3) I have to disagree with you about the dialectical nature of philosophy. It isn't important to discuss ideas with others or even have a physical teacher in front of you to answer any questions you may have. I'd argue that you can learn almost anything you've ever wanted to know on your own by utilizing free internet resources like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Wikipedia, Google Books, iTunesU, your university library, and MIT's OpenCourseWare. I actually met with a philosophy TA during the first half of my self-study project and didn't find him to be all that helpful. I seem to get a lot more out of assigning myself short papers to write every three days and stashing them under my bed. Most profs, in my experience, only really care about their doctoral charges.
Sorry, I can't let this go : ) Its the philosopher in me. It is of course fine that you disagree, but just to be clear, you aren't disagreeing with me per say, at least in terms of who originated the idea. You are disagreeing with Socrates (via Plato) this is his explicit view that philosophy is dialectical, that is why he didn't write anything down. You are allowed to disagree with Socrates, as many have, but I am going to side with the guy that founded Western Intellectual Thought at least in terms of the nature of philosophy, but hey do what you want. Also "answering any questions you have" is not the role of a good philosophy professor. If you had one that gave you "answers" to your questions, that is unfortunate, as that is not real philosophy. Its not about learning content, its about ways of thinking. My favorite philosophy prof said, "I do not want to teach you to think what I think, I want to teach you how I think." This is the philosopher's education.
The materials you referenced are very high quality, and some of which I use regularly. I will check out the others that I am unfamiliar with.
You also keep referring to philosophy TAs. The idea of a philosophy TA is comical, and I would wager that anyone who is such a TA is a tool and not worth one's time. All of the top thinkers in my program, wouldn't have been caught dead in such a position, 1.)You can't tutor philosophy, and 2.) it would be incredibly boring trying to do so. The good scientist in us also knows that one TA does not speak for the validity of all programs it seems like a pretty small sample size.
Your short papers idea every three days is very good and something that I do still to this day. We were required in all of my upper division courses to write a one or two page paper for each class meeting. It really helps synthesis the information, but the value of course comes from discussing the papers, not from just writing them.
Also the, profs only care about their PhDs, comment is a little cynical and quite a generalization. Almost every philosophy prof I have come in contact with, which is around 20+ in regards to conferences and classwork have been extremely helpful and have a sincere interest in working on the material at hand.
I am curious how you seemingly have good insights into the field of philosophy, at least regarding graduate school, but yet have such a bad opinion of formalized philosophical training. Did you take a class or two and dislike it or what? If you majored in it, you must have had a very poor string of faculty to have such an opinion.
Well anyways... I appreciate your responses and the time you took to write it out. I just disagree with some of your conclusions that is all : ) I am going to let you have the last post if you so desire, I won't drag this back and forth out any more.
