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What foreign languages are most useful for philosophy graduate students?

Brian Leiter

An undergraduate philosophy teacher asks: “In your opinion, for potential doctoral candidates in Philosophy, what is the most useful foreign language by specialty?”

I’ve opened comments (no anonymous posts!). I’ll begin with a few observations of my own.

For the undergraduate still undecided about his or her particular interests in philosophy, the safest bet is German, i.e., it is the language most likely to be useful wherever one ends up concentrating in philosophy. Several of the most important figures in the history of philosophy wrote in German, of course, and German is a primary language in which important scholarship is done in several areas of philosophy, both historical and contemporary. My impression is that French is a distant second to German, though obviously indispensable for certain topics and figures.

In ancient philosophy, one obviously must have classical Greek and probably also Latin, but it is equally essential to have several other languages, given the truly international community of scholarship in this field. My impression is that German and Italian are the most important languages right now for scholars of ancient philosophy, but that French is also valuable.

My impression is that in philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and epistemology, the main philosophical work in the English-speaking universities is overwhelmingly in English, though some is in German, and a bit less in French and Italian. (Perhaps the Italian share is larger than I realize.) It is not uncommon for specialists in these areas to have no foreign languages at all.

In moral and political philosophy, English is again the primary language, but German is quite important, both for historical and contemporary contributions. The same is true for philosophy of law, though there one might add, interestingly, Italian, where quite a lot of jurisprudential work is being done, some of which is permeating Anglophone consciousness.

Other perspectives are welcome, and feel free to take issue with the advice, above.

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24 responses to “What foreign languages are most useful for philosophy graduate students?”

  1. Ryan Overbey

    I'd suggest that any serious philosopher consider learning Sanskrit in addition to Greek, Latin, and German. There's a mountain of interesting philosophy out there that typically gets ignored by "Greeks -> Germans -> Us!" departments.

    Reply
  2. Robert Burns

    Bravo, for comments. Though your posts are usually beyond my specialties (beer, video games) I think I will gain from exchanges between the likely visitors to this site. I will, on occasion, have something to contribute so expect at least two cents worth.

    Reply
  3. Robert Burns

    The thought occurs to me that you turned on comments for this post only. In that case the post above should be looked on as a reason to include them more often (i.e., they benefit me).

    Is it safe to say that, in general, English and German, and to a lesser degree, French, Italian, Latin and Greek, are languages that facilitate philosophical scholarship and that any additional languages, such as Sanskrit, Hebrew, Chinese etc. will depend on your particular specialty?

    Reply
  4. Matt Weiner

    I read French OK and learned German (sort of) in grad school, when I was studying a lot of Frege and Wittgenstein. In doing epistemology, philosophy of language, and some logic since then, I haven't really had occasion to call on any language other than English. I'm tempted to say that if you're going to do work on indirect discourse the problem of the essential indexical, you should learn Amharic (which generates some interesting linguistic examples, IIRC), but that wouldn't be very constructive!

    Reply
  5. Martin Lin

    Languages are important primarily for historians of philosophy. So if an undergrad thinks that she will focus on contemporary issues, then she should study whatever language interests her the most/will be most useful in life outside of philosophy.

    I have to disagree with Brian concerning the usefulness of German. There are only two historical figures of really major important who wrote in German: Kant and Frege, although many would want to put Hegel and Wittgenstein on that list (I don't). It is also true that if you go into ancient philosophy you will need German. So that basically means that three fields require German: Kant, early analytic, and ancient.

    On the contrary, Latin is important no matter what historical period you want to study, with the exception of early analytic. You need it to do ancient, early modern (even the empiricists) and Kant. And since Latin was a core component of liberal education in the early part of this century, it is probably useful for early analytic as well (analytic philosophers sometimes spice their prose with Latin phrases and terms). So it seems to me that Latin clearly has a broader application than German.

    Reply
  6. Brian Leiter

    I am interested in Martin Lin's comments on Latin, though I am curious why Latin is needed for work on Kant.

