Question Number One: Masters in Philosophy?

I am well aware that one can probably accomplish next to nothing with a Masters in philosophy alone. However, my undergraduate grades leave a little to be desired.

Is a MA in philosophy the best route to getting a Ph.D? Or is it better to take philosophy classes on ones own and apply directly to doctoral programs?

For many people the MA is a great option.

Not only can you improve your skill set and fill in any missing philosophical background, you're also not committing as much time to your program.

What I mean is this: you may decide, after a few years in grad school, that you don't want to be an academic after all. It's much easier to walk away after doing an MA. You've only invested two years and it gives you a firm, clear end point at which you cam remove yourself if you so desire.

Furthermore, if you actually enter a good MA program you'll be doing grad level work in small seminars with professors that have an interest in your progress. This is a rather different, and to my mind better, scenario than one in which you're taking "brush-up" undergrad classes or sitting in on seminars at a university where you aren't actually enrolled in a degree program. You're more likely to get lost in the shuffle if you take the latter approach.

Finally, you probably want to make sure you apply to MA programs that have a good track record when it comes to placing people in PhD programs. Most of these places will have funding available for their top applicants and you want to make sure you have some. As far as I'm concerned, the first rule of graduate study in philosophy is this: never pay for anything out of your own pocket!

Also, you might enroll in an MA in Humanities program and find that you can broaden an approach to the PhD.

In most schools, the M.A. in philosophy is not necessary for a Ph.D. in philosophy, but is rather a consolation prize for those who can't or chose not to make it to the end. Usually you just start right in with the Doctoral program.

If you are doing it for your own satisfaction, the Ph.D. is more satisfying.

If you're doing it to get a part-time adjunct position, the M.A. may help. But if you're doing it to get a tenure-track position, the Ph.D. is necessary.

If you're doing it to learn how to think well before moving into a different field for a Ph.D., the M.A. would probably be very helpful.

These thoughts are not from research, but from observations in my limited experience. I have a Ph.D., and I've taught for about 18 years, but only at two universities. I started as an adjunct in both places, and I've seen a lot of adjuncts come and go. Having only an M.A. pretty much guarantees you'll never even get a shot at tenure. Having a Ph.D. improves without guaranteeing your chances. In general, philosophy is a sorry job market that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. But even if I hadn't landed a job, I would never have regretted the degree. It makes one a very different person.

"In general, philosophy is a sorry job market that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy."

Could you please elaborate on that sentence. I am currently considering a career change from Information Technology to a professorship in philosophy and I would hate to start down that long road to find that the job is a miserable one. Thanks.

The recent Wall Street Journal salary survey puts Philosophy majors above IT. Don't know if this is related to the creds of the degree or the cut of the people who do philosophy.

What's in a name? Does the Ph in PhD indicate that philosophy is the integument that encases all other disciplines, so take on your degree and take on the world?

See:
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degrees_that_Pay_you_Back-...

And I second the advice in >2 NoLongerAtEase:. Doing well in a Master's program at a feeder school is the way to open doors.

Re:5

Yes, philosophy jobs are hard to come by.

However, I'd like to qualify that statement. Basically, there are more qualified people than there are jobs. There are simply too many PhD programs and not enough jobs. However, this is less of a problem if you do your graduate work at a top university. No one is guaranteed anything....but I think it's safe to say that *most* people that finish at a top 50 PhD program manage to find an academic job.

Now, as to whether the job *itself* is miserable...that all depends on you and what your expectations are. I'm a mere PhD candidate so I haven't yet taken off the training wheels, so to speak.

I will say, however, that if you're not willing to relocate to places like Mississippi or Oklahoma you should probably not become a philosopher. If you're troubled by the possibility of teaching four classes a semester at a less-than-prestigious state university you should think again.

I checked the WSJ article and Philosophy is paid 10k less than IT.

Hmm. As for "willing to relocate to places like Mississippi or Oklahoma" that's something I didn't consider. I'm checking with the local university's graduate chair to see what he has to say.

MrStevens:

Sorry I didn't reply earlier. I haven't been keeping up with LT threads.

What I mean is that there are 500 applicants for every position. Your chances are good if your degree is from Princeton or the like, or if you happen to fill just the right niche for some school. When I applied to grad school in 1972, I was told, by every school except Princeton, "don't do it unless you're only in it for personal satisfaction." The situation has only gotten worse.

Of course, if you're lucky, like I was, the job itself (i.e., teaching) is low-paying but otherwise highly rewarding. New areas are opening up, too, outside of academia. But I don't know much about that.

Question: What's the difference between a large pizza and an associate professor of philosophy?

Answer: A large pizza can feed a family of three.

Heheh. Thanks for making me smile.

