The Philosophers' Cocoon

Good Mentoring

There is a post up at Philosophy Smoker where 'zombie' remarks about post-doc opportunities. In a remark about the positives of their post-doc experience, zombie says "My grad program wasn't so hot on mentoring. My post doc PI was awesome as a mentor, and took that role very seriously."

That made me curious about what constitutes 'good' mentoring. I've found both of my universities thus far to have more than a few good mentors, but I'd be curious to hear about others experiences. My paradigm example of a mentor is my undergraduate advisor - Matt McCormick. 

Here are some general remarks that I think made him an exceptional mentor:

(1) A good mentor takes teaching seriously. He took his job as a teacher to heart, and put a lot of work into organizing his courses and preparing his lectures. He also gave a significant amount of comments back on papers. We would turn our papers in via Google Docs, and we could expect extensive, insightful commentary on our work.

He also took class participation very seriously. As an undergraduate, I was (and still am, actually) nervous to speak up during class. After I finally did one day, I remember that after class he encouraged me to speak up more and that my comments were insightful and helpful. 

(2) A good mentor is supportive of future goals. When I told him of my desire to go to graduate school, he was more than happy to help. Although he gave me a preliminary warning about the long and arduous nature of pursuing a career in academic philosophy, I managed to convince him that this is what I really wanted. He then walked me through each step, and gave me a time-line of when to take GREs, when to write personal statements, when to submit my writing sample for feedback, etc. He also amended one of his courses so that I could produce my writing sample (instead of writing shorter, less ambitious papers). We went over multiple drafts of both my writing sample and personal statement, and he helped me decide which schools to apply to. 

Naturally, both of these more broad categories assume traits such as general availability/approachability and a desire to help their students. If he hadn't made himself available/approachable to students, none of this would have happened. So, my question to all of you, what in your experience makes a good mentor? 

 

The Finkelstein Problem

Following up on my last post, Which side are you on?, here is another reason to be concerned about the evaporation of tenure-track jobs and the increasing dependence on contingent faculty. One of the major purposes of tenure is to guarantee academic freedom. In the words of the AAUP:

Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.

Academic freedom is essential to these purposes and applies to both teaching and research. Freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth. Academic freedom in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning. It carries with it duties correlative with rights.

Tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically: (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability. Freedom and economic security, hence, tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society.

Clearly, without tenure, contingent faculty’s ability to engage in “the free search for truth and its free expression” is severely limited. For example, consider the case of Norman Finkelstein. Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University for reasons that were clearly related to his controversial research on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now, I cannot help but wonder: how many more Finkelsteins are out there? How many contingent faculty have looked at the Finkelstein case and said “If I want to get tenure, I better not try to publish this work; it’s too controversial”? That cannot be conducive to “the free search for truth,” right?

What's your philosophical story? Part 2 of mine: Syracuse

I'd like to follow-up my earlier post recounting my early days in philosophy with the next chapter of "my philosophical story": my two-year stint in Syracuse's graduate program. I've decided to share my story in the hope that others will share theirs as well. We know each other, after all, primarily as colleagues -- by our discussions about philosophy and the profession. However, I, at least, carry the hope that we can be more than that: that we can be friends as well as colleagues, even if we've never met in person; and that by sharing our lives a bit, including our histories, we can not only get to know each other better as people, but also share the wonderful and not-so-wonderful experiences we've had in the discipline. Anyway, that's my hope, at least. On with the story.

After graduating from Tufts, I spent a year working in a mental institution and preparing grad school applications. I didn't know at the time how important the GRE's were (there wasn't anything like the amount of online discussion about such things back then), and truth be told, I've never been much for studying for standardized tests. I've always found it very easy to work incredibly hard on things I find intrinsically interesting, but next to impossible to work hard on things for merely instrumental reasons. So, I ended up taking the GRE but didn't do very well. The only other thing I recall about my grad school application process was my personal statement, which I entitled, "Think different", which I had not-so-slyly coopted from  Apple Computer's advertising slogan at the time. As I take it is often the case with grad school apps, the personal statement was a undoubtedly a bit cloying. Still, it's funny how, after all these years, I still pretty much subscribe to it as my "calling card." I may not be the most brilliant person around -- I'm certainly not the most rigorous by any means -- but still, I think I have a certain knack for seeing problems in new ways. That, at least, is what I tell myself, and it's what I live for as a philosopher. I live for insights; arguments, to me, come a distant second (as merely of instrumental value, a test of whether an insight is anygood). 

Anyway, because I was pretty into phil mind at the time (having focused on it as an undergraduate under Dennett), I applied to mostly phil-mind-y PhD programs. I remember being flown out to visit the PNP program at Washington U in St. Louis, the best part of which was a trip to a bowling alley where Andy Clark accidentally forgot to let go of his bowling ball and slid halfway down the bowling lane with the ball still attached to his hand. That was awesome. I didn't enjoy the rest of the trip all that much, though, for reasons I can't quite remember (I think I found the whole experience overly intimidating).

The best PhD program I ended up getting into -- and which I had applied to mainly because Robert Van Gulick was there -- ended up being Syracuse. Truth be told, I was pretty disappointed that it was the best school I'd gotten into. It was only ranked something like 34 on the Leiter report at the time, and I had expected to do better than that given my undergraduate credentials. Whatever disappointment I had disappeared once I got there, as the two years I spent there are to this very day the best, most exciting time I've ever had in philosophy.

My first semester at Syracuse I took an amazing course on vagueness co-taught by John Hawthorne and Jose Benardete. I assume most of you know who John is (he's now an endowed professor at Oxford). At the time, though, he was just a young shooting star on his way up. He basically showed up at class and simply talked off the top of his head with what appeared to be little preparation. It was almost always brilliant. Seminars were also always from 7-10pm, and the entire class almost always went out for beer and games of pool with John afterwards. We'd usually stay out til the wee hours of the morning drinking beer and chatting philosophy. It was awesome.

For those of you who don't know Jose Benardete, I would be remiss if I told the story of my time at Syracuse without introducing you to him. Jose is, without a doubt, one of the most...extraordinary people you'll ever come across (if you're so lucky). Apparently, he was a super-hotshot philosopher when he was young, but after writing a pretty brilliant and megalomaniacal book on infinity, he appears to have cared relatively little for publishing. Anyway, about Jose...there is just no way to really convey who he is. Let me begin by putting it this way: there is an entire facebook page devoted to Jose stories. Most of these stories seem so ridiculous that they couldn't possibly be true, but I know they're true because I had one of them happen to me. To tell the story properly, I'll have to give some background.

During my two years at Syracuse, I had a rather extraordinary personal situation. I had a girlfriend in school at UPenn in Philadelphia, and was a member of a punk rock band in Boston. For two years straight, every Thursday afternoon I would drive 4 hours after class from Syracuse to Philadelphia to visit my girlfriend (I had no classes on Friday). On Friday, I would take a 6-8 hour bus ride from Philadelphia to Boston to either practice with my band or play a show at club. Then, in the wee hours of the morning (1 or 2am), I would get back on the bus back to Philadelphia. The bus stopped in New York's Penn Station at 4am, and so I would sleep on the ground (it was freezing!) until the 7am bus to Philadelphia came. Obviously, I hardly really slept through all of this, so I was usually a total wreck by the time I got back to my girlfriend's place. Then, on Sundays, I would drive 4 hours back to Syracuse, and repeat the whole thing again the next week.

It was, I recognized then and do now, all quite mad. But what can I say? I wanted to live while I was young, and not let life get away from me. Which brings me back to Jose. After one of my trips -- there were I think some department functions that weekend -- Jose spotted me from a distance of about 50 feet in the department hall.  His face turned stone-cold white -- he looked like a ghost -- and he roared, "You're A-LIVE!" I said of course I was alive! I learned from him that he saw a headline on the front of the newspaper that read "Arkan Murdered", and he assumed that this Arkan was me. Well, as it happened, Arkan was a Serbian warlord, and it never occurred to Jose that I wouldn't be front-page news. But well, that's just Jose! ;)

That was one of the real treats I experienced at Syracuse. Another was the fact that a lot of the grad students (including my good friend at the time, Alyssa Ney) all lived in the same apartment building. We called it the philosophy dorm or something like that. It too was awesome. We'd stay up til whenever and talk about philosophy like it was the most interesting thing in the world. Which of course it was to us. I can't begin to describe how exciting and edifying it all was.

Anyway, believe it or not, I was a metaphysician during this time. I had no interest at all in ethics or political philosophy, and actually regarded it as all basically garbage. Funny how things change. The other truly great memory I have from the time was the single best class I ever took: "Logic and Language" by Mark Brown.  It was the single most difficult course I ever took (it was Syracuse's grad student "weed-out" course), and we did really crazy-difficult stuff ranging from different modal logics to proofs regarding infinities to set theory to the Frege system (where modus ponens is the only inference rule)...basically a bunch of super-difficult stuff you could imagine smashed into one semester. It was awesome. Brown taught from his own unpublished book, which was totally brilliant and I kept with me like the Bible for years afterwards (but which mysteriously disappeared after my girlfriend and I broke up!). I remember giving the most ridiculous proof on the final exam, deriving a result in quantified logic from five nested reductios. I later learned that it was probably the most circuituous way possible to give the proof...but it was also correct!...which, well...is totally like me. If I could go back in time and take that class again, I swear I'd do it a dozen times.

