1. Will I be satisfied with what you say here? Of course not: you’re (probably) a philosopher, whether credentialed, credentialing, or fellow-traveling layperson. But give us a chance anyway.
2. Is this a) a beauty contest, or b) an objective report on the quality of the programs under consideration? It is c) none of the above. We’re not foolhardy enough to try to rely on controversial constraints like objectivity. For one thing, we’d never satisfy everyone that we were using the right notion of objectivity (see question #1). For another, the best way to pursue objectivity would probably require looking at information that isn’t consistently reported and that we don’t have ready access to – like graduation rates, time to completion, placement data, and faculty citation reports. For still another thing, there’s no guarantee that even these factors will track whatever it is we claim to be tracking – or that they can all be put together in a coherent or satisfying way.
3. So what the heck is this? Think of this as a dressed up, moderately systematized version of what happens when you ask experts in a field about the best places to study in that field. We have put this question to our experts in various ways, and we have tried to organize their responses into a provisional, partial picture of the fields in question. So we aim to provide a summary opinion survey, meant to report the considered judgment of experts in a few fields on how one might fare when attempting to study these fields in various departments of philosophy.
4. How do you pick your experts, and what exactly do they do for you? We pick them the way we’d pick people to review tenure files, or to consult about applying to graduate programs: we relied on our professional sense of the movers and shakers in the relevant fields. (Don’t pretend you don’t know how this works.) We have invited these folks to join our advisory board, which means that they provide regular input. We will also consult with them on how to improve the surveys, the reports that result, and the constitution of the advisory boards. They are not constrained in any way in answering our questions. They can go to websites to remind themselves of who’s in a department, they can talk to other people – they can, in short, do whatever they need to do to produce what they regard as a responsible assessment.
5. Why are you doing this? Our sense was that some of our main areas of philosophical concern had no systematic way of gathering and distributing the information that aspiring scholars most need in deciding where to study. In talking to our peers and colleagues – both informally and in more formal settings in, among other places, SPEP and the APA – we found that a great many people shared this view. So we are trying to correct this situation.
6. Why are you focusing on these areas? What about [my favorite underappreciated area of philosophical study]? The short answer is that one has to start, and end, somewhere. The longer answer is that one has to start and end somewhere, and these are the areas that we know best. We make no claims to universal coverage, and we have no desire to occupy the entire field. So if you think another area needs the sort of treatment we try to offer here, then start your own survey – or talk to us about partnering with us to expand this one.
7. Where are the numbers? What’s with this ‘strongly recommended’ and ‘recommended’ business? We have numbers, but quantification is an artifact of the attempt to systematize what are essentially qualitative assessments. So the numbers are less important than the trends that the numbers reveal. Put differently, focusing closely on the numbers will, in our view, exaggerate tiny and somewhat arbitrary differences – between a department that scores a 4.57 and one that achieves a 4.61 – at the expense of larger scale patterns – like the gap between departments that average in the 4’s from those that average in the 2’s. For this reason, we have used the numbers to arrive at broad distinctions between places that seem more and less likely to provide the kind of high-level support that is conducive to good work in a field.
8. What’s with these categories? If there’s no such thing as race (‘race’), and if notions like ‘race’ and ‘gender’ and ‘America’ are artifacts of highly contingent and problematic sociohistorical dynamics, how can fields of study be organized around them? The fields of study we have in mind are devoted in part to exploring and answering questions like these. We are working not from a Platonic conception of the ideal division of the fields of philosophical inquiry, but from an entirely pedestrian sense of the actual lay of the land in our profession. It is in fact the case that people study these things, and that they do so with some regularity under the rubrics that we’ve used, sometimes with the aid of dedicated professional associations, journals, and the rest. All we want to do is use the categories and identifications already at work on the ground and give people some resources to navigate the terrain a little more knowledgeably.
Our hope is to rise above, or sidestep, the ongoing debates over categories, and point prospective students (and interested others) to the departments where they can consider issues like these responsibly, and with high-level support. This hope has led us in each case to choose the most capacious label, so as not to exclude any parties to the debates that define the fields. For example: You might be wondering why we refer to ‘American Philosophy’ and not just to ‘pragmatism.’ The answer is that the question of pragmatism’s centrality to the tradition that we know as ‘American philosophy’ is a question people ask in that field. We don’t propose to settle it here. And the question makes sense only against the backdrop of a professional practice that in at least some of its forms invites us to study people – like Santayana, Anna Julia Cooper, and Emerson – who might chafe under the pragmatist label. (This will be our answer, mutatis mutandis, for similar questions about, say, ‘feminist theory’ vs. ‘gender studies,’ or ‘race and ethnicity’ vs. ‘critical race theory.’)
9. Why are there no graduate students on these Advisory Boards? Graduate students are an excellent and important source of information about many issues regarding departments, but they are less likely to know about other departments besides their own. Therefore, we would need a graduate student from every department surveyed, and how would we choose which one? We urge students who are considering departments to consult with current graduate students, and to reach beyond the names provided by Graduate Directors.
10. Who is behind this guide? Who do I contact with thoughts or suggestions? This site is independent of any philosophical organizations. Its authors are philosophers interested in helping prospective graduate students get better information about programs that would suit their interests. The principal players are:
Linda Martín Alcoff, Hunter College, CUNY Graduate Center
Raja Halwani, Art Institute of Chicago
José Jorge Mendoza, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Paul Taylor, Vanderbilt University
Gail Weiss, George Washington University
You can contact us at: pluralistguidetophil@gmail.com