    Among the significant figures in the history of philosophy who write in German besides Kant and Frege are Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer. One needn't claim that any or all of these are on a par with Kant in importance (certainly Frege is not) to nonetheless notice that an awful lot of significant figures in philosophy, about whom doctoral students end up writing dissertations, write in German.

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  7. Martin Lin

    German is a useful language for philosophical scholarship. German idealism and post-idealism are large and significant fields. It seems, however, uncontroversial that ancient and early modern are larger fields. So if an undergrad believes that she may well work on an historical topic but doesn’t know which one, the rational thing to do is to learn Latin. The odds of ending up working on ancient or early modern are just greater than the odds of ending up working on German idealism or post-idealism. The reason for this, it seems to me, is that while there are a large number of interesting philosophers in that tradition, with the exception of Kant, none of them are quite at the level of figures like Aristotle, Descartes, and Hume. And just as dissertations on Descartes are more common than dissertaions on Malebranche because Descartes is a better philosopher, so too are they more common than dissertations on Schopenhauer.

    I may have overstated my case when I said that scholarship on Kant *requires* Latin. No doubt there are many highly competent Kant scholars who have no Latin. The fact remains, however, that some of Kant’s works (although admittedly none of the major ones) are in Latin. Moreover, knowledge of Leibniz is important for understanding Kant, and knowledge of Latin is useful for understanding Leibniz. In other words, if an undergrad invests in learning Latin and then winds up working on Kant, her investment will still bear significant returns – returns greater than a similar investment in learning German in the case where the student winds up working on early modern (if only because some of the relevant primary texts for Kant are in Latin and no significant primary texts of the early modern period are in German and I place a greater value on having access to primary texts in the original languages than I do having access to secondary sources in the original).

    Of course, the situation is quite different when the student leans one way or the other. If she feels greater attraction to Heidegger than Descartes (*sigh*), then she should by all means study German.

    Reply
  8. Manyul Im

    I think for MOST potential graduate students, Greek or (Classical) Chinese are best for the following reasons: Most philosophy Ph.D.'s are not going to be in competition for the top jobs. What that means is that for many jobs under those and in any specialization, being able (credibly) to teach either ancient Greek phil. or Chinese phil. is going to provide a competitive edge. Departments that are not in the top 25 are often interested in having more people capable of teaching ancient Greek philosophy aside from their one specialist–if they have one. With regard to Chinese philosophy, most departments are lucky if they can offer a course at all to their undergraduates, despite the popularity of the subject among the latter. In both of those sub-fields of philosophy, knowledge of the language is extremely useful for being able to teach the material with any nuanced understanding, particularly of much of the useful secondary literature. At any rate, from a job-placement perspective for most potential graduate students in philosophy, it's worth considering.

    Reply
  9. Brian Leiter

    Very interestings points from both Professors Lin and Im–they are educating me on this subject, as well as prospective graduate students. A query–for them and any others reading: surely for contemporary secondary literature, not only in historical fields, but in fields like epistemology, philosophy of science, and moral philosophy, German is an important language, perhaps the most important after English. Comments?

    Reply
  10. Steve Jauss

    On the rare occasion that I encounter a prospective graduate students who hasn't yet developed some ideas about what subfields she's most interested in, and who bothers to ask which language she should study, I say:

    1. Classical Greek and German are both languages you're sure to find at least a few modest uses for here and there in ANY standard career in philosophy, even if you wind up in an area in which you do not NEED either, and even if your talents in either are rather modest.

    (Regarding Latin: While MANY fascinating early moderns (Suarez, Cumberland, and Baumgarten, for example) wrote in latin, the usefulness of German is certainly not limited to "Kant & After": the most important German philosophers between Leibniz & Kant–viz., Wolff & Mendelssohn–both wrote in German.) More and more, historians of early modern philosophy are taking serious interest in such allegedly "minor" figures.)

    2. Language skills that are non-standard among, say, members of the APA–e.g., quite good knowledge of Italian, Norwegian, Japanese, modern Greek, Chinese (classical, Mandarin or even a Wu dialect), or hindu or punjabi)–are not hopelessly silly things for a would-be philosopher to acquire, especially one who thinks she might like to study or teach abroad, or benefit from even modest opportunities to read works in such languages.