Great feedback. It really helps put things in perspective. I'm gonna have to think long and hard about what I really want to accomplish. I'll keep the "top 50 schools" thing in mind. After you mentioned that I checked my local university's ranking and it's in the toilet.

When you say "personal satisfaction" do you mean the accomplishment of completing a PhD even though it doesn't lead to a tenured position?

Ever since high school, I had the single-minded goal of becoming a philosopher. I didn't particularly care to teach. I figured that if I learned how to think well--as philosophy promised--I could pick and choose what I thought about for money. After graduating, I didn't even try for a teaching position. I did some freelance editing and in-house editing for a small software developer and eventually drifted into teaching at the college level, at first on Saturdays, then during the middle of the week. Two schools and eighteen years later, I'm a tenured associate professor and up for promotion in another year. But I never expected or intended to be in academia when I left grad school. It's just that the people here are so much more satisfying to hang out with.

Hmm, I believe Alex Trebek of Jeopardy was a philosophy major.

MrStevens asked:

Could you please elaborate on that sentence. I am currently considering a career change from Information Technology to a professorship in philosophy and I would hate to start down that long road to find that the job is a miserable one. Thanks.
====================

My response is as follows:

As someone who spent about a decade in Academics and who has now spent over two decades being a lawyer, I wouldn't wish Academics on my worse enemy. The people in Academics are petty, there is little or no real intellectual exchange, and about the only solice is teaching and research.

The problem with research which is, indeed, the gateway to any significant advancement is that unless you are a professor in a well funded well established large institution, you can go get your own grants and try to establish contacts with like minded people with like interests at conferences.

All of this bitching is, however, subject to two provisos: (1) As I said before, the "quality" of the institution makes a big difference. The University of Chicago is not Denison University. You are at the former and are a congenial guy who works his tail off, you can forget my comments above. (2) A great deal depends on your "alternative cost" outside of Academics. I was an economist specialized in "theory" and history of economic thought topics. Alternative cost for me was zero - except for doing what I did, retooling into something more generally salable. They typical Professor of Law, for instance, willl have a much higher alternative cost and a much better lifestyle than the typical Professor of Philosophy, because he can usually find a position with a private law firm practicing law.

Along the same topic....

I've worked in the Information Technology field for 20+ years and my grad/undergrad degrees are in the same discipline. I enjoy learning just to satisfy my natural curiosity. Over the past year or so, my reading list has tended more towards philosophy and theology. The more I read, the more I realize that I don't know.

Since I do not have any particular career goals in mind, just a desire to learn, would a MA or PhD in Philosophy be practical? Specifically, even though my grades in previous grad/undergrad coursework were above average, I'm not sure that schools are seeking Philosophy degree candidates who do not have teaching aspirations.

Re: 14

A PhD in philosophy is, to my mind, mainly a credential that one needs in order to obtain an academic job. If one is not pursuing university employment there's really no strong reason to obtain a PhD. One can read philosophy, join the APA, and even publish in the journals without doing a PhD or formally studying philosophy. Further, besides perhaps impressing a few people here and there, having a PhD in philosophy probably doesn't add any substantive value to one's resume, at least as perceived by most employers.

However, I think that really understanding what's going on in philosophy, for most people, involves a kind of complete immersion which is hard to achieve outside of an academic setting. There's a presumed historical background, a presumed set of technical terms, a presumed set of questions, and presumed knowledge of the contours of philosophy's various sub-fields.

It's one thing to read the great books and poke around here and there on one's own. That's fine if all that one wants is to challenge oneself and do some occasional hard thinking. In the end it doesn't matter that much if some things are incomprehensible.

But...to get to the point where one can pick up a recent copy of Phil. Review or Nous or whatever and *really* make sense of the articles... that takes a certain kind of focus that is usually only developed over a lengthy course of study.

So, if you are interested in philosophy to the extent that you hope to be able to read cutting edge stuff with relative ease and, one day, to perhaps write something worthy of publication, that might be a reason to consider doing graduate work.

I think much of the value of graduate work comes not just from the structured course of study, but also from the opportunity it provides to interact with other philosophers. Even if you have no desire for employment in the discipline, graduate study would be like a guided tour of the playing field given by the best possible guides (active participants). Plus, you'd be surrounded by other students with similar interests. Outside of that kind of environment it can be difficult to find folks to talk philosophy and to perhaps force you to present and defend your ideas coherently and in (relatively) plain speech.

If any of that sounds appealing, you might consider an MA program. That's probably all you'd need to get sufficient training, and MA programs are much more likely to take on students for whom an academic career is not in the offing.

Although I would ordinarily hesitate to "dump" my personal "witnessing" for philosophy per se, perhaps such a narrative might provide anecdotal possibilities for some one considering an academic commitment in this direction.

