Kukla had an excellent post over at Leiter Reports a few days ago about whether the tendency to pursue an MA before your PhD is a good thing or a bad thing for philosophy as a profession. I think this is an important question but I must admit that I found many of the comments (or unintended implications of the comments) enormously puzzling (if not straightforwardly offensive). At some point during the debate there seemed to be somewhat of a consensus that if you pursue an MA after your bachelor's degree before pursuing a PhD, then your chances of becoming a great philosopher (as opposed to a good philosopher) are greatly diminished. Some commentators did offer reasons for thinking this (whereas others didn't), but I must admit that I didn't quite understand those reasons.
The most obvious reasons people pursue a (terminal) MA before pursuing a PhD in philosophy (in order of frequency, determined by applications to our terminal MA program) are as follows: (1) The student did not study philosophy during her undergraduate studies, (2) the university at which she was an undergraduate does not have a PhD program in philosophy, and she was not yet ready to move away from boyfriends, girlfriends, children, etc. by the time of graduation, (3) she is still uncertain about whether she wants to pursue a PhD in philosophy (or alternatively: shift to psychology, neuroscience, physics, mathematics, med school, or something else altogether), (4) she came from a very small college that no has heard of and with very few philosophers who could write her letters of reference, (4) she didn't do well enough as an undergraduate and needs to improve her record.
If students pursue an MA before going into a PhD program for reason (4), then there is a chance that they just don't have the talent necessary to become a great philosopher, but lack of talent is not the most obvious reason that a student does poorly as an undergraduate student. Some do poorly because they came from disadvantaged families and have to work full-time jobs to stay in college. Some have serious illnesses, have to deal with sick family members or are going through traumatic experiences (e.g., rape, bullying or facing the difficulties of coming out as LGBTQ). Some are in a field of study that really doesn't interest them and only later discover what philosophy can also be like. In other words, undergraduate students can do poorly for a wide variety of reasons that will have no bearing on whether they will become great philosophers later (Einstein did poorly in school. Remember?).
Students who go into an MA program for reasons (1), (2) and (3) are definitely just as likely to become great philosophers as undergraduates who go directly to a PhD program. So I thought the implication of these comments (that pursuing an MA before a PhD leads to a lot of good philosophy but not a lot of great philosophy) was misguided. This sort of implication has connotations to the effect that only privileged students whose parents could afford sending them to a private top-ranked university or who knew what they wanted at age 17 (probably because they were privileged) and who weren't going through traumatic events during their undergraduate studies can become great philosophers.
We know that that is false. Children from privileged families (perhaps with parents associated with ivy-league universities) are usually not the people who end up as great philosophers, even if they do end up working at ivy-league schools because of admission biases. I will not out any people here but a lot of great minds in philosophy worked their way up. They didn't go from Harvard University as undergraduate students to a PhD program at Princeton and then to a TT job at NYU. Sure, there are people who did do just that (or something like that) but if you have a closer look at them, they are usually not the greatest minds in philosophy. The greatest minds in philosophy have, for the most part, had some hardship along the way.
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