Anyway, I should probably stop here. My office hours are over and I have a book to begin writing this afternoon. I hope you all enjoyed the story and decide to share some of your own. It would be really wonderful to hear everyone's personal stories -- as it's good for the soul to share, I think.  I was once told by one of my profs at Syracuse that I was (and I quote), "The single most aloof person" he'd ever met. I was always terribly guarded about my personal thoughts and feelings. That's sort of changed a bit. ;) 

Which side are you on?

Commenting on his own post What Is to Be Done? (about the evaporation of tenure-track jobs and the increasing dependence on contingent faculty), Marcus lists the following options:

1. Stop producing so many PhDs when there are so few jobs.
2. Tenured faculty collectivize behind the protection of tenure, to put pressure on administrations to hire more full-time positions.
3. Tenured faculty taking to public fora (e.g. the media) to disseminate to parents that their children aren't getting the bill of goods they've been sold.
4. Collective action of adjuncts without unionizing -- such as an Occupy Wall Street like movement started by social media where adjuncts collectively agree to stop accepting adjunct contracts. If a strong enough movement like this got started, who knows what it could do.

I would like to focus on (2) and (3) and raise the following question: Do tenured faculty have a professional duty to protect tenure and fight against the increasing dependence on contingent faculty? (Please note that I am talking about tenured faculty, not tenure-track.)

I think that the answer is “yes.” Here is why:

1. Tenured faculty are in a position to alleviate the plight of contingent faculty without sacrificing something of comparable significance.
2. If tenured faculty are in a position to alleviate the plight of contingent faculty without sacrificing something of comparable significance, they ought to do so.
3. Therefore, tenured faculty ought to alleviate the plight of contingent faculty.

Of course, even if they ought, that doesn’t mean that they will. But if they won’t, they’d be acting immorally. What do you think?

 

Related articles

Are Professors 'Selling Students Short'?

What is to be done?

What are our professional duties?

I'd like to dwell a bit more on the conversation that started in the comments section of my post on publishing secrets about our professional obligations. I stated in the post that I don't see any grounds for thinking we have professional obligation to not "clog up the system" with  second-rate papers (i.e. papers that might not be publishable). Dan Dennis then pressed me on this, asking whether it's equivalent to littering or not paying one's taxes, which I agree are both wrong.

I'm curious what everyone else thinks about this. I am still inclined to doubt that we have a duty not to "clog up the system with second-rate papers" on a couple of grounds. One ground is epistemic. I don't think one can necessarily tell in advance -- before submitting it -- whether a paper is second-rate. I am relatively confident that some people would say that some of the papers I've published are second-rate, but I don't think they're second rate. Further, I don't think I have a moral duty to tailor my judgment about what's second-rate to how others judge it. Why? Because, as I've mentioned several times before, I have a bit of an idiosyncratic -- though I think justified -- view of what good philosophy is. In other words, what many people think is great I think is second-rate, and what they think is second-rate I sometimes think is great.

More generally, I think that even when people have less idiosyncratic view about philosophy than do I, it's still permissible for them to decide for themselves whether a piece is "second-rate" befor they send it out. I'm happy to agree that it's wrong to send out a piece one believes to be second-rate, but I'd be surprised if people ever do this. Once I think something is genuinely second-rate, I don't send it out.  This, then, is the first reason why I don't think we have a duty to avoid clogging up the review system with second-rate papers.  If the expectation is that we judge second-rated-ness in terms of how others judge our papers, I think it is too strong: each person has the right to judge for themselves whether a given paper is second-rate. On the other hand, if the expectation is that we don't send out papers we think are second-rate ourselves, then I'm happy to accept the obligation but think it's practically vacuous, since I doubt people tend to send out papers they think are second rate. (But maybe I'm wrong about this?)

Here's another worry I have. The entire publishing review system is, in my view, profoundly unfair. I think there is all kinds of evidence for this -- for instance, (a) evidence that reviewers often behave unethically by "Google reviewing" papers (which almost certainly harms people at less-prestigious institutions), (b) irresponsible reviews in general (ones where the reviewer plainly didn't read the paper conscientiously), etc. This raises the question: what is a morally permissible way to respond to an unjust system?

Dan Dennis' remarks suggest something like a duty of fair play. This is what his littering and non-taxpaying cases suggest (it's wrong to litter and not pay taxes while others do). However, I, following Rawls, think that a duty of fair play is only triggered against fair background conditions.  And I don't think there's anything remotely close to fair background conditions here. First, I think many others aren't doing their fair share (I've personally had to review a good deal of papers I think are second-rate). Second, I think the entire review system is unfair (for reasons given above). Why think we have a duty to "do our fair share" in a system that is deeply unfair?

The only thing I can really think of here is a kind of virtue-theoretic argument? Such an argument seems suggested by Elisa Freschi's pointed response to my reply to Dan in that thread:

Marcus, after your last comment (answering to Dan), I am puzzled. Did not you advocate stronger links between adjuncts, so that they are not exploited? Don't you dedicate time and energy to collective enterprises such as this blog, which is by the way meant to support young philosophers, although they might one day be your competitors? Why do you now speak as if you were just coming out of Hobbes' Leviathan?

Elisa's thought seems to be roughly, "Don't you try to be a good person -- one who cares for treating others well? How is being that kind of person consistent with your Hobbesian reasoning here?" Because I really do try to be a good person and recognize that I don't always succeed (who's perfect?), I take Elisa's worry deeply. But I am still inclined to give the response I gave in the thread. In conceiving myself as a good person, I am torn. I recognize that a good person shouldn't want to burden his/her professional colleagues with second-rate papers. I also recognize, however -- again, trying to be a good person -- that I have a duty to my wife (and, I think, to myself) to do my best to be successful in this very difficult, competitive discipline. If I never find a permanent job, I probably not only consign myself to prolonged misery; it would harm my family. So, what is a good person to do? I still think: if one has to choose (and I'm inclined to think one sometimes must), a good person prioritizes the long-term good of their family over imposing unfortunate inconveniences on professional colleagues.

This, at any rate, is where I am coming from. I don't take the issue lightly. Far from it, I really do want to do the right thing -- and so I'm happy, as always, to listen and change my mind in light of further discussion.

Coastal Ethics Online Conference

This is a pretty neat undergraduate online conference that I am participating in, along with Marcus (and perhaps other contributors, apologies if I missed anyone). Russ Shafer-Landau is the keynote, and gives a talk in defenese of marriage equality. 

 

EDIT: Thank you to David Killoren for organizing! 

A Couple of Publishing Questions

I have a couple of publishing questions.

1. Would you ever cite the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in any of your papers?

2. How much would citing works outside of the field reduce the chances of your paper being published? I ask this one because although my main focus is political philosophy, I tend to include works on education in my papers.

What is to be done?

I've been thinking about this story over at The Atlantic about the evaporation of tenured and tenure-track academic jobs, and the rise of dependence on incredibly undercompensated adjunct labor. The article has received already received a good deal of attention elsewhere -- but I would like to offer up a very radical thought that I haven't yet come across.

Higher-education's increasing dependence on adjunct labor seems morally abhorrent on a number of grounds. First, adjuncts are paid a pittance for highly skilled labor: for teaching the same classes as highly paid tenure folk. Second, they are not afforded full-time work benefits. Third, colleges and universities tend to sell parents and students on their classes being taught by full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty, but many courses are taught by adjuncts who haven't completed a PhD (this isn't to say that adjuncts don't do a good job, just that parents and students often don't get what they think they're paying for).

How does higher-education get away with this? One increasingly common thought seems to be that it is at least partially because adjuncts aren't unionized. If only they unionized, they could press for better wages and benefits. However, I have a hard time seeing how this would solve the problem. As long as there are people willing to work in low-paid adjunct jobs, colleges and universities will keep using them. They may pay them more if they unionize -- but, as long as there are a ton of people willing to work in adjunct positions, colleges and universities will continue to use them to cut costs.

So, what is to be done? The problem, as I see it, is not that colleges and universities can't afford more tenured and tenure-track jobs. This excuse is often trotted out thanks to the recent recession and state budget cuts -- but the facts are these: colleges and universities have been dramatically increasing the amount of well-paying administrative jobs for years. The problem is that there are a lot of desperate people out there who are willing to work in low-paying jobs, and colleges and universities are more than happy to take advantage of them.

So, again, what is to be done? I don't know -- but here's a radical possibility. Colleges and universities would have to create far more tenure-track and tenured jobs if people simply stopped taking adjuncting jobs en masse. If colleges and universities didn't have a class of willing labor to take advantage of, market pressures would force them to create far more full-time, well-paying academic jobs. I know this radical answer will probably never come to fruition, but one can always dream.

Or is there a better, more realistic answer? What say you, my Cocooning friends?

Leiter on Nietzsche and Recent Trends in Moral Philosophy

Brian Leiter has just posted this very interesting paper on Nietzsche's objection to all of western philosophy descending from Socrates. In my view, Leiter presents Nietzsche's worries very clearly and persuasively, showing how Nietzsche raises serious questions about everything from metaphysics to ethics to philosophical argument itself. Although I'm not convinced that Nietzsche is right, I am inclined to think that his worries are very serious ones that our discipline should grapple with a great deal more than it has been inclined to do.

Leiter's paper also ends with a very interesting, a scathing, evaluation of not only the substance but also the sociology of recent moral philosophy. Leiter writes:

But in the late 1990s in Anglophone philosophy, something quite strange began to happen. In 1996, Ronald Dworkin, the recently deceased legal and political philosopher, published a quite unusual paper in metaethics attacking naturalistic moral realists and defending the idea that the objectivity of moral truth does not depend on whether such truths can be located in a natuarlistic picture of the world. If you can give a good moral argument for a moral claim, that, on Dworkin’s view, is enough to secure its truth. The criteria for a “good” moral argument was a topic on which Dworkin, alas, was silent; one worries that Dworkin thought if it passed peer review among his friends at Philosophy & Public Affairs that was enough. Dworkin’s paper, in any case, was ignored, indeed, regarded as something of a professional embarrassment, especially after being excorciated by Simon Blackburn. But then Thomas Nagel, a colleague of Dworkin’s at New York University, began defending a smiilar view, and then, a few years later, T.M. Scanlon, and then, most recently, Derek Parfit in his two-volume magnum opus (2011). These other defenders were more philosophically adept than Dworkin, but their basic posture was the same: objective moral truth does not depend on satisfying naturalistic criteria for objective truth. For the first time in a century—really since the Bloomsbury group in England, of which G.E. Moore was a member—you had a group of well-known philosophers defending the objectivity of their moral opinions on the grounds that they were confident in the good reasons they had for them (or in their apparent truth), and quite independent of whether there was evidence for them of the kind we would expect in any other domain of human inquiry thought to be epistemically reliable.

This strange turn of philosophical events shares something else with the phenomenon of the intuitionists of the Bloomsbury group, namely, that it emerged among a socially insular and economically elite group of like-minded people with considerable institutional power. Nagel and Scanlon, both students of John Rawls at Harvard, were colleagues at Princeton for many years, and close friends. Parfit teaches regularly at Harvard (where Scanlon now teaches) and New York University (where Nagel teaches), and, teaches frequently with both of them; indeed, Parfit dedicates his magnus opus, On What Matters, to these two friends. Parfit, whose main appointment was at Oxford, was a colleague of Dworkin’s there for many years, and Dworkin co-taught with Nagel for a quarter-century at New York University. 

One might think this exemplifies a well-documented phenomenon in social psychology, namely, the tendency of like-minded individuals who interact and talk a lot to move to the most extreme version of the position to which they are all initially sympathetic. The phenomenon in question is known in the social science literature as “group polarization.” Indeed, discussion among like-minded individuals magnifies the effect, but if individuals with the same attitude—say, that their moral opinions must be true, because they and their friends think them true, even if there is no ordinary evidence for them—are simply exposed to others with the same attitude, that alone can produce movement to the extreme. Various explanations for the phenomenon have been proposed: for example, that individuals are sufficiently sensitive to social comparisons that they will opt for the most extreme position that they deem to be dominant in their group to make sure they are included; or that like-minded individuals tend to come up with the best arguments for the position to which they are already disposed, but those arguments simply reinforce the antecedent position. This literature should certainly, at least, make us wonder about the role of the sociology of contemporary philosophy on its most famous, or infamous, conclusions.

The worry, in short, is that philosophy tends to be moved not by "the truth" that we all purport to be seeking, but rather by the reciprocally supporting presuppositions and beliefs -- the "groupthink" -- of an influential few.

Leiter admits that his above analysis is rather rude -- but all the same, it's hard not to share the general worry sometimes (about the sociological causes of "progress" in our discipline), isn't it? For instance, did Kripke ever truly refute descriptivism about proper names, or did he merely convince many people to share his intuitions/beliefs about reference?  For my part, I recall many of my fellow graduate students (myself included!) not sharing Kripke's intuitions about Godel, Schmidt and all the rest, but "having" to accept Kripke's intuitions because "everyone else did."

Anyway, an interesting paper by Leiter about interesting worries from Nietzsche. I advocate giving it a read, even if, in the end, like me, you're skeptical about the worries themselves.

Publishing Secrets

Given that we are a community of early-career philosophers, I thought it might be helpful to share and discuss "publishing secrets." What follows are a couple of secrets that I think I've learned -- that, as usual, I should probably note that they are only my thoughts, not "advice" per se. I'm curious to hear what you all think, and hope you all share some of your "secrets" as well!

Publishing Secret #1: send a lot of stuff out

About halfway through my first year in my first job, when I still hadn't published anything, I asked a couple of very successful people I'd gone to grad school with -- people who had published a ton in very good journals -- what "their secret" was. Both of them told me the same thing: send out a lot of stuff. Both of them said they had anywhere from 7-10 pieces under review at journals at any given time. This struck me as beyond my capabilities (at the time, I was only working on one or pieces for months on end), but their rationale for it made sense to me.  They both said, "Look, journals have acceptance rates of 5-10%.  If you have 1 piece out at a journal, 90-95% of the time it will get rejected...even if it is good!  On the other hand, if you have 10 pieces out at journals, chances alone dictate you'll get one or two acceptances." After a couple of years of struggling, I took their advice. And here are the results. Before taking it, I had published only two short reply pieces in over two years. Since taking the advice, I've published 7 full-length articles in two years. In other words, the advice really seemed to work.

Some might object to this strategy (of sending out a lot of stuff constantly). Indeed, in response to my earlier post on research strategies (where I also advocated sending a lot of stuff out), some commenters over the Smoker argued that we all have a duty to not clog up the peer-review system with second-rate papers. Personally, I don't think we have any such duty. I simply don't see any good ethical grounds for thinking we do. The way I see it, my duty is to do the best work I can and send it out -- and it is reviewers' and journals' duties to reject my work if it sucks. But anyway, I am not going to argue for this here. I'll leave the ethics of the practice up to you, and to discussion. I am simply relaying a "publishing secret" that I was given, and reporting how it worked in my own case. If you all would like to debate the ethics of it, I'm all for it.

 Publishing Secret #2: write like a faculty member, not a grad student

Although I heard this one from many people a long time ago (as far back as graduate school), I think I've only begun to appreciate it recently. It's hard to explain exactly what it is, but there seem to be distinctly "grad student" and "faculty" patterns of writing that make a difference with reviewers. The best I can put the difference is this: there's a kind of quiet assurance of faculty writing that distinguishes it from grad student writing. As a grad student, you need to demonstrate to your profs a mastery of the literature -- so, when you write papers, you really spend a great deal of time showing that (e.g. citing everything under the sun).  Faculty, it seems to me, write very differently. They know that their readers assume they have a mastery of the literature. Their papers begin with a very direct and to-the-point explanation of what the paper is about, and they lay out their arguments confidently. The paper that really hammered this home with me is this one by Jason Brennan (who I went to grad school with). Setting aside questions of content (I myself tend to find Brennan's arguments quite unconvincing), notice how assured the paper is. Brennan doesn't mince words. He doesn't waste time summarizing all of the literature, etc. He just gets on with it. And reviewers, I think, tacitly recognize the difference. They are far more apt to accept papers that are assured and to the point over papers that are less assured.

Anyway, these are two "publishing secrets" I think I've learned. Anyone have any of their own?

New Contributor

I'd like to welcome our newest contributor, Anthony Carreras, to the Cocoon. Anthony received his PhD from Rice in 2011 and is now Assistant Professor at Lone Star College-Kingwood. He wrote his disseration on Aristotle's ideals of friendship and virtue, and specializes in ancient philosophy and ethics. Welcome!

Soft Encouragement

I know it's a very busy time of year, but I would really like to encourage all of our contributors, as well as anyone who would like to become one, to read and comment on Mark Alfano's paper for our Working Paper Group, "Friendship as a Model for the Moral Virtues." It's an interesting paper, and even if you can only give it a quick read, I am sure Mark would be very appreciative of any constructive feedback the members of our community might have to offer on it.

Hope you've all had a wonderful week, aside of course for the Boston tragedy.

What do you like about your dissertation?

Inspired by Marcus' post, I'd like to ask: what do you like about your dissertation? Do you look at it with a sense of pride, fulfilment, or any other warm emotion? And, if so, why?

I have to admit, I have mine lying around the house and I really do enjoy picking it up, flipping to this page or that, and reading. It makes me feel good to know... I did that.

In a way that connects with Marcus' post, I like my dissertation, in large part, because of its ambition. I set myself a very large project, ended up with a very large result, but one I feel good about.

The first half (3 of 6 chapters) is historical, in the sense that I provide critical interpretations of thinkers from the past (18th, 19th, and 20th centuries). Then the second half consists of constructive interventions into contemporary debates on the basis of a position that has gradually emerged through the critical interpretations of the first half. I show in-depth familiarity with both Western and Africana traditions. I tackle big things like the nature of race, culture, politics, and their inter-relationships.

