Nova PhDs

A forum for grads of Villanova's Philosophy PhD program

a question -- update
one of the other new faculty (in chemistry) here at western carolina university asked me today, how many PhD programs in philosophy are there in the US? he said there were something like a couple hundred programs in chemistry, but i had to admit that i really didn't know how many there were in philosophy. a little research this afternoon gave me a preliminary answer from leiter's gourmet report, which indicated there were 100+, but i couldn't seem to find anything more definitive that that (i took a brief look at the APA's website). anybody have this info.? i suspect it has to be definitively in the big book that lists all the philosophy faculty and programs (undergrad and grad) in the country, but i don't currently have access to one of those.


Edited to add the following:

just found this little gem on an old leiter posting, available here :



There are more than 110 Ph.D.-granting programs in philosophy in the United States. If the majority of them were closed, there would be only a slight loss to the profession; if the weakest third of them were closed, there would be no loss at all, and, in fact, a net increase in human happiness... Philosophy, at least, does not need more Ph.D. programs. It could benefit, I think, from more top-flight, terminal M.A. programs (like Tufts, Wisconsin/Milwaukee, Northern Illinois, Virginia Tech, etc.), as a way of helping students figure out whether the academic career is for them. Unfortunately, the trend right now is in the opposite direction, with what were quite attractive terminal M.A. programs becoming PhD-granting institutions, without any clear market rationale.


i presume that villanova (and the spep-continental departments generally) would, for leiter, be in that "bottom third," which, if closed, would be no loss at all.