Undergrad Languages

[UndergradDad]

Hi- First time poster here. Question for you- does taking a language other than German, French, Greek or Latin in undergrad hurt your chances of getting into a Philosophy Phd program? My son is minoring in Chinese with a major in Philosophy.. He is a freshman and just changed to Philosophy from politics this semester and has not had a chance to see his Philosophy advisor yet so I wanted to get some opinions from this forum since he has already signed up for classes for the Fall and does not have any of the languages listed above on his schedule. He has already expressed interest in going on to graduate school.

Thanks for your help.

 

 

[maxhgns]

No. Certainly not directly. It might do so indirectly if, for example, it brings the student's GPA down significantly and the admissions committee cares about that. But that's highly unlikely (they'll care about the philosophy GPA, and everyone knows languages are hard and bad grades are common).

I guess it might also cause some very indirect harm if the grad program in question has a language requirement and doesn't recognize Cantonese/Mandarin, or if the applicant needs to spend time learning other, non-Chinese languages for research purposes (e.g. if he/she is working in ancient or medieval, then they'll need Greek and Latin, and perhaps even Arabic, French, and German). But language requirements are becoming less common, and these days they're usually tied to the student's research. So if the student is interested in Chinese philosophy, then having an undergrad background in the language will be helpful. If the student is interested in other things, then the worst that will happen is that he or she will have to learn whatever the other relevant language is. But they'll hardly be alone in doing that. Lots of people only learn their research-relevant language in grad school.

[Duns Eith]

35 minutes ago, UndergradDad said:

Hi- First time poster here. Question for you- does taking a language other than German, French, Greek or Latin in undergrad hurt your chances of getting into a Philosophy Phd program? My son is minoring in Chinese with a major in Philosophy.. He is a freshman and just changed to Philosophy from politics this semester and has not had a chance to see his Philosophy advisor yet so I wanted to get some opinions from this forum since he has already signed up for classes for the Fall and does not have any of the languages listed above on his schedule. He has already expressed interest in going on to graduate school.

Thanks for your help.

Whether a language helps depends on what you want to research in philosophy. Many enter a PhD program with a long-faded education in Spanish. Their dossier is not hurt by this. But suppose you want to do medieval: it helps that you have Latin. Suppose you want to do French Existentialism -- French, obviously, helps. But many graduate students acquire the research language while in the PhD when they have identified which language will be most helpful for research. Most enter the PhD without knowing what they will write on; so let's have a reasonable expectation.

That said, knowing any language is helpful, insofar as it is helpful for equipping the person to know how to learn a language.

[edit]

Some programs give an option to replace the language with some other research skill. If not language, then maybe advanced statistics. If not language, then maybe supplementing with cognitive science and neuroscience. The program I am entering into has no language requirement, unless your research area calls for it. (I'm interested in early modern, so it looks like I'll be learning Latin or French ... or both)

Edited April 22, 2017 by Duns Eith

[UndergradDad]

Thank you- those replies were very helpful. He actually enjoys his Chinese class and has an A so far. He liked taking Latin in high school. The only thing he dreads is if he had to take German. Glad to know he doesn't have to worry about languages in undergrad.