From the FLP mailbox:
We’d like to announce a new source of information about philosophy departments in the United States, Canada and England: The Pluralist’s Guide to Philosophy, to be found here.
This Guide is based on a survey of expert opinion on the best places to study select sub-fields of philosophy. Our aim is to provide students and their mentors with some informed, crowd-sourced ideas concerning where any student might productively cultivate an interest in American Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race and Ethnicity, Feminist Philosophy, and GLBT Studies. This site is totally independent of any philosophical organizations. Its methods and advisory board members are detailed on the site itself, along with the reports. It will be updated yearly.
The creators of the site are: Linda Martín Alcoff, Hunter College, CUNY Graduate Center; Paul Taylor, Pennsylvania State University; William Wilkerson, University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Update 4:15 p.m. ‘Tis more complicated than I realized. Brian Leiter comments (here) about what the guide is and does. Of particular interest to readers of this blog might be these observations from Brian Leiter:
[T]here is one bit of the new SPEP Guide that I do think is pretty outrageous, namely, the section that purports to be about the “Climate for Women in Philosophy,” which is essentially an anonymous slur, without any evidence adduced, on four departments. Even more ridiculous, the only departments deemed to have a suitable “climate” for women are SPEP departments, with one striking exception of a top ten PGR department that had a faculty member involved with this ‘assessment.’ (At one time, the SPEP Guide listed the evaluators, but now that list appears to be gone.) This is both absurd and shameful, and I hope they will remove this nonsense.
Read his full comments here. Reader of SPEP Guide, proceed with appropriate mindfulness.
-Bridget Crawford
