Am I cut out for graduate school?

Work, Careers and Money
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I’m at a turning point in my life, and I’d like some advice as regards one path I’m considering: graduate school in philosophy.

By turning point, I mean, in a very big sense, rock bottom. I’ve made a lot of big mistakes, I have no career prospects to speak of, and my mental health is in the sh*tter. And while these all seem like good reasons to avoid graduate studies in philosophy like the plague, I also wonder whether I might be in a unique position. For one thing, my mental health is suffering due to lack of purpose, and going back to school would potentially go a long way towards solving that problem. To be clear, I would never expect school to be a silver bullet; I expect to begin therapy soon as well. For another thing, graduate school in some field seems to me like my best option at this point. I’m far more academically oriented now than I was in undergrad, and my only other option is to work my way up from the bottom at my restaurant job or beginning a freelance career of some kind that would take an enormous amount of motivation to get up and running.

Now, in doing research on the experiences of philosophy graduate students, there seems to be a consensus that the work is very rewarding and that the career prospects are about that of a starving musician. On top of that, I worry that, as an Objectivist, I would be setting myself up not only to be perpetually frustrated with the views and personalities of my peers and professors but to guarantee I never make tenure, were that my goal. On the other hand, I’m not particularly interested in an academic career and may find that, with enough planning (and with the time I’d save not socializing with my peers), I can find a nonacademic career. I’ve wondered if the existence of ARI would give me a career opportunity not generally available to other philosophers, but I’m worried I’d be putting too many eggs into that basket. But again, I’d much rather have a chance there than at being regional manager for a burger chain.

As for my chances for admission, here are some things I have to consider:

  • I have maybe one person (currently) that would write a recommendation letter; however, I’m considering applying for the Ayn Rand University and/or taking post-bac classes at a prominent philosophy program in my city

  • I have two degrees, one of which is in Romance Languages, which would make the language requirement of a philosophy degree a non-issue

  • I’ve spent the last five-ish years of my life doing little else than teaching myself philosophy, not to mention I’m probably going to continue doing so whether or not I’m working towards a degree

  • My unorthodox life experience (not being a total nerd, i.e., knowing what life is like outside of an office/classroom and having a few non-academic skills) could maybe be worth something

  • My goal would likely be UT Austin, so I would possibly have an ally of Tara Smith if the timing is good and I play my cards right; that said, it seems from what I’ve seen that I would very little chance of being accepted at any given school and would be at peace with what options I end up with

  • Being an Objectivist may allow me to come up with more original ideas than I would be able to otherwise

So, am I totally deluding myself?

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I might answer later but funny that I’m eating at the Inn and Out across the street from UT Austin right now. Came here to escape this criminals that destroyed my life and are trying to murder me but they are everywhere.

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HRSD, I encourage you to go the philosophy grad school choice, provided you can afford it and providing you have an interest in all sorts of philosophies, not only Objectivism, and providing you are willing to relocate to most anywhere to get into a program. Interaction with your peers can be wonderful and helpful in ideas as well as for the intellectual companionship. I know people who achieved a Ph.D. in philosophy, who could not find employment for that, and who have ended up back working as you are now. But you will be richer in another way. Practice extensively for the GRE. Study logic texts as far as you can before the beginning term, should you be admitted somewhere. To be more sure you are right for this, you might read some history of philosophy, such as Jones, and see if you like it. If you have a language French, German, or Latin, that too, is an advantage. In grad school, the main thing is they will want you to learn how write analysis-type papers, with a thesis to argue over. But the practice of that in the courses can get you better and better at that, especially if some of the profs. give you specific feedback.

It is unlikely ARI or Atlas Society can offer employment; don’t bank on them, and the higher aim is a position in a university philosophy department. There are ARI affiliated philosophers and Stephen Hicks and 2046 at this site who can give you better advice on your grad philosophy endeavor than I can. Tenure track is becoming very rare, I understand. And I know one Objectivist philosopher who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy with world renowned experts in his specialty as his dissertation directors. He found a tenure track position, and after teaching there for seven years, tenure was denied. Given his personality, expertise, and teaching ability I witnessed, I incline to think they did not want him at that Catholic University because he was Objectivist. Maybe it’s best to keep that interest and alignment under cover—I don’t know.

