Ernest Sosa, a leading figure in epistemology and metaphysics and a mainstay of the Brown Department for some forty years, will move full-time to the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, effective January 2007.  (Sosa had been teaching part-time at Rutgers for a number of years now.)  That’s certainly a significant loss for Brown (as well as addition for Rutgers, solidifying its status as the top department in epistemology in the world), though given Brown’s successes in the last year or so (retaining several faculty in the face of outside offers, and hiring both Richard Heck [philosophy of language, logic, and math; history of analytic philosophy] from Harvard, and Charles Larmore [political philosophy] from Chicago), I would still expect Brown to remain a solidly top 20 department in next year’s PGR surveys.

(An interesting, but not unimportant, side note:  according to research done by my colleague Josh Dever, Ernest Sosa has been one of the five most "prolific" mentors of graduate students, supervising 40 dissertations!)

UPDATE:  Keith DeRose (Philosophy, Yale) has thoughts on what this all means for epistemology graduate study here (go to section 3 of the document if the link doesn’t take you right there).