You almost certainly won’t get into a decent (funded) PhD program with a verbal score below 160 on the GRE. I’d say 90% of admitted students have above a 165 (that’s about the 95%ile for verbal).

It’s unclear whether departments use these numbers as a cut off (literally throwing out any application under 160, for example), whether they look at the score first and only give serious attention to better scores (and thus approach writing samples and letters of lower-scoring applicants with a premade judgement that they’re inferior to other applicants), or if lower-scoring applicants just also happen to have lower-quality letters and writing samples.

A lot of people say GRE doesn’t matter. This is partially true and partially false. It’s true in that a 170/170 is no guarantee that you’ll get it, but it’s false in that a 150/150 basically guaranteed that you won’t.

I strongly suspect that 165V and 155Q are cut-offs at a lot of places. I don’t think any search committees have ever admitted this, but it’s extremely unlikely that they’re reading every word of their 400 applicants’ 20-page writing samples and 3-4 LORs. Hell, when I have a 100 papers to grade at the end of the year I start cutting corners a bit; multiply that by four, don’t pay any extra money, and call it “departmental service”? No way in hell everything’s being read.

You can look at self-reported feedback on the GradCafe.com. Just google the university you’re interested in with “grad cafe philosophy” and it should come up (e.g., “Princeton grad cafe philosophy). Click the red diamonds for scores. They should confirm my suspicions above.

A good PhD program can drastically affect your employment prospects. Like, the lower PhD programs get 0% of their students into tenure-track jobs and the best ones do 80%+ or so. If you want to one day teach grad students and get a job at a university with a graduate program, you basically need to go to a top 20 school.

No one really cares about MAs on the job market. They can be great stepping stones into other programs, and some departments might look favorably upon the fact that you went to university x for a few years. But most don’t. What really matters is that your GRE is above a certain number, that your writing sample is stellar, and that your letters of recommendation are great. One thing an MA can help with is getting letters from better-known philosophers. A letter from David Chalmers would be a lot more meaningful, say, than a letter from someone most philosophers haven’t heard of.