    3. To my mind, Italian is becoming more and more useful in philosophy all the time; for all I know, it may have already become a serious alternative to French. There's a lively scholarly community in Italy working on 18th-C. topics, not to mention a serious contingent of talented (broadly) M&E folks who write in Italian.

    4. Finally, it seems to me that one useful alternative to working on a language is to study some linguistics. Learning, say, old-fashioned GB syntax theory (esp. case theory) can make learning ancient and modern languages go a little more smoothly, since one can approach language study with a means for making slightly better sense of what language instructors inevitably present as endless and messy lists of exceptions to rules.

    Reply
  11. David

    Another factor to consider might be the difficulty of learning these languages for a native English speaker. If two languages are equally useful, but one is more difficult to learn, then the best use of our prospective grad student's time might be to learn the easier one. Here are my guesses as to the levels of difficulty of learning these languages. (Easiest is #1.)

    1. Italian and French (tie)
    2. Latin
    3. German
    4. Greek
    5. Chinese, Sanskrit, Hindu, Punjabi, etc.

    Even if knowing classical Chinese had more usefulness than knowing French, it still might be that our hypothetical undergrad's time is more profitably spent learning French.

    Reply
  12. Matt Weiner

    Finally, it seems to me that one useful alternative to working on a language is to study some linguistics.

    And that will be immensely helpful if you wind up doing philosophy of language; I wish I knew much more.

    Reply
  13. Stephen Frug

    Not to sound hopelessly practical, but aside from the issue of what's most useful in a philosopher's work, isn't there the issue of what is necessary to get through the Ph.D. in the first place?

    I am not studying philosophy any more, but as an undergrad at Harvard, I recall learning that the grad program there required two languages: German, and one of either French, Greek and (I believe it was) Latin. One could substitute another language for the non-German requirement if there was serious case to be made for it (i.e. Danish if you were writing on Kierkegaard, but not any old language that you happened to know just because you happened to know it).

    I have no idea if these requirements are representative or not. (Perhaps someone knows & can say?) But it seems an issue worth throwing into the mix. If German is required in any event, then — particularly what Brian Leiter & others have said about its importance — there is another reason to learn it, namely, that one will have to learn it anyway. (Whereas Chinese, e.g., wouldn't have counted unless one was specifically studying Chinese philsophy.)

    Just another issue to throw into the mix.

    SF

    Reply
  14. drapeto

    why do you Eminences seem to think "hindu" is a language? one person could be making a typo but two is beginning to scare me. i'm surprised that arabic has not been mentioned, or farsi.

    Reply
  15. Steve Jauss

    I'm afraid the spelling error started with my comment above. (At 3:14 am the 'u' must have seemed to me just as good as an 'i'.) Sorry.

    Reply
  16. David

    It is worse to repeat an error than to originate it, so I am the real criminal here. Sorry!

    Reply
  17. Ralph Wedgwood

    Before I was seduced by philosophy, I was very keen on languages, and learnt quite a number of them (including French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek).

    I don't really do any serious research in the history of philosophy (although I might get round to doing some before I die), but I do enormously enjoy teaching the history of Western moral philosophy. I find that the languages that I use for reading historical texts are Greek (especially Plato and Aristotle), German (especially Kant, but a bit of Wittgenstein, Frege, and Nietzsche as well) and Latin (especially Aquinas and Descartes).

    These days, most European analytic philosophers write in English (at the latest meeting of ECAP, the European Congress for Analytic Philosophy, all the papers were in English — although much of the gossip wasn't!); and increasingly much of the best scholarly literature on the history of philosophy (at least in the fields that I'm most interested in) is in English. The main exception to this are the French, many of whom are keen on maintaining the use of French as a vehicle for philosophy. So I have found that the foreign language that I use most for reading contemporary philosophical writings is actually French. I can't recall ever reading any philosophy in Italian.

    Obviously, this is only my experience. Such is the triumph of English around the world that we English speakers have much less reason to learn foreign languages than other people have. So, I would say on balance that among English-speaking students of philosophy, only those who want to study the history of philosophy have a really compelling reason to learn a foreign language — and which language they should learn just depends on their interests.

    I should say, however, that I have long believed that the neglect of non-Western philosophical traditions in Western philosophy departments is simply indefensible. There probably should be an attempt to encourage more people in the West to work on non-Western philosophical traditions. So if there are any languages that should be studied more widely by philosophers than they currently are, those languages would probably be Sanskrit and Chinese.

    Reply
  18. Ralph Wedgwood

    Another point that I'd like to add to my last post: I really do think that those who want to work on the history of philosophy have a *compelling* reason to learn the relevant language(s). I won't name any names, but I have come across a disconcerting number of people who seem to think that it is possible to do serious research on Kant without knowing any German, or serious research on ancient philosophy without knowing any Greek. This is in my judgment a disgracefully unscholarly attitude, which should be severely discouraged by all good graduate programs.

    Reply
  19. Tony

    Having just come back from several months in Italy I would like to reiterate Brian's comment that Italian is growing in importance for anyone interested in legal theory. The quality of the work done in law in Italy is extremely high, and almost none of it gets translated.

    On a broader note I'd want to point out that no-one has even mentioned Spanish yet. Traditionally it hasn't been a major philosophical language, but over the last couple of decades (post-Franco) the quality of Spanish universities has improved remarkably. This is in addition to the numerous quality academics working in Latin America. Generally that area has only gotten attention through the hipness of "liberation philosophy", but once one looks beyond that the quality of more conventional work being done there is very high.

    Since the question, though, is what language to learn, rather than where the best work is done, I'd push the idea that Italian and Spanish have a particular worth simply because top-flight works in those languages are simply far less likely to be translated than those in French or German.

    Reply
  20. brian weatherson

    I share Tony's surprise that there's been little attention paid to Spanish in this debate. It would not be surprising if several South American countries have as much impact on analytic philosophy over the next 50 years as, say, Australia has had over the past 50. And while much of this work will be in English, not all of it will be, so I suspect there will be important schools of thought develop that familiarity with Spanish will be helpful for understanding.

    Reply
  21. Ethesis

    " arabic has not been mentioned, or farsi."

    I thought Hindu meant one of the family of about 300 languages spoken by Hindu peoples in India, either that, or the official language, a form of English.

    Well … as for arabic, I had a friend who was learning a new dialect about every sixty days for a graduate program he was in. He said they were like various flavors of pre WWII Italian, once you got the roots down.

    Reply
  22. Les Green

    For the philosophy of law, this is easy:

    German

    Kelsen is hard enough in the original; forget the Black translation.)

    Reply
  23. Carl Seaquist

    As for ancient philosophy: if you are approaching it from the classics perspective, you need to be able to teach Latin. Otherwise, you can get along pretty well with Greek and German. These should, at least, be the first languages for an ancient philosophy person in a philosophy department. Latin is essential for the medieval and Renaissance periods, and most German dissertations and classical scholarship well into the 19th century.

    Someone who is still in college in 2004, and is considering a career in ancient philosophy, would do well to consider combining Greek with Sanskrit. Sanskrit is fairly straightforward once you read Greek (kind of like a good knowledge of Latin allows you to read a fair amount of French: just squint when you read and ignore the word-final x's), whereas Chinese, the other great language of ancient philosophy, is not. Increasingly jobs are opening up to people who can teach both Western and non-Western history of philosophy courses, so this combo should be very marketable.

    I'm not sure there's any grad program that would encourage a Greek-Indian focus, unfortunately. Hawaii might be the best bet. Maybe Texas, Washington, Toronto, or Chicago? You can do both at Penn, but probably won't find much encouragement. Penn does, however, encourage Greek-Latin combined with Arabic, which is another great combination.

    So I guess tell undergrads that their first half dozen languages will be easy to pick, and only at that point does it get complicated: in alphabetical order, Arabic, French, German, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.

    If they don't like that answer, give them an alternative: Amharic, Chinese, Flemish, Ge'ez, Russian, and the Kerenzer dialect of Swiss German.

    Reply
  24. Gran Canaria

    Gran Canaria http://www.grancanariaguide.com Tuesday 28 September 2004 10:14:32

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