[lbo-talk] Speaking of grad school

[andie_nachgeborenen]

Believe it or not, when I was in grad school at a major midwest public ivy in philosophy in the 1980s, if memory serves, the department allowed the required course in mathematical logic count for the nominal language requirement for a PhD because after all logic is a formal language. In case you missed it, the logic requirement  was a requirement anyway. Soooo, you could write a thesis on, say, Kant or, if you were especially professionally suicidal, Marx, without knowing German. You could even get tenure in a period of philosophy without knowing the languages in which the originals were written, working only from translations. Nor was the philosophy dept the only one with this sort of attitude towards scholarship at the time. This was not a formal policy, but a senior Prof in political science tried to persuade me to write up my theory of Cold War military policy Into a dissertation, although I don't know Russian. I told him thought this was a problem, but he said it didn't matter, all the important Soviet literature and documents had been translated. I don't know whether he knew Russian, although nuclear strategy wasn't his speciality, and how he knew this without having done the research, which would have been required to do the thesis, I do not know. Of course this was in the 80s, so things    might have changed.

Sent from my iPad

On Aug 21, 2012, at 9:45 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:


> When I was in grad school, specializing in the Renaissance, I decided to study Latin and Greek (to avoid the alternative of deconstruction). I figured I'd take the "scholarly" route. 
> 
> My advisor asked me why I was doing this, since I had already fulfilled my language requirements with French/Italian. 
> 
> I was stunned. I was expecting congratulations for taking things seriously and being willing to do my homework. I mean focusing on the Renaissance without knowing at least Latin is a joke. 
> 
> Joanna 
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk