> That depends, I guess, on what kind of philosophy you are studying. If
> you're at all interested in 20th-century analytic stuff, it's pretty
> hard to make head or tails of most of it if you haven't studied
> symbolic logic. And most philosophy departments I'm aware of would
> consider you rather under-educated if you didn't know your upside-down
> As from your backward Es. I don't think you could pass their PhD
> qualifying exams.
Yeah, you're probably right about departmental requirements--although many departments also require that you be able to profitably read philosophy in a foreign language. There are, of course, portions of articles and books that would be unintelligible to you if you didn't "know your upside-down As from your backward Es," but there's generally nothing that couldn't quickly be paraphrased in English and made readily accessible.
-- Luke