It has its weaknesses, I'm sure. Strangely enough, though, I felt more conscious of weaknesses when I was closer to it then now, which is the reverse of how it often is when you have more distance from a work. I could find a ton of things to complain about or at least question, but at this point, looking back at it, I generally just feel thankful for both its broad vision and its heaping helpings of detail, guiding me as these features do toward present and future projects. Actually, as I do these present and future projects, I'm always of course aiming for vast improvement on the dissertation, so perhaps that in itself means I know it to be comparatively weak... but, maybe precisely because I don't plan to make it a book, I don't feel that way. It feels not weak but great... as my dissertation.

What's going on with dissertations?

I've come across a number of PhD dissertations recently that are something like 3 chapters/100-135 pages long. I've also heard that more and more programs aren't even requiring dissertations anymore for the PhD, but only several (e.g. 3-4) standalone articles. Both trends -- if they really are trends -- seem problematic to me.

Although I have some vague worries about fairness -- how is it fair for a discipline to award some people PhD's for 100-page dissertations but others PhD's for 300-pagers? -- this isn't my real worry. My worry is that the practice discourages ambition and systematic thought. Most of the great philosophers -- Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger -- didn't just hammer away at small problems; they developed entire systems of thought. And the same is true of more recent people of influence: Quine, Rawls, Davidson, etc.

I don't mean to suggest that we should all aspire to create grand philosophical systems. All I mean to suggest is that it is important for philosophy to encourage systematic thought, and to do it early on. After all, as David McNaughton points out, if you don't learn to do it early on -- if you develop deep habits of attending to narrow problems -- it seems unlikely that, all of a sudden, you'll learn to do later on in your career. Habits are not easily broken.

What say you, fellow pupae?

Publishing a Book

I've decided to write a book this summer. I have its main arguments mapped out in my head, and have published a couple of small articles relating to some of the book's main ideas -- so I feel ready to get writing. Well, almost. What I don't know is really what it takes to publish a book. Indeed, I have a ton of questions. Among them:

• What is the proper process for approaching publishers?
• Is the style of how one should write a book substantially different from articles?
• Do publishers prefer short books?
• Etc.

For example, it seems to me that books tend to be written in a different style than articles. One sees relatively few reference to the literature, for instance, in A Theory of Justice or Anarchy, State and Utopia. Is this just because people like Rawls and Nozick were well-known and could get away with it? Was it because they were constructing really novel theories? Etc. I just don't know. After all, when I look at other books -- say, recent books on moral realism, etc. -- there is a lot of citation of the literature. What's the expectation? Or is there an expectation at all? (Is it, rather, up to the author to roll the dice?)

I'd be incredibly thankful for any help with any of these questions, as well as any issues that I might be unaware of, etc.  Thanks in advance for anyone who chimes in!

New Contributor

I am happy to welcome our newest contributor, Michael J. ("Augi") Augustin.  Augi is a PhD student at the University of California - Santa Barbara, and focuses on ancient philosophy, particularly the ancient Greek atomists. Welcome!

A Question About the Ontological and Cosmological Arguments

Something has long puzzled me about these two "arguments for God's existence": namely, that, if they are successful (a big if!), they seem to me to establish not God's existence but rather the plurality of all possible worlds. Let me explain.

The Ontological Argument purports to establish God's existence by identifying God with the referent of the definite description "the greatest possible being." Since, it is argued, there is an inherent contradiction in the proposition the greatest possible being does not exist, it follows that the greatest possible being does exist. Ergo, God exists.

Okay, but by *definition* the largest class of possible things -- the greatest possible *being* -- is clearly the plurality of all possible worlds. Nothing, by definition, could possibly be greater than that plurality. It is *all* possible beings, and hence, as a mereological sum, the greatest possible being in the singular.

Now turn to the Cosmological Argument. This argument purports to show that there is a necessary being that explains the existence of all contingent beings. Why? Because, qua the principle of sufficient reason, all positive facts require explanation.

Forget the details of the argument and focus just on the conclusion: the idea of a necessary being that explains its own existence as well as the existence of all contingent beings. What kind of thing could *be* a necessary being of this sort? Not God, as I see it -- for God is supposed to be some super-perfect *mind* of some sort, and it's hard if not impossible to see how such a mind could be the explanation of its own existence. Why not *no* Godly mind instead?

But now think of the plurality of all possible worlds, and Lewis' idea that possibility and necessity (all modality) are properly understood in terms of such possibilia. Well, can the plurality of all possible worlds explain their own existence? Yes, if possibility is simply *existence* (as Lewis claims), then the plurality of all possible worlds explains its own existence. All possible worlds exist simply because to *be* possible is to exist. And of course the plurality of all possible worlds explains all contingent things, as the contingent things (e.g. things in our world) are just proper subsets of the necessary being that is the plurality of worlds.

Simplicity? Not in our school!

According to the SEP entry on simplicity, "Most philosophers believe that, other things being equal, simpler theories are better." This is especially true in the case of scientific theories. What about arguments? Are simpler arguments better?

My impression is that some (most?) philosophers would say no. In fact, I have had several papers rejected because referees thought that my arguments were "too simple." Why the double standard, then? Why simpler theories are better, but simpler arguments aren't?

Where have all the "freak flags" gone?

There have been a lot of posts recently on the hyperprofessionalization of philosophy, including whether it affects the quality of work in the discipline. I don't to beat that horse to death anymore, especially in light of the community's response to The Onion Test I proposed (which I now see was a very bad idea, and I'm sorry for posting about).

Anyway, I'd like to discuss another aspect of the professionalization of our discipline that has struck me: the manner in which it seems to me to have possibly changed the spirit of our discipline. When I was younger -- a while ago now! ;) -- one of the things that attracted me to philosophy was all of the "weirdos" in it. I don't mean this as a pejorative in the least, by the way! I mean it in the most complimentary way possible. I've always had an (admittedly romanticized) attachment to people who "walk to the best of a different drum." And, for a long time, philosophy seemed to be a home for people like that: people who spoke oddly, sometimes cryptically, but interestingly, people who let their hair run wild and dressed goofily. Etc. I'm think you all know what I mean. There's even a popular phrase for it: "flying your freak flag."

Maybe it's just me, but this aspect of philosophy seems to me to be in real decline. Perhaps some of you think it is a good thing -- that philosophers for too long behaved in adolescent, obtuse, even offensive or threatening ways. And to that extent, I would agree that it is a good thing. I assume most of us have known "that" philosopher, the one who growls at, humiliates, etc., students and other faculty. By all means, I think it is a good thing that our discipline seems to have progressed in these areas, though I think I would say it clearly hasn't progressed enough.

But what about the good-natured type of strangeness that (or so it seems to me) used to pervade philosophy a lot more? Has it declined? It seems to me (anecdotally) as though it has, probably in large part due to market pressures: namely, the sorry state of the academic job market leading to an ever-growing concern to "look professional" to get jobs. Is this a bad thing -- something to be regretted? Or is it, on the whole, a good thing that our discipline seems to be growing "more professional"? Is it something that we can expect to change if/when the market changes for the better? I'm curious to hear your thoughts!

Will great teaching land you a TT job?

Commenting on Marcus' heavy grading load, Rachel says the following:

Putting this much effort into your teaching might make you *LESS* attractive to search committees, since it makes you look like a VAP/adjunct. None of them put this much work into their teaching. You should care about your teaching, sure, and it certainly helps to innovate, but it won't get you a TT job. I conjecture that in some cases it'll hurt you, additionally because you're making yourself way too busy.

Working yourself into the ground won't necessarily help you in your goals of a TT job. You want to do good research, good teaching, and be well rested and prepared for the market season. Having worked yourself into the ground won't help you achieve those. Be a good teacher, not a great one. Being a great teacher will land you VAP after VAP, but won't necessarily help you land a TT job, and it may harm you in some people's eyes.

Are great teachers really less attractive to search committees? By investing time and effort into becoming a great teacher, is one hurting one's chances of landing a TT job? What do you think, my fellow pupae?

Working Paper Group: Alfano on Friendship and the Virtues

Hi everyone, I have just posted Mark Alfano's paper, "Friendship as a Model for the Moral Virtues", at dropbox.com for our ongoing Working Paper Group. Here's a snippet of the introduction, which gives an idea of what the paper is about:

In this paper, I describe some of what I take to be the more interesting features of friendship, then explore the extent to which other virtues – especially trustworthiness, but also prospectively generosity and humility – can be reconstructed as sharing those features.  The aim of the paper is not to demonstrate that all moral virtues are exactly like friendship in all important respects, but rather to make plausible the claim that most moral virtues are surprisingly similar to friendship in many important ways.