My own post-military (5 years USN Aviation Machinist Mate) college effort began (circa 1956) pursuing a BS in Public Administration (It was the fastest path to a degree.) and, at the time, I did not even know what the Hell PA was. However, that did make me eligible for a foothold on a Federal Government retirement path. While on this "path" (of many boring assignments), in an effort to use up the rest of my GI bill entitlement, I enrolled in a Master's degree program (also in Public Administration) and was successful. This gave me added leverage to move around (switch jobs) in the various Federal career fields, After many transfers to different west-coast and east-coast locales, all the while continuing to go part-time to whatever local college or university was available, taking the attitude that I was just "working my way through school" (and I could associate with much more interesting people than my "coworkers"), I ended up in a PhD program in Urban Affairs (during which time I retired from the Government and continued the PhD program afterward). While cogitating on a dissertation project (and having to continue current enrollment in "dissertation", I began taking seminars in the Humanities Department (much more interesting) and began "pulling those threads"--from phenomenology, to hermeneutics, etc., etc. and thus ended up immersed in existentialism. I was fortunate to have a dissertation chairman, who encouraged me to use this "approach" in an Urban Affairs dissertation: "Hermeneutics as a Research Tool in Identifying Patrimonialism in Small Cities". As much as I would like to continue participating, in philosophy seminars (discussion groups), I can no longer afford the cost of tuition. Thus, Teaching Company lectures and continual reading fill this gap.What the Hell, all we are doing anyway is "passing away the time until we die." (See Irvin D. Yalom's "Existential Psychotherapy".)

A PhD in philosophy is, to my mind, mainly a credential that one needs in order to obtain an academic job. If one is not pursuing university employment there's really no strong reason to obtain a PhD. One can read philosophy, join the APA, and even publish in the journals without doing a PhD or formally studying philosophy. Further, besides perhaps impressing a few people here and there, having a PhD in philosophy probably doesn't add any substantive value to one's resume, at least as perceived by most employers.

However, I think that really understanding what's going on in philosophy, for most people, involves a kind of complete immersion which is hard to achieve outside of an academic setting. There's a presumed historical background, a presumed set of technical terms, a presumed set of questions, and presumed knowledge of the contours of philosophy's various sub-fields.

It's one thing to read the great books and poke around here and there on one's own. That's fine if all that one wants is to challenge oneself and do some occasional hard thinking. In the end it doesn't matter that much if some things are incomprehensible.

But...to get to the point where one can pick up a recent copy of Phil. Review or Nous or whatever and *really* make sense of the articles... that takes a certain kind of focus that is usually only developed over a lengthy course of study.

So, if you are interested in philosophy to the extent that you hope to be able to read cutting edge stuff with relative ease and, one day, to perhaps write something worthy of publication, that might be a reason to consider doing graduate work.

==================================

I believe that the above comments are well taken. My comments were only as to those who depended on an academic position in Philosophy for their support or their family's support.

The question was obviously specific to the US, so you might want to ignore the following:

In the UK, it's very rare for good philosophy grad schools to consider applications from anyone that hasn't already done an MA. As far as I can tell, the US undergraduate degree takes students a little further than the UK equivalent, but not as far as the UK MA. The philosophy MA is deemed necessary as a way of making the transition to PhD studies. By the end of the MA one should (ideally) have gained a some knowledge of recent research in one's chosen area of philosophy (the student's essays/dissertation/thesis will engage with current research in the major journals), and will already have been writing articles of a publishable or near-publishable standard (ie peer-review publishable, even if none are published). It wasn't this way a decade ago, but the field is now incredibly competitive. I assume we are all talking about analytic philosophy. Outside of analytic philosophy, things may be different.

The job issue is another matter. Though I suspect that the situation in the US is not so different from that in the UK - hundreds of PhDs and very few academic jobs. At that level, there's a fair amount of cross-migration - US PhDs going to UK unis for jobs, and UK PhDs going to the States.

Similar to comments above, without a PhD there's no longer any chance of an academic job at any good uni in the UK. Even the teaching of the history of philosophy is expected to be informed by current research in the field, so typically only those at the cutting edge get employed, even for undergraduate teaching positions.

1> On second thoughts, you ought to just ask this question directly of whichever institution you are interested in applying to, or whichever professor you might want to supervise your research. They should be able to tell you straight what your chances are without an MA.

Here, in Texas (specifically, at University of Texas at Arlington), It appears as though a deeper "digging" into the applicability of philosophy (to the various artifacts) is found in other fields of the Humanities (e.g. Literary Criticism) and, then there are those who contend that existentialism does not belong in the philosophy "realm"; however, I would maintain that existentialism would include philosophy merely as a "sub-field". See: http://www.yalom.com/index.html