Why did YOU choose Oxford or Cambridge over the other?

That was MacDowell actually...

...For your information...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McDowell

LOL OXFORD. megafail it is.

I chose Oxford over Cambridge because I preferred the Biochemistry course over the Natural Sciences one Cambridge offers.
And I think Oxford is prettier.

Conversely, I chose Cambridge because I prefer the structure of the NatSci course, and I think it's prettier than Oxford :P

Conversely, I chose Cambridge because I prefer the structure of the NatSci course, and I think it's prettier than Oxford :P

I agree, Oxford has a bit of a faceless town thing going on, the parts which are of the university are lovely but otherwise it's like any other city. Cambridge, given that the university swallows the place up whole, seems so idyllic and other-worldly

Hah! Different preferences I suppose.

Whether or not you're interested, Philosophy at Cambridge is definitely superior if your interest is precisely that, Philosophy.

Cambridge also has a phenomenally strong reputation in Philosophy, the best in the world at present, due to recent past philosophers.... I'd hate to speculate on Harvard or other American universities but I can't see them being better.

.

That list is absurd. Cambridge is practically the home of twentieth-century Philosophy, and a departmental ranking which employs such a daft methodology doesn't change that.

I'll be applying to Cambridge this October. Don't really know why - I just have some kind of unnatural bias towards it. Whenever people have asked me 'have you ever thought about going to oxbridge?' - I just say 'yeah I'm thinking of Cambridge' and I guess it kind of stuck. This was before I'd even visited either city - just had some kind of bias - Cambridge just feels more 'right' to me.

That list is absurd. Cambridge is practically the home of twentieth-century Philosophy, and a departmental ranking which employs such a daft methodology doesn't change that.

It is definitely the superior choice for an undergraduate applicant wanting to do only philosophy for the three years there, and of these two is the only choice. That, though, doesn't provide warrant to make the broader-seeming claim that "Philosophy at Cambridge is superior", it is not.



I'm afraid this simply isn't true. Philosophy departments are ranked by a report called the Philosophical Gourmet and at present it is this report which pretty well entirely determines reputation in philosophy. You can perhaps question whether the report accurately captures which department is or isn't best, but that wasn't what you were claiming, which is that Cambridge has a reputation for being the best in the world at present. It doesn't have, nothing like it.

http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/overall.asp

Don't worry about Harvard, the philosophy department at NYU is presently unbelievable, and is possibly the strongest academic department in any subject anywhere in the world. Many of the philosophers you'll be studying while at Cambridge will be teaching your contemporaries at NYU*, while the reverse certainly won't be the case.

*Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Paul Boghossian, Ned Block, Derek Parfit, Jeremy Waldron, Crsipin Wright, Hartry Field, David Chalmers.... It's the galacticos.




That said, you're about to begin what is by any measure a very good course, and in one of the best universities in the world, and can be glad enough of that.

I'm rambling a bit, I have exams very soon, but I really think that any list which places Cambridge's philosophy deparment's reputation as 25th or whatever it was ought to be discarded at once, sorry.

Well, there is concern about the list in the philosophy community, but it's chiefly a concern about its influence and the extent to which it is self-perpetuating, rather than concern about the methodology. You might have seen as well that Cambridge itself takes part in the rankings system (is one of the departments which ranks other departments, with Nicholas Denyer, Jane Heal and a couple of others from Cambridge having submitted their assessments to the most recent round).

Anyway, and as I said before, you'll be following a terrific course at a terrific university. Good luck with those exams.