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@Boydstun I think I enjoy the history of philosophy more than any other aspect. I’ve become a bit dogmatic about Objectivism in an unconscious effort (ha) to stave off ideas I know have hurt me in the past, yet one of my favorite things about learning philosophy is learning about the cast of characters that have made up its history. It almost feels collecting baseball cards.

I have some proficiency in Spanish and Portuguese and sort of Italian, so French and Latin would be accessible.

I should email Dr. Hicks. He’s a big inspiration to me, and we’ve messaged in the past.

7 hours ago, Boydstun said:

And I know one Objectivist philosopher who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy with world renowned experts in his specialty as his dissertation directors. He found a tenure track position, and after teaching there for seven years, tenure was denied.

This baffles me. It makes me believe that philosophy academia is based in no way on merit. A friend sent me a famous Reddit post from a person working at a Wendy’s and claiming to be the world’s expert on Husserl. He apparently is so humiliated that he tells everyone he was in prison for seven years so he doesn’t have to admit he went to grad school for no reason.

7 hours ago, Boydstun said:

Given his personality, expertise, and teaching ability I witnessed, I incline to think they did not want him at that Catholic University because he was Objectivist. Maybe it’s best to keep that interest and alignment under cover—I don’t know.

Well, I’m not sure I could tolerate a Catholic University anyways, having grown up Catholic. Makes my stomach hurt. So does being “in the closet”, for that matter. I don’t have any moral qualms with keeping quiet; I’m just terrible at it.

Do you think there’s any sense in trying to enter into journalism after a grad program? That seems like a natural path, but I’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere.

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Also, do you have any recommendations as to logic texts?

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Based on your comments here, I would recommend that you not directly and immediately pursue an academic career in philosophy. This does not mean “don’t study philosophy”, it means, find a different career path that allows you to do something for a living that matches your passion and which allows you to maximize your philosophical proclivities, but don’t put all your efforts into securing an impossible-to-get job. Sure, it is possible that you might find your central purpose in life in the course of pursuing a graduate degree in philosophy, then again you might also find that purpose by following some other path. For example, law school. The necessary skill sets for philosophy and law are fairly similar, especially the parts related to critical and objective reasoning and analysis.

Rather than focusing on a set of advanced training courses, you should try more basic training courses, such as an intro to ancient philosophy and/or modern philosophy, intro to epistemology etc. (depends on what phil classes you took as an undergraduate) – do this outside of a specific degree program. Find a convenient university and sign up for a class. Do the work. If you can’t bear to sit through a required course in “Introduction to contemporary woke ethics”, you will probably face insurmountable tongue-biting problems with the rest of the program. Which then would argue for focusing your efforts on law.

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@HowardRoarkSpaceDetective – The logic text they used for the required course at grad school at U of Chicago was Quine’s Methods of Logic. They offered an opportunity to test out of taking the required course. I tested out by studying that Quine text and Essentials of Symbolic Logic by R. L. Simpson in advance. However, I think those texts are best if you have first studied an Introduction to Logic book, such as the one by Copi or The Art of Reasoning by David Kelley. I continue to reopen these books (and another one called Intermediate Logic by David Bostock) through my many years of writing since then as an independent scholar.

I am glad you like history of philosophy. And that you will be able to communicate with Hicks who knows the ropes. 

I agree with taking the options suggested by David Odden seriously. You might really like the law. My first life-partner earned a JD, passed the bar, and found employment. I became acquainted with his class mates and made brownies for the gang as they studied together. I dipped into the Con Law book and other case-law areas, and books on jurisprudence, all of which were pertinent to my interest in political philosophy at the time (1970’s).

By the time I was entering grad school in philosophy (the second time), I had read all of Copleston’s history of philosophy, slowly, over the many years I had working as an unskilled laborer and eventually as an engineer, which history was helpful and I enjoyed, and indeed I had gone on to much independent study of the writings of the philosophers themselves. Just now, in connection with some writing I’m doing reaching back to early modern philosophy, I’m digging into Peikoff’s lectures on history of philosophy as transcribed in the book Founders of Western Philosophy – Thales to Hume and comparing it with my own reading of the classical writers themselves and modern specialized studies on them.

There are many superbly trained Ph.D. philosophers in America today who have no academic job and write papers simply as Independent Scholar. I never completed earning any advanced degree in philosophy (first time due to wanting to make a living; second time due to physical health failures), but any courses I took, undergraduate or graduate, helped make me able to write the serious papers I make when I really devote the time to polishing them.* One can continue to expand one’s knowledge in philosophy and knowledge of the world from a distinctively philosophical angle on the world without being in the professional circuit. Provided one has the passion for it and money for books or access to university libraries. I think in my case it is also necessary that there be some tablets, however modest, on which one can write and communicate with minds having the same interests.

I have made attending meetings of the American Philosophical Association my continuing education (in addition to books I buy) in philosophy. Papers are read there by the professionals, and these are almost always of highest caliber. Anyone can attend provided they are well behaved and pay the conference registration fee.

I have not known of anyone getting advanced degree in philosophy and combining it with journalism. Of course there was Camus, who went from journalism to his fiction writings with their philosophical import for human existence. I’ve known of some people trained in both law and philosophy, a natural pair for sure, as David mentioned. 

 

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I’m going to buck the trend here and recommend against law as a profession. I think there is something wrong about it, which seems to come from its “dual mandate” of finding the truth on the one hand, and upholding the stability of existing power structures on the other. (Doctrines such as stare decisis are examples of ideas driven by the latter, and that’s why for example the scientific method doesn’t have an analogue of stare decisis.) Many times these two goals are in conflict, and many times legal theory resolves the conflict in favor of the existing power structures and at the expense of the truth (such as recent Supreme Court rulings that allow the execution of people known to be innocent because they “had their day in court” and were convicted at that time). The defense of existing power structures, which goes back into the English roots of American law, and perhaps even to ancient Rome, tends to favor the existence of a sort of aristocracy. It’s probably also based on the false assumption that the truth alone is not enough to ensure political stability.

(The defense of existing power structures is not necessarily bad; it depends on whether the power structures themselves are bad; it can be good in cases where, for example, respect for individual rights is part of the existing power structure, but it can be bad in a case where the power structure does not respect individual rights.)

Then again, if you study law, you might be able to more precisely identify what is wrong with it and propose a way to fix it. The problem is that, even knowing what is wrong, and even with a proposed fix in hand, you won’t be able to do much of anything about it (except possibly write a book which would hopefully survive the fall of civilization, and thus be a guide for the next civilization, so that it can avoid repeating the same mistake).

If you like logic you could just as well go into engineering and design digital circuits such as CPUs. However, in spite of its obvious practicality, it is actually surprisingly difficult to get a job in that field. I have noticed that as you progress from “information science” to “computer science” to “electrical engineering” to “physics,” the math gets more difficult, and more intelligence is required, but there are fewer jobs, and the pay is less. I think this is generally because people don’t want to buy something they do not understand. The real money (“hot off the press” as it were) seems to be in “information science” which basically consists of automating bureaucracy (although the attempt to automate bureaucracy is frequently stymied by other bureaucracy, and rather than fixing that, they just print more money and throw it at the problem).

If you like philosophy in general then I’d recommend reading a lot of books about it, but because there is no clear definition of “results” in philosophy (unlike CPUs which have to work) it’s harder to trust educational institutions to get it right. Objectivism does define whether a philosophy “works” or not, but its definition differs from that of other philosophies and is not widely accepted.

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@DavidOdden @necrovore I’ve never really had an interest in law. I think it’s because so much of it seems arbitrary, which is an issue because 1) memorization is not my strong-suit, and 2) it’s infuriating. I was always a math kid in school because I never had to ask why something was the case. I could just figure it out myself. This is, of course, due to an excess of rationalism, but I don’t expect to break the habit between now and hypothetically beginning a law program.

Law also does seem to have that excessively bureaucratic aspect where the jargon seems designed to be opaque to laypeople. Normally I’m skeptical about claims like that, but I’ve gotten some of those scary papers delivered to me before and it was clear as day they were not intended to comprehended.

I’ve also never been interested in programming or computer science. Despite growing up a rationalist, it’s always been clear to me that the humanities were my home. This is, again, not due to a passion for the humanities but for a hostility towards the concentration required for the hard sciences. Math was my real calling, but I overestimated my ability to get a career in something more emotionally charged, like journalism. I also like the idea of electronics, but it’s more of an aesthetic interest that came from DIY-ing my moped circuits.