I know it's a busy time of the semester, but I hope lots of people read the paper and comment. It would be really nice to help Mark out with some feedback and get the WPG moving again! Anyway, for anyone not "in the know" already, here's how the paper group works:

• The paper is posted over at Dropbox.com. 
• In order to access it, you must email me at [email protected] for the login and password.  Once you have these, just login into dropbox and download the paper.
• Barring unforseen and unfortunate circumstances, our dropbox login and password will be the same for all future working papers.
• The login, password, and working papers themselves are in no circumstance to be distributed to anyone. In order to maintain the integrity of our forum, I alone am authorized to distribute them.
• In order to maintain the safe and supportive integrity of the paper discussion,I will only distribute the login and password to registered members of The Philosophers' Cocoon. 
• As always, any professional philosopher who wants to become a member of the Cocoon is welcome to email me to join. However, you must become a member to participate in the working paper group.
• Finally, here are ground-rules for the paper discussion (which should simply proceed in the comments section below): 

1. You must have access to -- and presumably have read! -- the paper in order to comment.
2. Comments should aim to be helpful in nature. If you raise an objection, try to suggest potential way(s) of resolving it.  The purpose of this group is to help our friends here at the Cocoon improve their papers, not to show off one's awesome refutation skills.
3. Be a good dude/dude-ette.  Do everything you can to make this a positive experience for the paper presenters.

Let's get to it!

New Contributor

I'd like to welcome our newest contributor, Anthony Adrian, to the Cocoon. Anthony is an MA student at Tufts University. His areas of primary interest are language, ontology, or logic. Welcome!

What's your philosophical story? Part 1 of mine

A while back Robert Paul Wolff published his memoirs over at his blog, The Philosopher's Stone. I thought it was pretty gripping stuff, providing wonderful glimpses into the personal and professional life of a philosopher in the 60's and 70's, including really neat tid-bits about influential philosophers like Quine, Parsons, and many others.

I don't pretend that my philosophical story is nearly as gripping, but I thought it could be fun to share some of ours together, both so that we can see into one another's lives a bit, but also into the discipline we inhabit together? So, I'd like to encourage everyone to share some of your "philosophical story" in the comments section below. I'll try to start things off in what follows.

My first exposure to philosophy was a trip I took as prospective undergraduate during my junior year in high school. I attended a philosophy class at St. John's, a tiny liberal arts school on the east coast. They were discussing Plato's Republic. I found it utterly gripping, bought a copy, and couldn't put it down during the 4-1/2 hour flight back to San Francisco with my mother. I was "a goner." Philosophy had me at hello.

That summer, I took my first philosophy course -- a course on philosophy in literature -- at Stanford with Taylor Carman, who was a grad student there at the time.  We read Voltaire's Candide, some Dostoyevsky, Camus' The Stranger, Sartre's No Exit, Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, and Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I wrote a term paper on the problem of evil. I love the problem to this day.

Next came Tufts. My freshman year there, I knew I wanted to take philosophy, but since there was no internet at the time, I had no idea who was "famous" or whatnot. Someone told me I should take an honors course with some guy named "Dennett", as apparently he was a big-shot or something. I showed up for the first day of class -- a class with something like 6 other students -- and met this gigantic man who looked like a cross between Socrates and Santa Claus. Being in that course was a stroke of luck, and an honor, that I will never forget. We read the classics: Plato, then Descartes, then Hume, then I'm not sure, then Wittgenstein. We had five 3-5 page papers to turn in. Dan let us rewrite them as many times as we wished. I spent weeks writing my first paper while the other students on my floor in the dormitory were drinking and doing drugs. I just wanted to do philosophy, and so became something of an outsider. Anyway, after weeks of working on the paper, turned it in believing it was the best thing I'd ever written. I got a B- on it, which Dan told me was the best grade in the class. In other words, Dan was a pretty brutal grader. I rewrote it 5 times before I finally got an A. It was the best educational experience I've ever had. It's why I always give my students the same option. Give someone the incentive to work hard for results, and most people will take it. That, anyway, has been my experience.

Anyway, Dan showed up every day and just lectured on whatever he found interesting. Some days what he talked about seemed to have little to nothing to do with what we read for the day -- but I didn't care. The stuff he was talking about was always fascinating. And he was a great, great dude to all of us. He pretty self-consciously pushed his views in the classroom and in grading our assignments, but I also didn't care about that, as I thought it was an honest thing to do. If this is what my professor thinks, I thought, and I disagree, well I'll challenge him. Of course, most of the time I lost, but he always took my challenges seriously. Dan didn't suffer fools. If you came to him with a foolish idea, he'd tell you in no uncertain terms why it was foolish -- but I respected that. He always treated us like fellow philosophers in the classroom and office hours, with important things to say, not as "mere students." That attitude has always stuck with me, and I've tried to emulate it as a teacher ever since.

I rewrote so many papers that semester it was insane. I wanted to get things right. But, with the last paper -- one on Wittgenstein's On Certainty -- we had one chance, and one chance only. No rewrites. I put my all into it. I got it back at the end of a semester with a grade of "A+" -- according to Dan, one of the only ones he'd ever given out -- accompanied by the simple phrase: "You have great promise." It was the first, and really only time that anyone other than my mother had said something like that to me. It meant the world to me. It still does.

At the end of the semester, Dan had us all over to his house for pizza. We met his robot: "Cog", I think it was called. I really tried to soak it all in. By that point, I really knew how lucky I had been to have taken his class. Philosophy had become a part of me forever.

The Onion Test

Leiter recently published a post linking to a paper by David McNaugton about why much of philosophy is so tedious. Although I've riffed on this question several times -- attributing it at least in part to our discipline's overfetishizing rigor -- I'd like to comment on a point made by Chris Hallquist in Leiter's thread. 

Hallquist thinks that academic philosophy awards too much respect to cleverness for the sake of cleverness, whereas truly interesting, non-tedious philosophy should be more than clever: it deals with important problems. Is Hallquist right? Does our discipline disproportionately reward people for cleverness and not lend nearly enough weight to importance (thereby making much of academic philosophy tedious)?

This is a difficult question to evaluate. But let me offer an acedote in Hallquist's favor. I recently came across this paper, "One Second Per Second", by Bradford Skow from MIT, which appeared in 2011 in one of the top generalist journals in all of philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.  Now, I personally think Skow is a great philosopher, but let's take a look at the subject matter of this paper. Skow's paper is a response to a problem raised by Peter van Inwagen in his 2009 book Metaphysics, and taken up later by Eric Olson in his 2009 article, "The Rate of Time's Passage", which appeared in Analysis -- another top journal in our field. As reported by Skow, the argument by van Inwagen and Olson is this:

[O]ne second per second is one second divided by one second, and one second divided by one second is the number one. But the number one is not a rate, so is certainly not the rate at which anything (the flow os time included) happens. (Skow 2011: 377)

Skow's thesis? "This argument rests on confusions about the nature of measurable quantities and the meaning of phrases of the form n Xs per Y." (ibid.)

No kidding. The problem seems to me obviously not a serious problem, and the argument obviously a howler. By parity of reasoning, one could argue that because 30 miles per hour is 30/60, which is 1/2 -- and 1/2 is not a rate -- that 30 miles per hour is not a rate, I really mean no disrespect to Skow, van Inwagen, or Olson -- who I truly think are all top-notch philosophers. Lord knows I've made bad arguments and wasted time on them! But this much I think is clear: the "one second per second" argument was a bad argument from the outset. And publishing papers on "problems" like this makes academic philosophy tedious and inconsequential.

Am I being unfair? I'm happy to entertain objections, and as always will reconsider my position in light of further discussion. However, in the meantime, I'd like to half-seriously propose the following test for determining, as a necessary condition, whether an issue is one worthy of publication in a top journal in philosophy -- a test that I call "The Onion Test". The Onion, as I'm sure most readers know, is a satirical news site, with articles like, "Freezing, Coatless Woman Has Decided It Is Spring." I hereby propose that if a philosophical problem or article can be easily spoofed by an Onion-like title or article, then it's probably a silly problem.

Here's an example of the Onion Test. I've explained before why I think problems of persistence conditions and material constitutition are pseudoproblems. Here's an application of The Onion Test:

Area Philosopher Unsure if There Are Any Tables, Chairs, or People

An area philosopher emerged from his lab today with what appears to be an astounding discovery: there are no tables or chairs. "Look," this philosopher said, "if tables and chairs existed, there would have to be coincident objects everywhere. This lump of matter would have to be both a lump and a table. But surely there is just one object here: the lump. So, there are no tables or chairs! Or people!" When asked whether this finding has any practical applications ("Does it mean that no one should ever try to sit on anything, since chairs are for sitting?"), the philosopher replied, "No -- not at all. There are no practical applications whatsoever." After an uncomfortable brief pause, he added, "Well, it did help me get tenure."

On asking how someone is doing -- and mentorship

I'd like to follow-up Mark Alfano's post on buying beer with a post of my own on what I take to be another "small but consequential policy": seriously asking people how they are doing.

One of the things I've noticed over the years is how much "private" issues can derail a person's career. I've seen otherwise very-capable graduate students wash out of grad school for all kinds of reasons: loss of confidence, health issues (including mental health issues), failed relationships, etc. And I've similar things same happen to young faculty, such as those who have to move away from their partners/spouses for jobs. Even when "private" issues don't cause someone to wash out of the discipline, they can have marked effects on a person's performance. Allow me to share my own case.

I started out grad school at Syracuse when John Hawthorne, Ted Sider, Dean Zimmerman, William Alston, and Brian Weatherson were there. I was in a long-term relationship, and I completely rocked my classes (all A's over two years). When our faculty was gutted by Rutgers, I transferred to Arizona. Because my girlfriend at the time was still in school back east, I moved to Arizona without her. The relationship quickly crumbled, and since it was the first very long-term relationship I'd ever had, I didn't handle it well. I had trouble focusing. I didn't "rock" my classes by any means. Indeed, I think I did thoroughly unimpressive work, which was not a good way to start out in a new grad program. I thought the faculty didn't think much of me, and I lost confidence.

