My wife is currently studying for the LSAT (Law School Admissions Test). It looks to me like a fairly easy test (she's finding it fairly easy as well); it emphasizes verbal logical reasoning, i.e. reasoning in natural language (as opposed to logical reasoning in mathematical language).
It occurs to me that the LSAT has tremendous direct applicability to philosophy, for obvious reasons. It also occurs to me that most of the lawyers I know, even the ones I tend to have political disagreements with, are pretty sharp people with good reasoning skills; the ones that turn their attention to philosophy are pretty good philosophers and don't often make egregious errors of logic. And I see egregious errors of logic all over the place in philosophy.
I'm curious: How many academic philosophers take the LSAT? How high do they actually score? Do the ones who score high get sucked into law school, leaving the low and medium-scoring to take philosophy? What are the standards to get into graduate school in philosophy?
Sunday, May 18, 2008
3 comments:
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I don't know the answer to your question. What I can tell you is that I got perfect scores on the verbal, quantitative, and logical reasoning sections of the GRE and did not get a perfect score on the LSAT.
ReplyDeleteI would really love to learn your wife's secret to attacking the logical reasoning section. I really wish I could say that it is rather easy!! Any tips, especially on the assumption question types?
ReplyDeleteThanks,
ab8579@wayne.edu
How to solve the logic problems and part 2 are a good start. The pictures are broken for some reason.
ReplyDeletePhilosophy and computer programming are good practice, too.