I very much suffer from the “I can be interested in anything as long as I don’t have to do it as a job” syndrome, which makes being passionate about any field impossible. I think the reason I’m more optimistic in that sense about philosophy is that I can see how applicable it would be my entire life. I think the one thing I could see myself enjoying day in and day out is learning. Learning seems, by definition, to never become stale. Hopefully I’m not wrong about that.

@Boydstun Great, I’ll check those out, thanks. I’m really curious to see what an entire textbook about logic covers. I can’t actually envision what there is to talk about past syllogisms. However, I have the same attitude towards math in a way, and I know full well that that field is basically inexhaustible.

I’m just very surprised that philosophy and journalism don’t cross over more. Maybe philosophers see journalism as too vulgar, but I doubt it. It seems to me that we as a civilization should be disturbed by the lack of philosophical training both in journalism and creative writing, but I guess it’s not news that this isn’t the case. Still, I would expect that philosophy students should be capable of swamping both fields. Maybe that’s just Atlantis talk.

Regarding law- I wonder if law school might be simply a good introduction to political philosophy. Despite knowing that I 1) don’t have the metaphysical/epistemological/ethical chops yet to tackle politics, and 2) being disgusted by politics as they exist now, I keep finding myself drawn to thinking about the field. This may be social-metaphysical/polemical symptom of bad premises, but I have the interest nonetheless.

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There is a substantial difference between the arbitrary, versus conclusions that you do not agree with. An arbitrary statement has no basis in perception and an arbitrary conclusion is one that is one not based on reason and observation. That simply does not characterize law, which is heavily based on observation and logic. I find that most philosophy is also superficially arbitrary, but if you look carefully, you ought to be able to say exactly what premise (in law, or in philosophy) is responsible for supposedly arbitrary conclusion. To take a concrete example, copyright protection in the US last for the life of the author plus 70 years. You might declare that to be an arbitrary standard, why not life plus 72 years or 68 years? If you research the answer to the question, you will discover that it is not an arbitrary number, it is a simple solution to a fundamental problem (discussed by Rand) of protecting a person’s right to the product of their mind, given human longevity and the need to pick some number.

In addition, I think you are confusing the arbitrariness of legislation with the nature of law. It’s not “the law” that is arbitrary, it is the politicians which compose the codes that set the foundation for the law – and less than half of “the law” is written by politicians (consider contract law, for example). Of course you will have to learn bits and pieces that include more arbitrary parts of the law, just as you will have to drive yourself insane studying Kant and Hegel in philosophy graduate school. I find philosophical jargon to be more opaque than legal jargon – and certainly philosophy is not designed to be understood by the layman.

The only way to avoid the apparently arbitrary nature of studies in the man-made is to focus on hard core physical science: physics, chemistry, engineering, where you only confront inorganic nature and not human choices. Something has to give, either your antipathy towards focused studies, or your dislike of the “arbitrary”.

11

Memorization is not my strong suit either.

I hate to sound like a commercial, but when I discovered spaced repetition flash cards, they changed my life. (I even resisted them at first.)

There are open-source programs like Anki where you can create your own flash cards and quiz yourself on them. There are also commercial products that come with ready-made flash cards.

People use spaced repetition systems to learn foreign languages (which cannot be deduced from principles), and also to get through law school or medical school.

They really work.

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FWIW, when I was teaching math at Indiana University, a senior colleague was auditing law courses on the grounds that law is the closest thing in the real world to math.

Is there some other field than the restaurant business where you could start at the bottom and work up?

 

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On 8/26/2024 at 8:44 PM, DavidOdden said:

There is a substantial difference between the arbitrary, versus conclusions that you do not agree with.

That’s true. I can appreciate the difficulty of applying law to the “real world”. In studying property rights in my libertarian days, I was always frustrated with all the nitty gritty questions that came up when talking about property rights, but Rand has made me appreciate that application is a whole issue on its own.

I hate to admit this, but I went through a bad breakup with a lawyer that has somewhat defined my life for years now, and just hearing the word “law” sends me into fits. It’s not a rational response, but it’s a factor that will certainly make putting my all into a law education very difficult. There’s psychological work that needs doing before I can grapple with those emotions, and I don’t know how long I’m willing to wait.

