasons for reconsidering logical positivism.  In particular, I think that Carnap is sort of overlooked these days.