[lbo-talk] Speaking of grad school

christian bayes christianbayes01 at gmail.com
Thu Aug 23 05:13:08 PDT 2012


I think I actually had this conversation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSdHoNJu5fU

-c

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 12:51 AM, andie_nachgeborenen < andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:


> 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
>
> ___________________________________
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>



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