By the time I got around to (passing) my comprehensive exams, I still didn't have any confidence. I dawdled around for a couple of years looking for a dissertation topic, but hated philosophy -- mostly, I think, because I wasn't doing it very well -- and I got so frustrated that I wasted a ton of time playing in a rocknroll band. Probably not the best decision, I know, but at the time it seemed rational. I felt like I needed a hobby to distract myself from (A) a failed relationship, and (B) my rapidly declining confidence as a philosophy. 

Anyway, I know I'm not alone in having these kinds of experiences. It's incredible how things in one's private life can bleed over to one's performance, and in turn profoundly affect one's career prospects. Of course, to a certain extent, people have to deal with their own personal issues. All the same, the more that I thought about it, the following thing puzzled me: I can't recall ever, either in graduate school (both at Syracuse or Arizona) or as a professional (with one exceptios I'll mention in a moment), being seriously asked by anyone, "How are you doing?" Of course, I got the, "How's things?" in the hallway. But, aside from one occasion, I never had anyone in a position of power and experience seriously inquire about my well-being. 

I'm not sure failing to inquire about grad students or colleagues' well-being is morally blameworthy -- and I want to emphasize that both of the places I went to grad school (Syracuse and Arizona) were very supportive places, as have been the two places I've had jobs (UBC and Tampa). People have their own lives to live, their own work to do, etc. But what I do want to suggest that it can be very good to do it, and to have mentoring mechanisms in place to promote the practice. Here's why: small interventions can make all the difference in the world. I'll share a couple of instances that I shared before.

After a couple of years failing to find a dissertation topic -- and even having my prospectus cancelled at one point -- I approached two mentors for help. I told one that I didn't want to do anymore. He shared some wisdom: read, read, and read more until you come across a big idea by someone that just seems wrong. I told another that I had lost confidence. He reminded me of a paper I had written for him a few years before, how it had impressed him, and how he had confidence that I could produce good work. Slowly, but surely, both interventions led me out of the bad spot I was in and to successfully completing the PhD.

Grad students, colleagues, etc. are grad students, colleagues, etc. -- but they are also, at a deeper level, human beings, with human problems outside of the philosophy room; human beings who, with a little bit of outreach, we may be able to help when they are struggling. Can we prevent every grad student from washing out by showing real interest in their well-being? Probably not. But can actively inquiring about how someone is doing help? All I know is this: I think something like it saved me. In addition to hard work, the difference between finishing and possibly not finishing grad school was two small acts -- an expression of wisdom, and an expression of confidence -- by two mentors; acts for which I will forever be grateful, and hope to pay forward.

On buying beer

(Cross-posted at philosophy etc.)

When I was on the market last year, one of the many lovely people I met was an assistant professor who had a policy about beer.  His policy was to never let grad students pay for beer, if he could help it.  At first, this struck me merely as extremely generous.  I've come to think of it, though, as one of the more admirable policies a professor can have.  Here's the thing about beer: philosophers drink a lot of it.  We actually have good taste when it comes to beer, which is rare among academics, or people for that matter.  We also like to talk shop over beer.  So having a beer with a colleague -- especially someone more senior than you -- is an important part of professionalization and networking.  You can end up with co-authors, letter-writers, sympathetic referees, and host of other things by having a beer with senior colleagues from time to time.

This can easily lead to intended and unintended forms of exclusion.  People who don't drink get excluded.  People who need to get home to take care of their kids, their parents, or their ailing partner get excluded.  Perhaps most common: people, such as grad students, who can't afford it get excluded.  That sucks.  I'm also mindful of how absurdly lucky those of us who have well-paying tenure-track jobs are.  In grad school, I had two side-jobs to make living in NYC affordable.  I was on the verge of leaving the discipline for two years while I struggled on the job market.  Those of us who won the lottery need to keep firmly in mind that we are the beneficiaries of the "imperceptible updraft of inexplicable luck."  For these reasons, among others, I've adopted this policy as well. 

On top of this, I think it's also important that it be common knowledge within one's department that one has this policy.  If the point is to encourage grad students (and others who are in precarious positions, such as VAPs and post-docs) to come out and do the networking thing, it's important that they know in advance that they're not going to have to pay.  Otherwise, only the adventurous, the well-enough-off, and the lucky end up benefiting.

What other small but consequential policies do y'all have or suggest?

What it is like to be a VAP

I'm going to follow up on my proposal to begin a series, "What is it like?", with a posting on what it is like to be a VAP (i.e. a non tenure-track "Visiting Assistant Professor"). I hope, again, that other contributors post on what it is like to be them, and that readers submit their stories as well. Anonymized stories will be accepted and posted, provided they satisfy this blog's safe-and-supportive  mission.

What follows is a brief discussion of what life has been like for me as a VAP. I will try to describe the experience as even-handedly as possible. I will try to describe my day to day life, what I enjoy about it, and the things I don't. I'll simply be honest about what it's like for me.

I have been been in two VAP positions since finishing my PhD at the University of Arizona in 2008. I started out in a VAP at the University of British Columbia. It was a tough year. Finally making some real money was awesome -- and my colleagues at UBC were great and supportive -- but I was away from my fiance (now my wife), which was awful, and learning how to publish and teach were real challenges. Publishing was tough because, well, I had never done it before. I spent just about every minute of the day I wasn't teaching slaving away on my office computer at paper drafts that went nowhere (to this day, none of the stuff I was working on at UBC has survived). In terms of the publishing game, I felt like someone threw me into the ocean without a life-preserver. I started to panic, because I knew I had to publish to get a TT job. That is when I got insomnia, which crippled me for my first three years out of grad school (but which, fortunately, is very well-treated now). The insomnia -- which I am certain to this day is stress-induced -- was so bad that I literally didn't sleep for days on end (for about three years, I would go between 2-4 days at a time without a wink of sleep). It was that bad. I remember driving to a convenience store in the rain and a daze at 3am to get sleeping pills. They didn't work. I then remember panicking right before the social-political philosophy class I had to teach the next day because I realized I would be standing in front of 100 students and I was half-incoherent. Although I had received excellent teaching reviews throughout grad school (I taught a ton in graduate school), let me tell you: none of your teaching experience in grad school prepares you for what it is like to teach 2-4 lecture classes during the semester. Prepping for 2-4 classes a term, carrying them out, and trying to publish -- all at the same time -- are a rude-awakening. You think grad school is hard? Being a professor (even a VAP) is way, way harder. Oh, and be prepared for students to challenge you. It happened in graduate school, but in my experience it is worse when you're a new professor. I had one student verbally assault me for how I graded his paper. It was awful. But hey, in the Spring I got my first publication, a reply in JESP. Let me tell you: there's nothing like your first pub. Even if it's a small one, you don't have to wake up every morning worrying that you'll never publish. Now you only have to worry that you'll never publish again. Seriously, that's what you'll do! ;) 

Although UBC was a very good gig, and Vancouver was a nice place to live -- well, aside from the two months straight it rained (I kid you not: I woke up every morning for two months to it pouring outside!) -- my fiancee couldn't move to Canada, so I tried to find a job in the States. I did. I got lucky and got another VAP at the University of Tampa. 

Tampa is beautiful. I love living here. The weather is great, the campus is beautiful, and they treat us well. But things did not start out well. My fiancee and I moved into what seemed to be an upscale apartment complex. It was far and away the worst decision I've ever made. The place is a bona fide slum. Don't take it from me. People have been killed there, it was so poorly constructed that you could hear people breathing in the apartment adjascent to your bedroom. And then there were the college students partying out on their balconies every night until 4am (sometimes 7am) in the morning. My insomnia returned, and day-to-day life was so stressful that my relationship with my fiancee/wife almost ended. 

The stress and insomnia carried over into work. Teaching at UT was a far cry from what it was like at UBC. Instead of teaching two 100-200 student lecture classes for 50 minutes apiece like I was at UBC, I was now teaching a 3-3 load of 20-25 student classes, each of which meet for two hours twice a week (I teach for six hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays). I'll tell you this: the teaching strategies I learned at UBC did not work at all. I was prepping more than ever before (all day Monday and Wednesday), but my teaching reviews were abysmal. Life was hell. I started looking on job boards for other lines of work. I really thought I wasn't cut out for this.

Slowly, though, things began to change for the better. I attended a teaching workshop which emphasized the "flipped classroom" -- i.e. getting students to do more work in the classroom, rather than being the "sage on the stage." My wife and mother also suggested that instead of working myself into the ground prepping for classes, I should prioritize getting students to work. I did. I now spend 1/3 of my 2-hour classes discussing mandatory reading responses students prepare, another 1/3 having students do group work in the classroom, and the final 1/3 giving a lecture. It has worked wonders. My student evaluations have soared, and more importantly, my students are improving beyond my wildest dreams. Getting them to work -- to do philosophy themselves, both in the classroom and at home -- works wonders.

