Studying philosophy in the Committee on Social Thought

 

What follows is my best attempt to answer summarily some of the questions I’m often asked about the Committee. These impressions are entirely my own and should not be taken as authoritative or even representative of the views of its faculty or students.

What is it?

The Committee on Social Thought is one of those rare PhD programs that permits students to work across a wide variety of disciplines. For most of its history it has had the distinction of being the only such program that regularly places its graduates in prominent academic positions (although the Social Thought “purists” do not like to emphasize this). Its core mission has always been to give students a strong foundation in the great thinkers and writers, but most students combine this foundation with rigorous training in a more conventional discipline such as history, literature, classical studies, or philosophy (among others). The Commitee’s faculty are accomplished scholars who share in its basic mission. Most have cross-appointments in other departments. Even so, the larger share of its faculty treat the Committee as their first home, which serves well the needs of its PhD students and makes for an unusual but very vibrant intellectual environment.

Does it prepare students well for a career in philosophy?

There are two ways of approaching this question. One is to examine whether its graduates succeed at finding jobs in philosophy departments. The other is ask whether the training their philosophically-oriented graduates receive is sufficient to do sophisticated scholarly work in philosophy. My answers to both questions are open to debate, so please bear in mind the above disclaimer.

Given the current configuration of the department, it does particularly well at training scholars who do the history of philosophy. Since the program is quite open-ended, it is conceivable that a scholar could structure her education in such a way as to become a great metaphysician, but the core requirements for the degree--which focus on the great thinkers and writers--lend themselves to a more historical approach. In the past decade or so, its graduates who work in the history of philosophy have found tenure-track positions in the philosophy departments of Johns Hopkins, Yale, twice at Northwestern, and various notable research universities in Europe. This is a good placement record if you bear in mind that the Committee graduates just a couple of philosophers every year, but one should be wary of extrapolating from so small a pool of candidates.

Of course, just because it does well at placing its graduates in philosophy departments, it doesn’t necessarily follow that its graduates are well prepared for advanced philosophical work. In my (extremely biased) opinion, a number of its recent graduates are indeed equipped with a sophisticated understanding of philosophical issues and methods, but this is in large part because they organized their program of study with this goal in mind. Again, its students have much latitude to pursue their own agenda, so their success in this depends greatly on their own initiative. It also helps to have a sage advisor who recognizes the importance of a broader education in contemporary philosophy.

How do I get admitted?

A great deal depends on the availability of the faculty and university-wide resources necessary for the particular research interests that you declare in your personal statement, and of course your qualifications to pursue those interests. Much also depends on the vision of the faculty at the time in which you apply. Aside from these remarks I’m of little help. I have freely shared my advice about applying to the Committee, but usually to no avail. Prospective applicants might have better luck contacting a member of the faculty or a student who has been active in the program more recently than I.

Further thoughts on interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary graduate education

Many complain that academia’s conventional disciplines are too averse to interdisciplinary studies, that we need more people working outside of them, that good scholars should study broadly in the humanities before pursuing a specialty, and so on. I generally agree with this, but only up to a point. What is correct about this is that there are, at the graduate level, very few options for the aspiring interdisciplinarian. If you want to study past efforts to rid sociology of normative presuppositions, you are going to have a difficult time convincing a traditional department to give you the time and latitude to do it well. If you go into a history department, you are likely to end up with a dissertation that might strike historians as fascinating, but one that would also strike philosophers as confused, and leave most of your readers in sociology feeling profoundly misunderstood. If you go into a sociology department, you will have great difficulties finding the time and latitude to research now-outdated materials in the way a historian would demand. And no matter what sort of interdisciplinary project you have in mind, you will always face pressure from professors to produce the sort of work and write the sort of dissertation that they are interested in and feel qualified to supervise.

The reason I can only agree with this sentiment “up to a point,” however, is because in my view few should really be working entirely “outside” of a discipline. Disciplines are the real purveyors of knowledge in the academy, not professors or libraries. Without them, the cumulative insights and skills of scholars would fail to be passed on. Until we are trained in a discipline, we only pretend to comprehend the relevant materials, and we only glimpse the relevant issues in a superficial way.

My advice to aspiring interdisciplinarians, then, is both to endorse attending interdisciplinary departments and to offer a word of caution about them. If you have some idea for a lifelong pursuit whose prerequisites cannot be easily accommodated by one department alone, then seek out an interdisciplinary program. But if you do, and you get admitted, see to it that you are nevertheless trained in at least one, or even two, disciplines while you are there. If you do not do at least that, then I fear you will end up not learning much of anything. Perhaps it shouldn’t be the case that knowledge is so discipline-dependent, but in point of fact it is.

Reflecting on the small group of students I have known in the Committee, I am deeply convinced that it offers advantages unavailable to students in more conventional PhD programs. These benefits are tangible and manifest in the work of many of its graduates. But I am also convinced that these advantages are acquired on top of an education in some traditional discipline, not in lieu of it.