Sorry for the snafu with the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ yesterday. I really don’t know what went wrong with it. There’s a double issue up today to make up for it.
If you haven’t yet done so, you should read Bob Stalnaker’s comment on the “game theory post”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002563.html from a couple of weeks ago. (Scroll down to see the comment; I don’t have permalinks for comments enabled yet.)
Thanks to everyone who contributed to the “break-up lines”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002593.html thread. Keep the lines coming in! I think we could be cornering the market on corny-geeky jokes. I just wish I could come up with some to add to the hilarity. My reputation for wit is vanishing as I write.
By the way, thanks largely to the jokes, yesterday was the highest traffic day in this’s blog history, and the break-up lines post is the most read single post since I’ve been keeping track of those things. Previously it was my APA schedule, but I really don’t understand why that was so popular. Shouldn’t people here pay more attention to, say, “my conference paper”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002577.html than to who I care to name drop in “my conference schedule”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002581.html?
Yesterday was also, naturally, the biggest traffic day on the papers blog, just in time for a system malfunction.
“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000925.html follows up the comment about USC yesterday by listing all the leading philosophy of language departments in the country in order of quality. Despite the fact that Rutgers gets more people mentioned as specialists than anywhere else, I think the list could have been even longer. Both of them are primarily philosophers of mind, but I think both Jerry Fodor (compositionality) and Brian McLaughlin (vagueness) have made important contributions to philosophy of language in recent years and could easily be mentioned in this context.
I fully agree with Jason’s comment in “the thread below”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002591.html that there are a lot of linguists at Rutgers who do work that should be interesting to students interested in philosophy of language. I also agree with Ken Taylor’s comment in that thread that it’s really foolish for philosophers to try ranking linguistics departments. But the strength of departments other than philosophy could matter to how good your grad school experience is. So if you are a potential grad student planning on working in an area that potentially has interdisciplinary collaborations (and these practically all areas of philosophy outside perhaps analytic metaphysics have interdisciplinary links) you should investigate the quality of the departments other than philosophy at potential schools, as well as the existence of connections between those departments and philosophy.
I was feeling a little guilty today at pimping for Cornell on Brown’s website, so let me make up for that by plugging Brown a little. One of the reasons that I started thinking about the importance of other departments to a grad school is because of the benefits Brown philosophy gets from its interactions with other departments.
For instance, Brown is ranked as ‘Also Notable’ in “political philosophy”:http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/breakdown.htm#05, largely on the strength of Dave Estlund’s work. And that seems right as an evaluation of Brown’s philosophy department. Dave’s work is very good, but you can only rank a department so high on the strength of one person. (That’s a slight exaggeration since Jamie and Nomy and others do work that’s relevant to political philosophy, but only a slight one.) But when you consider also that Brown’s “political science”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Political_Science/ department is very strong in political theory (especially because “John Tomasi”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Political_Science/faculty/tomasi.htm is there) the combined offerings start to look like quite a strong political theory/philosophy program. (And in this case it’s not just an ‘in principle’ strong combined program, it’s a case where the two departments are actively engaged. There are active reading groups with philosophy and political theory students and faculty for instance.) Brown also benefits from our interactions with classics and our interaction with cognitive and linguistic sciences. I have more first-hand knowledge of the latter (the only reading group I’m in right now is over in linguistics) but I think all these connections are valuable to the program.
I don’t think you should ever choose a grad school because the departments other than philosophy are good. The strength of the philosophy program should always be the most important factor. But I think the benefits you get from having people around the university doing philosophically interesting work are not entirely trivial, and it should be __a__ factor in choosing a grad school.