I also dramatically changed my research philosophy. Doing what everyone else does -- trying to produce uber-rigorous work on small, targeted topics (typically on what others have written in top journals) -- didn't get me very far. Truth be told, getting me to do this kind of work well has always been a bit like trying to force a square peg into a round hole. What I had always been good at, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, was seeing problems differently. Although I'm thankful for the rigor that graduate school hammered into me -- because I do think it is important to be clear and rigorous -- I've never been as enamored with rigor as most people in our profession seem to be. A lot of academic philosophy has always seemed to me to be a contest of "who's smarter than who." That's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in truth, and I think insight above all gets at truth. Kant's philosophy, for instance, is a mess -- but it's profoundly insightful. And there were far, far more brilliant physicists and mathematicians than Einstein -- yet what made him great is that he saw things differently. I do not mean to compare myself in any way to these people. I'm just trying to express what I value, and why I value it.

Anyway, I stopped caring much about what people were writing in top journals. I was reading a bunch of biographies at the time, and came across the following quote from Einstein: "Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking." I followed it. Aside from teaching, I mostly stopped reading and just started thinking. In teaching Kant, I just tried to come up with a simple and intuitive understanding of what Kant is up to, and I came up with an idea that led to this. In teaching free will in my intro course, I got sick of the usual theories (compatibilism, incompatibilism), wanted to come up with something better to interest my students, toyed around with ideas in the classroom, and came up with this. I taught a course on human rights, and came up with this. All of a sudden philosophy was fun again.

One of the nicest things about being a VAP in a very small department (I only have two philosophy colleagues) is that I stopped feeling like I needed to impress people. I think I suffered from this in grad school and at UBC. I was always so worried that my ideas were no good that as soon as I shared them with people, people usually shot them down, depressing me and leading me to think I'm no good. At UT, I got away from this. I just started enjoying philosophy again, and I'm incredibly thankful that I have. In this regard, being in a VAP can be wonderful.

At the same time, there are tough things about being in a VAP. As I see it, TT jobs require specialization. If you get a TT job at an R1 school, you're encouraged to devote almost all of your energy to research. If you're at the typical SLAC (including UT), you're encouraged to devote the vast majority of your time to teaching and student experience. In a non-TT job, you have to bust your butt to do it all, so that (hopefully) you can land a TT job. In addition to teaching a 3-3 (with unusually long 2-hour class times apiece) and doing research, I have elected to:

• Serve on two university committees
• Supervise the philosophy club
• Supervise another student club
• Volunteer to teach a year-long freshman "gateways" transition-to-college course
• Serve as my department's assessment coordinator
• Coach two debate teams
• Advise 50 or so students

I'm probably leaving things out (oh right: there are the 100 or so job applications you have to send out annually, and, perhaps, running a blog;). Anyway, work is my entire life. It is not uncommon for me to have 12-hour workdays. I have a ton of grading, because I have students in all of my classes submit two assignments per day (individual assignments plus group assignments). I mostly spend the weekends recuperating. I have no friends. Not one -- though I am very friendly with my colleagues (I just hardly see them outside of work). My wife has some friends, and sometimes we do things with them -- but I have no time for any of my own. It sucks.

You know what also sucks? Waking up every single morning feeling bad about yourself. I don't mean to be melodramatic. You (or at least I) really feel this way. I work "my tail to the bone" and yet I wake up every day with very little hope. Every once and a while a student asks me "when I come up for tenure." I have to cleverly brush aside the question. And then there's the Eastern APA. I'm 36. I've published a lot of stuff (though not in top journals). Over the past year or so, my teaching reviews have been exemplary (average 4.8 out of 5). I've coached an Ethics debate team that qualified for the National Finals, beating out schools like Georgetown, University of Florida, etc. I've done all these things...and yet I see bright-eyed 27-year-olds at the APA with no publications, maybe 3-4 grad conference presentations, and no teaching experience beat me out for interviews and job-offers not just at R1's but SLACs (yep, places that claim to prioritize all of the things I think I've demonstrated abilities at). Again, I don't mean to diminish what people in grad school have accomplished...but I feel like Sisiphus. I've done all this...and for what?

My wife tries to remind me that I'm lucky. I know I am -- and, in my better moments, I feel that way. My worries -- my suffering -- are first-world problems. There are many, many people out there who have it far worse than I. I live in a beautiful place, have a wonderful wife, a goofy dog, I love philosophy, I have a great deal of passion in the classroom and derive a great deal of satisfaction seeing my students learn and succeed. But still, most days, it's hard to get out of bed. I want a home. I want to start a permanent life with my wife. I don't want to worry every single day that I'm going to fail her by never getting a TT job, etc. But worry I do. Every second, minute, and hour of every single day.

Series Proposal: "What is it like to be a [fill-in-the-blank]?"

It occurred to me today, after recent discussions on gender equity and employment, that perhaps we could all benefit by better understanding what it is like to be one another -- among other things:

• What it is like to be an adjunct
• What it is like to be in a tenure-track position
• What it is like to be a female grad student in philosophy
• Etc.

Accordingly, I would like to propose a new series, "What is it like?", for our community members to post on. In addition to official contributors, I would be happy to accept reader-submissions. The only rule is that the essays/postings must be consistent with the "safe and supportive" aims of the blog. Explaining what is hard about "being X" is fine and encouraged. However, to keep things safe and supportive, accusatory types of things -- it's hard to be an X because Y's are jerks! -- will not be approved.

I hope to kick things off with a post entitled, "What is it like to be a VAP?" That is, unless someone else beats me to it! ;)

Pseudonymous Contributors

Responses by women in the profession to my recent post about why there are so few female bloggers in philosophy (and specifically here at the Cocoon) strongly suggest that the phenomenon is due in large part to a "chilling" effect -- i.e. a reasonable fear about how women bloggers are treated and viewed in the profession. In response, I floated the proposal that the Philosophers' Cocoon permit people to sign up as contributors under pseudonyms. Although there were a few concerns raised about the proposal, by and large the response of the community seemed in favor of it -- and I agree that the balance of considerations supports the policy. Pseudonyms are not without problems, but the kind of de facto segregation excluding women on philosophy blogs (the Cocoon included) seems to me morally worse by far.

I therefore invite people interested in becoming contributors, but who wish to contribute under a pseudonym, to email me (at [email protected]) expressing a desire to become a member in this capacity. In order to contribute under a pseudonym, I must know your name and background (grad student/faculty?, institution). I will under no circumstances divulge your identity to anyone. I am an honorable fellow who keeps his word. I do hope this policy encourages people who fear professional repurcussions from blogging publicly -- including women -- to officially join our community. People of all backgrounds should be able to discuss philosophy online in a safe and supportive environment. Or so I. And so, I hope, say we all.

The Ethics of Hiring for TT Positions Directly from Grad School

Roman asks in the comment section of my post on this year's TT hires if "anyone else thinks it is insane" that nearly half of this year's TT hires so far have been hires of people directly out of grad school (Elisa also finds it insane). I don't really know how to evaluate questions about sanity, but I do know how to think about moral questions, and so I want to spend some time in this post thinking about the morality of the practice.

What I am about to write may appear to have a certain flavor of griping. Truth be told, I do have a horse in this race, and can't claim to be a disinterested party (I've been in a non-TT position for several years now). Be that as it may, I really don't mean to gripe. I accept that life is unfair, and that I, and I alone, am responsible for my professional future.

That being said, I think it may be worthwhile to think about the ethics of hiring people for TT jobs right out of grad school. First, I don't think it's an "open and shut" issue. Second, there are a lot of people out there -- in VAPS, adjunct positions, or worse (having to leave the profession) -- whose lives are profoundly (negatively) affected by practices and norms of hiring people for TT positions straight out of grad school. Third, I hope to be on a search committee some day, and I want to know how I ought to approach the hiring process if I'm ever so lucky to be there. Finally, I also think there are very real and unappreciated questions about whether hiring people for TT jobs directly out of graduate school is harmful to those hired.

I begin by making one big -- but I think rather weak -- assumption: namely, that many people with VAPS, post-docs adjuncting positions, etc., are roughly equally qualified and promising as teachers and philosophers as comparable candidates coming directly out of graduate school.

Two brief remarks about this. First, there are clearly some "stars" in grad school who can stake a legitimate claim to being much more promising than people in non-TT positions. My examination the CV's of people who have received TT positions this year suggests that some such "graduate school superstars" exist. However, my examination also suggests that many of those who got TT jobs out of graduate school aren't graduate school superstars of this sort. Second, however many talented people there are coming out of graduate school, there are clearly very many talented and accomplished people in VAPs, post-docs, etc. -- people with lots of good or even top-notch publications and teaching honors -- who aren't getting TT jobs. Many people with VAPs, post-docs, etc., are clearly comparable in accomplishment and promise to those coming directly out of grad school. If people want to argue with me on this, fine -- but I think it's a pretty safe assumption.

