Brian Leiter is “previewing”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/another_pgr_pre.html various gourmet report nuggets. The news today concerns a rather odd measure.

bq. This year, we set up the survey to calculate the mean for each faculty across all the areas of “metaphysics and epistemology” evaluated: in other words, the mean score across philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, philosophy of action, and philosophy of religion.

The top department is Oxford, naturally enough. Tied for 2nd are NYU and Rutgers. Again that’s fair enough, though personally I’m surprised by the size of Oxford’s lead. Anyway, after that it gets odd. Tied for fourth are Notre Dame and Texas. Look, there are really good people working in M&E at ND and Texas. But it’s pretty odd to think these departments are better at M&E than Princeton or MIT. (Those depts are tied for 6th with the St Andrews/Stirling joint program.)

I think this is a quirk of the measure. Princeton and MIT might both rank close to 0 on philosophy of religion. (I don’t know how well MIT would have done on philosophy of action. I think Richard Holton’s work should be considered really important work on action theory, but I’m not sure whether it is so considered around the world.) Even if they are substantively better than ND and Texas on the other six categories mentioned, that may be enough to lower them in the average.

Anyway, I think the Leiter rankings as a whole are a pretty useful measure. And I think the speciality-by-speciality rankings are pretty useful. But I don’t think these averages tell us much at all. By the time we’ve got a ranking that includes both language and religion, we may as well be looking at entire department rankings.