Graduate Program
Notre Dame places more of its graduates in tenure-track positions than any other graduate program in the United States.
The University of Notre Dame’s department is unique in American philosophy. The culture of the graduate program and the department tempers self-avowed pluralism with a commitment to the clarity and rigor of analytic philosophy. It blends an interest in contemporary debates with a commitment to studying the history of philosophy. It maintains a delicate equipoise between professionalism and the exploration of those bigger questions that have been philosophy’s traditional concern. It permits students to bring their religious convictions to bear on philosophy without lapsing into fundamentalism of any sort.
This last element of the local culture is what makes the equipoise between professionalism and tradition sustainable. Notre Dame’s religious heritage has bequeathed to the department an enduring sense that philosophy is not simply about the narrow-gauge questions that occasionally seem to preoccupy academic philosophy.
Students committed to Judaeo-Christian religious orthodoxies and students anxious to confront the big questions will find their concerns more hospitably received at Notre Dame than at many other graduate programs. The department’s commitment to professional excellence requires students to pursue those concerns with greater responsibility to professional standards and mainstream literature than in other doctoral programs where religion is taken seriously. It does all this while maintaining an atmosphere among the graduate students that is educational, collegial and hospitable.
The uniqueness of the department’s philosophical culture, its strength in so many areas of philosophy, the outstanding reputations of its most visible faculty and its depth at the more junior levels are very attractive to good students. So too is the department’s placement record, which in one important respect is as good as any in American philosophy: a 1995 study showed that Notre Dame places more of its graduates in tenure-track positions than any other graduate program in the United States.