So, assuming this, let's turn to moral evaluation -- in particular, to the question of whether it is ethical to hire someone directly from grad school (even though there are people at least as promising in post-docs, VAPs, adjuncting positions, etc.).  Here's a very brief sketch (I must be brief: this is a blog!) of why I think it's arguably not ethical:

• Utilitarian analysis: individual acts and/or a rule of hiring people directly out of grad school over comparable candidates in VAPs, post-docs, etc., does not maximize happiness. The converse acts/rule (prioritizing comparable people in non-TT jobs over grad school applicants) do(es) maximize happiness.

Here's why. First, the department who hires does as well either way. Either way, they hire a comparable applicant. Second, perhaps the biggest "utility reducers" in the academic market are people who get "stuck" in non-permanent jobs as a result of staleness. These people suffer year after year on the market, become paid worse and worse over time, and sometimes wash out of the discipline altogether. Third, prioritizing hiring people from VAPs, post-docs, etc., would minimize this. People would be taken out of the non-permanent job pool and into permanent jobs faster so that they don't grow stale and wash out.  Finally, those that wouldn't be getting jobs straight out of grad school wouldn't really be harmed, since they could still get post-docs, VAPs, etc., leading to TT jobs.  That's a very quick first gloss at the utilitarian argument, but I think it's solid.

Now turn to:

• Kantian Analysis: hiring people directly out of graduate school passes neither (a) Kant's contradiction in willing test for imperfect duties (the Universal Law Formula), nor (b) his harmonizing with humanity test (the Humanity Formula).

Consider first the contradiction in willing test. Could you consistently will that no (comparable) people get TT jobs directly out of graduate school? Yes, because any such individual could get a job later on, after a post-doc, VAP, adjuncting, etc. But could you consistently will that some (comparable) people get TT jobs directly out of grad school? No. Why? Because some such people getting hired could cause you -- in a VAP, post-doc, etc. -- to go "stale", thus making you less/un-hireable, which of course you couldn't will.

Now turn to the harmonizing with humanity test from the Humanity Formula. Can hiring no (comparable) people directly out of graduate school harmonize with humanity (e.g. the capacity of individual to set and pursue ends)? Surely -- because people not hired directly out of graduate school can still effectively pursue their end of getting hired out of a VAP, post-doc, etc. But can hiring some (comparable) people out of grad school harmonize with humanity? No. Because hiring some such people undermines the capacity of people in post-docs, VAPs, etc. made "stale" not able to set and pursue their ends of getting a TT-job.

Now turn to:

• Virtue-Theoretic Analysis:  not hiring directly from grad school best expresses and promotes virtue.

People in VAPs, post-docs, adjunct positions really suffer (first-world problems, I know, but the suffering is real). It's really, really hard to go on year after year getting publications, good teaching reviews, etc., all for naught -- and seeing people years younger than you get jobs with hardly a dot on their CVs. So, I would say, a compassionate and merciful search committee should prioritize people who have been out of grad school a while. They've worked for it, suffered for it, and accomplished things worthy of reward. Yes, people in grad school have too, but not nearly as long or under the same kinds of conditions. Second, I want to say, if you want to promote virtue (as a teacher, philosopher, and person), hire people who have been out of grad school a few years. They've had to bust their butts to become good teachers, good researchers, good members of the community, etc., under way-below-optimal conditions (e.g. teaching 3-3's, 4-4's, and worse).

Finally, I want to mention something that I think is important and relevant that I rarely see discussed. There is a not-insignificant number of people who receive TT jobs directly out of graduate school who never receive tenure. Why? Well, some of them (a surprising number, I would say) never publish, or don't publish enough, or never learn how to teach well. Getting a job right out of graduate school -- when you've never published anything, or taught a course -- can be a recipe for failure. And that's not good for the person who was hired -- nor, of course, those in non-TT jobs who were passed over for the hire, nor of course for the department who hired the person and now has to fire them. People from non-TT jobs who have good records publishing, teaching, etc., are, offhand, in a better position to succeed in a TT job. And those grad students who might get passed over if those non-TT people were hired over them? Well...I would say, post-docs and VAPs are an excellent way to learn how to publish and teach before you get put on a tenure-clock, thus increasing everyone's chances of actually getting tenure once hired. Which, again, is good for everybody (nobody wins when someone doesn't make the cut for tenure).

Some Remarks on Lewis' Law

I rejected a comment submitted yesterday on my post on gender equity in the philosophy blogosphere by a regular commenter here at the Cocoon. I'd like to publicly explain why I rejected the comment, both so that I can receive feedback from the community on the decision and because I think it brings up a very important issue deserving of discussion.

Over at Feminist Philosophers, there is a new post entitled "Lewis' Law", a simple principle coined by Helen Lewis.  The law is this:

Lewis' Law: The comments on any article on feminism justify feminism.

Although my experiences running the Philosophers' Cocoon are (obviously) highly anecdotal, they cohere with Lewis' Law. In the entire history of our blog, we have had, to my best recollection, two posts on issues relating to gender equity: the one I just made on gender equity in the philosophy blogosphere, and an earlier post I wrote asking what drives women away from philosophy.

In both cases, some of the very first comments I received (from men) were to the following effect: how do you know that the differences aren't due to the "different natures" of men and women? In the post on what drives women away from philosophy, a male commenter speculated that it may be due to IQ differences. In the more recent case (the comment I rejected), a male commenter speculated that gender differences in the philosophy blogosphere may be due to the "different natures" of men and women.

Finally, in both cases, the men in question complained that not entertaining these hyptheses amounts to an unjustified form of political correctness -- that we as philosophers, in a safe and supportive forum such as this, should consider and discuss these kinds of claims.  After all, the commenter (whose comment I rejected noted), I have discussed at length why I think certain types of metaphysics are fundamentally misconceived. If my doing that is consistent with a safe and supportive environment, the commenter asked, how isn't discussing possible inherent differences between men and women consistent with the same mission?

Well...allow me to explain. Throughout history, claims about inherent differences between races and genders -- claims without any sort of empirical proof -- have been repeatedly used to deny basic and equal human, civil, and political rights to women and other minorities, not to mention opportunities; not to mention the disrespect, public and private humiliation, etc., that come along with these sorts of things. Regardless of whether they are well-intentioned, comments speculating on inherent differences between races, genders, etc. do not merely run afoul of "political correctness"; they play into all-too-real historical and present day patterns of abuse that function to harm, exclude, and marginalize people that have suffered such indignities for millenia.

Finally, it ignores and discounts the experiences of women. What we see in the comments by women on this blog and others are explicit statements that it is *not* their nature that excludes them, but social and disciplinary norms and structures that create a "chilling effect", motivating them not to participate out of fear of repercussions they expect to experience distinctly as women.

In contrast, while not everyone may agree with (or even like) my objections to contemporary analytic metaphysics or to disciplinary standards of rigor, in those cases I am not only giving what I take to be arguments (rather than speculating about racial or gender differences); it is also not as though metaphysicians and rigor-ists in the profession have been rampantly discriminated against throughout history, in ways that profoundly affect their human, civil-political rights, well-being and equal standing as fellow human beings.

I hope this explains my decision to reject the comment in question, both to the individual and to the community. I bear no malice to this individual, and do hope the person continues to be an active member of the community. I raise this issue in public -- without compromising anyone's anonynymity -- because I think it is important to make clear (and discuss) the moderating standards I employ, and why I employ them.

As always, I am happy to discuss this post. Please do, however, because it is a sensitive issue, discuss the issue respectfully and within the aims of this blog's mission. I will moderate accordingly.

Under-appreciated Philosophers

I've been reading a fair amount of Epicurus lately, and it struck me that I hadn't really encountered Epicurus in many of my classes. When I did, his work was only briefly looked at in between the more popular ancients. It seems to me that Epicurus was on the right track in so many areas, and it's a shame that he gets lost in the fold. 

This lead me to think about all of the other great philosophers I was potentially missing out on, both ancient and present-day. I thought this would be a great question to ask here: What philosophers should have more attention paid to them? What philosophers do you think are under-appreciated? (Besides yourself, of course!) 

Gender Equity in the Philosophy Blogosphere (including the Cocoon)

There has been some discussion recently on "peripheral speech" and gender in philosophy blogs. This discussion got me thinking about our blog, and my experience as its owner and moderator. First, two things pop out about our site's contributor list:

• Almost all of our listed contributors are male.
• The female contributors listed have not yet posted any entries.

Second, as the blog owner, I have been struck by the following:

• All of the requests I have received to become contributors have been from men.
• The vast majority of unsolicited invites to contribute that I have sent out to men in the profession have been accepted.
• Almost all of the unsolicited invites I have sent out to women in the profession have been declined.

Let me be clear: my aim in reporting these facts is in no way to slight or blame women for not joining/contributing. Quite the contrary, I report these things because the situation strikes me as regrettable, and worth openly addressing.  Given the kinds of harrassment and other poor treatment women in our profession report facing, what could/should be done to make philosophy blogs (including ours) more welcoming? This is intended to be a safe and supportive blog, after all.

Several female commenters over at the Leiter thread on this issue noted that they feel more comfortable blogging under pseudonyms. Would it be helpful/inviting to permit and/or encourage people to join as contributors under pseudonyms?

Any thoughts, my fellow pupae? (Note: given problems that this and other sites have had attracting internet trolls on topics relating to gender and discrimination in the past, I will be rigorously enforcing the "safe and supportive" rule in approving comments).