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The Grad Student's "Gourmet"

© Frederic Giacobazzi

If you are a student considering graduate study in philosophy, you will want to be sure to include one stop in your Web surfing - in-between visits to the pages of various university philosophy departments:

The Philosophical Gourmet Report presents a ranking of U.S. and selected foreign graduate programs in analytic philosophy, along with other useful information for prospective graduate students. The report, compiled by Brian Leiter at the University of Texas at Austin, presents quality rankings of American philosophy departments and is sorted according to major emphases and "areas of strength."

Rankings of program quality in any college discipline are necessarily subjective. Leiter describes the criteria used in his rankings with reasonable detail, a brief summary of which reads:

This report ranks graduate programs primarily on the basis of the quality of the tenured faculty in analytic philosophy, though some weight is given to the following factors as well: (i) age of faculty (since very good but very old faculty do not make for an attractive program from the standpoint of prospective students); (ii) breadth of faculty; and (iii) quality of junior faculty. I no longer assign very much weight to prior reputation of the program, although this can still affect job prospects somewhat. I have generally tried to evaluate "excellence" of the faculty without regard to areas of specialty (e.g. ethics versus philosophy of mind). However, in cases where faculties are narrow in their specialties, higher rankings are given to those programs strong in the "core" areas of analytic philosophy (philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, epistemology).

While Leiter's criteria seem defensible, it of course will remain up to the reader to decide if the criteria can tell the full story about the quality of a graduate philosophy program. Readers would be advised to follow the links which are conveniently provided to visit the web pages of the departments listed in the rankings in hopes of learning additional information.

The site offers additional resources. The page makes some helpful suggestions on applying to graduate school. Thumbnail profiles of the major areas of strength in numerous university departments are provided, as well as selected rankings of leading philosophers in such areas as feminist and continental philosophy. Some recent moves and retirements of prominent faculty are given. Sensible advice on selecting a graduate school is provided for students whose undergraduate majors were not in philosophy, and a useful section is devoted to information about opportunities for philosophical study in law schools (along with a link to a full-blown Legal Gourmet Report 1997-1998).

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