Best universities for Philosophy?

Moral and political philosophy is a good choice! (The fact its my specialism has absolutely nothing to do with it ) If that's the area you are interested in, I highly recommend Reading, their specialism in that area really is outstanding. Personally I've never thought of Durham to be particularly good in this area, with their emphasis more on the metaphysics and phil. mind.

I'd like to completely disagree with River85 about Newcastle. I went to have a look there at their Philosophical Studies course and wasn't very impressed with the standard. One of their assignments was a POSTER to be put up on the wall. It wasn't detailed, it wasn't philosophical, and looked as though it was done by late primary school/early secondary school children. I was honestly shocked that people were doing that for their degree.

It's small, both in terms of student and staff numbers as well as the building (two decent size Georgian townhouses).



We're just talking about the philosophy department here? Well, there's a reason for that, it's not a massive, research intensive department. The research it does do, it does well, but not in great numbers. It's certainly not as intensive as KCL, Cambridge, Bristol etc. But it still exceeds most unis in terms of entry standards, graduate prospects and student satisfaction. Now, whatever you think about the inclusion of these stats it does explain why, despite its only fairly good RAE score, it outranks more research intensive departments.

So that's why it may not have the same respect amongst fellow academics as departments like English, Physics, law or History. But just because it doesn't have a fantastic number of top research staff (there's only really E J Lowe, possibly also M D Eddy and Prof. Maehle). Doesn't mean it can't match the others in undergraduate teaching. It does have some great areas, too, (moral philosophy, metaphysics, history and philosophy of medicine and science).

That was in late 2005 I believe. Personally that put me off straight away - I felt like I was in school. I'm aware of its strengths, I spent a lot of time there as the bloke did his undergrad and masters there (in History, which is also a very good department) - I just don't think that Philosophy is one of them.

edit: Incidentally, I was also applying for philosophy and politics at most places, so our comparisons were presumably pretty similar.

Perhaps, although I applied for V500 everywhere (except Newcastle's human interest course). I didn't change to PhilPol until the end of my first year at Durham.

You can change to Philosophy and Politics once you're in? That's great news for me. That course really interested me but I ended up picking straight Philosophy because I didn't talk about Politics in my Personal Statement.

I'm already considering Cambridge, but which other universities would you say are the best for a Philosophy course?