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    A new resource for those interested in graduate programs in philosophy of biology

    By Roberta Millstein

    A graduate student in my department, Shawn Miller, has created a wiki for graduate programs having faculty who specialize in philosophy of biology: philbio.net It gives an at-a-glance overview of schools and faculty, with links to websites, CVs, and PhilPapers profiles for individual faculty. The wiki thus serves as an excellent springboard for those who are researching graduate programs in philosophy of biology, both Ph.D. and terminal M.A. As the wiki notes, "The primary intended audience is prospective or current graduate students with interests in philosophy of biology who want to get the lay of the land by seeing who works where, and on what."

    Some important features of the site:

    • Anyone can edit the wiki, with or without an account. Faculty and students are encouraged to add listings and update listings.
    • The criterion for program inclusion is just that a philosophy (or a history and philosophy of science) Ph.D. program have at least one full-time faculty member who self-identifies as a philosopher of biology.
    • On the main page, faculty specializations can be listed and willingness to work with new students can be indicated. Programs can also create a separate page that lists further information about the program, such as lab groups (see UC Davis's entry for an example).

    I would encourage others to update this site and help make it a useful resource, and to recommend the site to prospective graduate students with interests in philosophy of biology. I would further encourage those who work in other areas of philosophy to create similar sites to facilitate prospective graduate students in doing the sort of deep research that an important decision like applying to graduate school calls for.

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    13 responses to “A new resource for those interested in graduate programs in philosophy of biology”

    1. Charles Pigden Avatar
      Charles Pigden

      Hi Roberta,
      You have overlooked Otago where we have James Maclaurin (co-author : What is BioDiversity?) . I will get him to get on to it.
      Cheers
      Charles Pigden

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    2. Roberta L. Millstein Avatar
      Roberta L. Millstein

      Charles, that would be great to add Otago and Maclaurin. Thanks.
      Just to be clear, I haven’t overlooked anything, since I didn’t create the wiki. Shawn Miller, a graduate student, created it, and did the best that he could from a web search, knowing that programs and people would be left off. Thus, the encouragement to publicize the wiki and to edit it to make it better!

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    3. Fool Avatar
      Fool

      This is brilliant. A great idea, and the sort of thing I’d love to see for my own field. Two questions: do you and Shawn think something like this would be feasible for subfields much larger than phil bio? and is information like funding, job-market fortunes of recent graduates in the field, etc., something that you want it to expand to include, or are you specifically limiting the data to “who works where”?

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    4. Roberta L. Millstein Avatar
      Roberta L. Millstein

      Personally, yes, I think that something like this could work for larger subfields, although the format might need to be changed slightly to be more manageable (e.g., universities could be broken up by country or in some other way).
      The Program Pages allow for departments to list information like the job-market fortunes of recent graduates. In the instructions, Shawn says: “While the style and format of this main page should be kept consistent, individual Program Pages can take any form whatsoever.” So yes, information about funding, or other sorts of information could also be included.
      But again, I do want to be clear that this was Shawn’s idea and Shawn’s legwork. That is, I don’t want to take credit for his hard work. At most I have made a suggestion or two, and that was after the main pieces were already in place. I am just the messenger, and, obviously, a proponent. 🙂

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    5. Shawn Miller Avatar
      Shawn Miller

      I agree with Roberta that this could work for larger subfields. Creating the initial list would take longer b/c it’s a bigger list. And if you want to contact the faculty you put on the initial list asking them to add information about specialties and willingness to work with new students—which I did—that will take longer b/c there are more faculty. But once the ball is rolling, the open wiki format facilitates filling in the gaps, even big ones. That’s the idea, anyway.
      For what it’s worth, the wiki was only three days of work, start to finish. It took two days to create the initial site, and then another day of tinkering and re-writing. The nice thing about academic department websites is that they are all basically structured the same way, so it’s really easy to find the information you are after. And I used a browser extension called Vimium that lets you navigate web pages via key strokes rather than a mouse, which sped things up.

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    6. Shawn Miller Avatar
      Shawn Miller

      I forgot UT Austin, too.

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    7. Eric Schwitzgebel Avatar
      Eric Schwitzgebel

      Very cool resource — thanks, Shawn and Roberta!

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    8. Mitchell Aboulafia Avatar
      Mitchell Aboulafia

      Shawn, Well done! I would love to see more and better use of the web to assist prospective graduate students. Students need all sorts of information to make informed decisions. One way to go would be an information web site with sophisticated search engine. I discuss one here, drawing on suggestions from others http://upnight.com/2014/10/04/thinking-outside-the-box-or-a-real-alternative-to-rankings/

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    9. Shawn Miller Avatar
      Shawn Miller

      Thanks, Mitchell. I think there is something to recommend sophisticated search engines to help make decisions. However, it seems to me that figuring out what phil bio grad programs to apply to is a really tractable problem. Staying agnostic about whether programs can be ranked in a sensible way, my view is that doing so is unnecessary for the purpose of helping prospective graduate students make informed choices. Assume there are 100 phil bio Ph.D. programs: Students will winnow the initial list using geographic and other criteria that don’t have anything much to do with the particulars of the Ph.D. programs. And they may further reduce the list based on how likely they think they are to get in, the overall reputation of the university, etc. So even if a prospective student still has 50 schools on the list—which seems quite high to me—researching the phil bio credentials of those schools is trivially easy. It’s not like the list is so big that they need some criteria that will allow them to sort what remains. They can actually look. And it’s getting to that level of close inspection that allows students to make informed choices about where they might want to apply.
      I guess what it comes down to is that I think that it’s actually quite easy to provide all the information prospective students need to research where to apply. So, it isn’t that we can’t come up with sophisticated, nuanced measures of quality; it’s that we don’t need to.

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    10. Jonathan Birch Avatar
      Jonathan Birch

      This is a useful resource, thanks. I’ve expanded the UK section (sorry to anyone I missed out!) and will start spreading the word.

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    11. Roberta L. Millstein Avatar
      Roberta L. Millstein

      That’s great, thanks so much!

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    12. Shawn Miller Avatar
      Shawn Miller

      Much appreciated, Jonathan!

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    13. Shawn Miller Avatar
      Shawn Miller

      A few updates to the wiki: Programs can now be browsed by number of philosophy of biology faculty and by U.S. state. Also, all programs now have their own basic Wiki Program Pages, so no setup is required. (Creating separate pages was necessary to get browsing by category going.) Total number of programs listed is 50.

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