> 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.
And quite rightly so. English-language chauvinism in the world of scholarship is simply ridiculous. Western philosophy started in ancient Greece, and if you want to be considered a serious scholar of Greek philosophy, you'd damned well better be able to read Greek. Similarly for Latin in the case of medieval and early modern philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, etc.), German for German philosophy, and so on.
> 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.
Of course, amateur philosophers and the general public who are interested in the subject can do very well with translations and paraphrases, but I had in mind graduate students working toward PhDs. Then, too, if a student is specializing in English-language analytic philosophy, of course the predominant amount of material would be in English, but some significant things have also been written in German and French (and don't forget that Wittgenstein wrote a lot of his stuff in German).
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. -- Attr. to Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile