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The rankings are primarily measures of faculty quality and reputation. Faculty quality and reputation correlates quite well with job placement, but students are well-advised to make inquiries with individual departments for complete information on this score. (Keep in mind, of course, that recent job placement tells you more about past faculty quality, not current.) Due to the time-consuming nature of this Report, it is published only every other year. Updates (faculty moves etc.) are available here: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/philosophy_updates/
The conventional demarcation of "analytic" versus "Continental" philosophy has become less and less meaningful. With the demise of analytic philosophy as a substantive research program since the 1960s (see Section II-B below), "analytic" simply demarcates a style of scholarship, writing and thinking: clarity, precision and argumentative rigor are supposed to be paramount. Thus, "analytic" philosophy is now largely coextensional with good philosophy and scholarship, regardless of topic or figure. (Of course, there is still a good deal more formal work that goes on under the heading of "analytic" philosophy which has no analogue in other traditions.) It is no surprise, then, that the best work on so-called "Continental" figures is done largely by philosophers with so-called "analytic" training.
So, too, "Continental" is an increasingly meaningless label: much of what philosophers do on the European Continent these days is "analytic" philosophy or historical scholarship. While a small minority of philosophers in the U.S. still use the label "Continental philosophy" to demarcate whatever someone suitably obscure has done in Paris recently, the label is best-reserved as a characterization for a group of important historical figures largely in Germany and France in the 19th and 20th centuries; in that respect, the label is much like the labels "medieval philosophy" or "early modern." And as with these other historical groupings, there are some overlapping thematic affinities among the figures so designated, but there are also discontinuities and in some cases profound differences (e.g., Husserl has more in common with Frege than with Nietzsche, and Habermas increasingly more in common with Rawls than Marx).
The collapse of a useful analytic/Continental divide means there is but one discipline, philosophy, which includes many topics and figures, and which admits of good and bad work. Certainly there remain differences in styles of philosophical work, but those differences are no longer illuminated by the analytic/Continental divide. This Report tries to capture existing professional sentiment about quality at different programs and in different fields in the English-speaking world. (Lack of reliable information leads me to exclude the non-English-speaking world, though there are thriving philosophical communities in, e.g., the Scandinavian countries, Israel , Germany , etc., but they are beyond the scope of this Report.) Obviously, there will be groups and departments on the margins of the profession-or which used to be at the top of the profession, and whose decline has been charted--who will resent such an evaluation effort, but qualitative assessment remains of great importance to prospective students. (Students beware: marginalized departments frequently advertise their "pluralism," which is usually a code word for lack of intellectual standards, not diversity of philosophical offerings.)
Yet there remain some important differences in how departments approach philosophy. One important difference concerns the priority different departments give to the history of philosophy. You can get a good idea of which programs are most committed to history of philosophy by reviewing the Specialty Rankings, below. Some excellent departments--like Rutgers and MIT--are ranked in few historical areas, while others--like NYU, Princeton, Pittsburgh, Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Notre Dame, Texas, and UC Irvine-are ranked in multiple historical areas. Conversely, some programs give less priority to "contemporary," substantive areas (like philosophy of mind or metaphysics) in favor of a strong historical orientation: for example, Chicago , Penn, Boston University , and Emory.
Here is how I recommend students use the overall rankings:
- Attend to the actual mean scores, and not simply the ordinal rank of departments : some ordinal differences mark trivial differences in mean scores, others mark more significant differences.
- For programs whose mean scores are fairly close (roughly, .4 or less apart), choose a program exclusively on the basis of how well it meets your needs and interests and needs, i.e., because it better meets your intellectual goals, or offers you a better financial aid package, or provides a more supportive intellectual community, and so on.
- It can make good sense to choose a much lower ranked program (say, more than 1.0 or more apart) over a higher ranked program if that program meets your special interests. Because Departments are increasingly specialized in their coverage and methodologies, it is quite possible for a lower-ranked program to offer a stronger program in a sub-field than a higher-ranked one. Where you already have a specialized philosophical interest (e.g., ancient philosophy or Kant or philosophy of biology), you should certainly consider choosing a program that is weaker overall, but stronger in your specialty, than others to which you are admitted.
Before choosing any program, of course, make sure that the faculty there are committed to training graduate students. This Report only measures the philosophical distinction of the faculty, not the quality of their teaching or their commitment to educating young philosophers. (There is, alas, no reliable way to measure these factors.) Anecdotally, at least, it appears that some schools with excellent faculties do not take that much interest in their graduate students (though often their students still get good jobs!). After identifying programs of general interest, students should investigate the kind of work done in the Department with care. I can not overemphasize how very different the philosophical climate is at equally distinguished departments, say, Pittsburgh and Rutgers . While both have many distinguished philosophers, the difference in training is likely to be quite dramatic. That John McDowell ( Pittsburgh ) and Jerry Fodor ( Rutgers ) are both among the most prominent philosophers at work today sheds no light on the fact that their conceptions of philosophy and philosophical problems are completely different.
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