This year the rankings of programs in almost all the specialty areas are based on survey of experts in those specialties. For a handful of specialties-American Pragmatism, Chinese Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Indian Philosophy-we had an insufficient number of responses to the faculty quality survey to rely solely on that; in those cases, members of the Advisory Board (and sometimes other experts in the fields) were consulted on the ranking, using the limited survey data we did have as a starting point. (Note that the Advisory Board voted to include Feminist Philosophy as a new category, but rejected inclusion of several other proposed specialties.)

Because, in many cases, the ratings reflect the presence of only one or two faculty in a department, the Advisory Board decided that we would not publish the precise scores. Programs are placed in "groupings" based on the rounded mean (rounded to the nearest .5). Next to each grouping, you will find the rounded mean for that group; next to the name of each program within that group you will find the median score for that faculty in parentheses. Within a grouping, programs are listed alphabetically. Only programs with a rounded mean of "3" (meaning "Good") or higher are so grouped. (Grouping by rounded mean obviated the need to standardize scores.) A category of "Also Notable" includes programs with a rounded mean less than 3.0, but a median of at least 3.0: thus, programs in this "Also Notable" categories are ones that at least half of the evaluators ranked as "Good" or better.

Following some of the listings, the Board will have chosen to include mention of other faculties notable in that specialty but which were not included in the faculty quality survey (usually because the overall faculty was unlikely to have ranked in the U.S. top 50, the U.K. top 15, etc.).

The primary purpose of the specialty rankings is to identify programs in particular fields that a student should investigate for himself or herself. Because of the relatively small number of raters in each specialization, students are urged not to assign much weight at all to small differences (e.g., being in Group 2 versus Group 3). More evaluators in the pool might well have resulted in changes of .5 in rounded mean in either direction; this is especially likely where the median score is either above or below the norm for the grouping. Also bear in mind that, in general, programs with more faculty specializing in an area tended to be rated more highly than those with just one philosopher in the field.

The lines between the specialty categories are not always hard-and-fast. What one philosopher might call an issue in philosophy of language, another might call an issue in philosophical logic or philosophy of mind. Students might look at the useful Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, or the equally valuable (albeit less detailed) Oxford volumes (ed. Grayling) on Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject , to get some sense of how the fields are customarily demarcated.

A note about two special cases. First, evaluators were asked to evaluate the University of London faculties as a whole, even though the individual colleges run separate admissions procedures. But there is a good deal of cooperation and interaction between the faculties and their graduate students, so it seemed useful for students to have information about how the whole is evaluated. However, in the groupings, below, we list only the colleges, noting, when appropriate, at the end the score of the aggregated faculties. Second, the University of St. Andrews/University of Stirling Joint Program is listed only in those cases where its combined rating is higher than the rating for St. Andrews considered by itself.

It is worth noting that the results were checked for evidence of strategic voting; there was none. Evaluators were admirably responsible and honest in their assessments, and there were fairly high levels of consensus on the strengths of the faculties among the evaluators who completed the surveys.

Remember: evaluators were not permitted to evaluate either their own department or the department from which they received their highest degree (PhD, DPhil, sometimes the BPhil).