Essay
The Perils of PhD Admissions in Philosophy
Why Academic Philosophy Needs a Stimulus
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it! (It’s rather like getting tenure.)
(Daniel Dennett — Consciousness Explained (1991), Chapter 7)
The application process for Ph.D. programs in philosophy is reliably a crucible of enduring uncertainty and disillusionment for many aspiring philosophers.
At its core, this process too often subjects top-tier applicants to a protracted limbo, wherein the determinacy of their futures are held hostage — not for lacking intellectual merit, philosophical insight, or scholarly rigor, but by an opaque and precarious system plagued by institutional deficiencies and scholarly egos.
This essay enumerates such deficiencies and discloses the nature of such egos and their fundamentally unphilosophical, impractical, snarky, and discrediting causes and effects.
This essay does not charge academic philosophy in modern academic institutions with an unconditional and absolute bankruptcy of value, for such…
