MOVING TO FRONT FROM MAY 12--MR. STRASSFELD WELCOMES MORE FEEDBACK
Jonathan StrasSfeld, a PhD student in History at the University of Rochester working on an interesting project on the history of American philosophy in the mid-20th-century (especially the fates, respectively, of phenomenology and analytic philosophy), asked me to share this data on philosophy faculty at the leading graduate programs 1930-1979 (corrected list from a few hours ago): Download Philosophers 1930-1979 corrected
Mr. Strassfeld explains:
As part of my dissertation research, I have assembled a database of information about philosophers at America's leading philosophy departments in the mid-20th century. It includes every Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor (not including visiting or emeritus faculty) in the philosophy departments of Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale, from 1930-1979.
I am making a limited version of this dataset available on this blog both because it may be of interest or use to philosophers, and in the hope that others will be able to spot errors or misidentifications. Most importantly, I have attempted to classify each philosopher as working in analytic philosophy, non-analytic philosophy, or the history of philosophy, allowing for combinations of these categories. Because of the number of philosophers involved - 492 in total - this assessment is necessarily cursory; and these categories are, of course also, not clear cut. Thus, I will be particularly grateful for any help finding misidentifications: please email corrections and suggestions to me at [email protected]
I hope readers will help Mr. Strassfeld out and, in any case, enjoy the snapshot of the American philosophy faculties of yesteryear!
ADDENDUM: An explanation from Mr. Strassfeld of the departments studied:
I determined which departments to survey recursively, defining the "leading departments" as those whose graduates comprised the faculties of the leading departments. Focusing on the period of 1945-1969, when universities were growing explosively, I found that there was a group of eleven philosophy departments that essentially only hired graduates from among their own ranks and foreign universities - that it was virtually impossible for graduates of any American philosophy departments outside of this group to gain faculty positions at these "leading departments." Indeed, between 1949-1960, no member of their faculty had received a Ph.D. from an American institution outside of their ranks. There were, of course, border cases. Brown, Rockefeller, MIT, and Pittsburgh in particular might have been included. However, I judged that they did not place enough graduates on the faculties of the other leading universities, particularly during the period 1945-1969, for inclusion. This list also aligns closely with contemporary reputational assessments, with ten of the eleven departments ranking in the top 11 in a 1964 poll (Allan Murray Carter, An Assessment of Quality in Graduate Education).
Note, of course, that MIT, Pittsburgh, and Rockefeller only became major PhD programs in philosophy in the 1960s.
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