Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. faculty at lower-ranked but competitive program's avatar

    We haven’t discussed this in our department (lower ranked PGR but tend to get highly competitive/very large applicant pool) but…

  2. Binary choice's avatar

    If you were the head recruiter for a professional basketball team, would you require height and weight measurements for prospective…

  3. Jeremy Telman's avatar
  4. Roger of Invisible America's avatar
  5. Brad's avatar
  6. LC's avatar

    I concur to a certain extent. I also scored very low on the writing section. Back then, GRE was required…

  7. Mark's avatar

So what do you do for a living? “I’m a philosopher”

Jonathan Wolff (UCL) has an amusing column on the topic here, which starts with the following great anecdote:

Several philosophers claim to have had the following conversation on
long-haul flights: "And what line of work are you in?" "Me? I’m a
philosopher." "Oh, really? And what are some of your sayings?"

UPDATE:  A reader writes with another amusing anecdote:

My husband is very proud of my daughter’s philosophy education.  When she
was doing her master’s degree a passenger on a
plane asked us during chit-chat what our children were up to.  My husband
said (a bit pompously, I thought) about our daughter, "She is a
philosopher."

Our co-passenger answered without batting an eyelid ( she
was kind enough to withhold the eyeroll): "Aren’t we all?"

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Designed with WordPress