Besides, I’ve truly never been interested in law.

On 8/26/2024 at 8:44 PM, DavidOdden said:

Something has to give, either your antipathy towards focused studies, or your dislike of the “arbitrary”.

I appreciate your candor here. I’ve thought that Economics might be the sweet spot. I became very interested in it in that libertarian phase (since those are the only arguments they have), but the basis of my interest ways always somewhat philosophical. When economic arguments reached their limits, I was forced to visit Objectivism for fundamentals. Anyways, it seems to me that Economics might be right at the crossroads of math, philosophy, history, and politics. And if I’m not mistaken, finance is only a hop/skip/jump away.

On 8/26/2024 at 9:54 PM, necrovore said:

They really work.

I’ll give those a try. My other task will be to discover to what degree I just have a bad attitude about memorization. There’s a lot of crossover between memorization and living according to arbitrary decree (say, if you grew up Catholic), and I have yet to separate the two emotionally.

19 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

that law is the closest thing in the real world to math

Please do elaborate on this. 

Any field that takes absolute beginners or values people with restaurant, audio engineering, or graphic design experience is open to me. My interest in grad school comes from my interest in the abstract as well as the fact that it seems to open doors otherwise not available.

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Well, it is easy to proclaim “Just get over it!”, yet very difficult to just get over it. Recognizing the underlying causes of emotional responses is essential to a mentally healthy existence, so maybe that is a good enough reason to do something else for a living. Perhaps then something in the realm of business would be more suited to the facts which “define you”, and if mathematics is really your forte, economics might be a good choice. Or, digital signal processing. My main advice is to think in terms of what you hope to accomplish by pursuing a particular career for the rest of your life.

There are very many careers that are math-intensive such as accounting, DSP, various kinds of quantitative analysis (guessing what the market is going to do, figuring out if a drug kills or cures people). Those are areas that involve “actual math”. I don’t think any part of law involves understanding convolution, vector spaces, FFTs etc, but it does have similarity to math in strongly demanding adherence to rules of logic.

 

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3 hours ago, HowardRoarkSpaceDetective said:

23 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

that law is the closest thing in the real world to math

Please do elaborate on this. 

As David Odden said, both math and law require rigorous logical reasoning.

 

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@Doug Morris I’m surprised to hear that. Courtroom dramas have given me the impression that law is mostly inductive. And there’s so much reading involved. Maybe commercial law is different.

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On 8/29/2024 at 1:44 PM, DavidOdden said:

My main advice is to think in terms of what you hope to accomplish by pursuing a particular career for the rest of your life.

This is the question that’s plagued me for years now. How anybody can answer it as early as 17, 18, 19 is beyond me.

I do wonder if my math chops have deteriorated too much in the 12 years since I last took a math course. Part of my interest in philosophy school is that it’s the area I’m most proficient in at the moment. But again, economics is right at that crossroads.

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29 minutes ago, HowardRoarkSpaceDetective said:

Courtroom dramas have given me the impression that law is mostly inductive.

Courtroom dramas tend to involve revealing the solution of a mystery.  Solving a mystery is inductive.  Normally in the real world, by the time a case gets to court, any mystery has been solved.

32 minutes ago, HowardRoarkSpaceDetective said:

And there’s so much reading involved.

The starting point for the deductions in law is the body of law and precedent, which is pretty vast.  Math has simpler starting points.

 

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@Doug Morris I think what I’ve always loved about math is that there is a strong element of “discovery” to it. When a concept clicks in math, it appears to (at risk of sounding too rationalistic) reveal something inherent in the nature of reality. There are many “aha” moments, and integrating ideas to other ideas is only a matter of time. Insofar as that is true of law, I think I could find it thrilling, and I’m starting more and more to see how much this is the case, especially when I compare it to Rand’s identification of analogous concepts in distinct branches of philosophy.

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15 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

The starting point for the deductions in law is the body of law and precedent, which is pretty vast.

That would be true for the application of law to a specific case in a trial, but the “discovery” of law as manifested in appeals can be inductive, i.e. discovery of the “right to privacy”, or discovery of the concept “negligence”.