I realize that the earlier call for corrections should have been clearer about the meaning of this category, so let me set out more explicitly the rules for inclusion and exclusion that we've used for a number of years:
1. Cognate faculty are faculty at the university (not elsewhere) who are available to work with PhD students in philosophy and actually do so. (In some rare cases--e.g., U Mass/Amherst-- we have made an exception for faculty who teach at liberal arts colleges in the same town with the PhD-granting program, whose colleges have a formal relationship with the PhD department, and who otherwise meet the criteria and who, of course, do not have obligations to PhD students at their own department.)
2. Cognate faculty can be philosophy PhDs or not: the question is whether they are willing to work with PhD students and whether they actually do so. The latter is good evidence of the former! (A good local example is Chris Kennedy in Linguistics here at Chicago: not a philosophy PhD, but he works very significantly with philosophy PhD students in philosophy of language.)
3. Cognate faculty, unlike those listed under "faculty," do not have tenure in the Philosophy Department or do not vote on Philosophy Department affairs. This is a crude proxy, obviously, for degree of involvement, but easier to determine than the alternatives. (Another local example: at Texas, I was actually in the odd position of having a non-tenured courtesy appointment in Philosophy and voting rights, but Chicago doesn't even have courtesy appointments in Philosophy; still, as I did at Texas, I serve on lots of philosophy dissertation committees.)
4. Emeritus faculty from other universities can count as cognate faculty if they have formal teaching duties at the university where they are claimed as cognate. There are a handful of cases like this, mostly in the UK and Canada.
5. Departments from which "cognate faculty" have typically come include linguistics, psychology, law, politics, and math. But in all cases, the faculty in question actually work with PhD students in philosophy on a fairly regular basis--at least in graduate seminars, and typically on dissertation committees.
6. I am worried that some departments are beginning to pad their "cognate" lists. Sometimes I have followed up with e-mails to cognate faculty to confirm, with mixed results. But more generally, there is, I am quite sure, no advantage to padding the cognate lists with non-philosophers, since a long list of unrecognizable names does not help.
I hope these guidelines are helpful. Departments that want to revise their cognate lists in light of the preceding can e-mail me directly, since the aim is not to embarrass any departments--I now realize the criteria were unclear.
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