All though they are in principle calm and clear-headed people, and not at all prone to the irrationalities that afflict the rest of us, analytic philosophers nevertheless get as anxious as a bad child at Christmas when The Philosophical Gourmet Report gets published. The Report is a ranking of Graduate Programs in Philosophy in the English-speaking world, with the main focus being on analytic rather than continental philosophy. It’s the creation of Brian Leiter, of the University of Texas at Austin. It’s been subject to poor criticism, good parody, and above all the undivided attention of philosophers, whatever they might claim in public.

From a social science point of view, Leiter’s methodology has been improving every year he’s conducted the survey. He’s moved from a quick email poll of his friends (and a tendency to tweak any results that were, um, “obviously” wrong), to having a heavy-hitting advisory board and a much better research design.

This year’s rankings show some interesting changes. NYU and Rutgers confirm their new status as the places with the best reputation. Arizona’s philosophy department is back in the top 10, where it belongs, which makes Laurie happy. In the specialty rankings, Arizona gets ‘Excellent’ rating in Mind and Cognitive Science, and ‘Good’ or ‘Notable’ in most of the other areas.

What I really want to do, though, is to get the original data from Leiter and blockmodel it. It’d be a fascinating exercise. By far the most interesting thing about the report is that it’s simply a reputational survey of the people working in the field, rather than a U.S.-News style effort with lots of variables that are hard to inpterpret. As a discipline, the top end of Philosophy is smaller and denser (in network terms) than many other fields (like Molecular Biology, say), and the fact that it has no empirical component means, helpfully, that people’s reputations are a pretty good guide to their quality. So the report is a unique —- and now very good—- snapshot of judgements of quality in an academic field.