The Philosophers' Cocoon

Brentano's Science of Consciousness

Last time I mentioned that Brentano was developing a “science of consciousness” and promised I would explain. Brentano’s claim that the true method of philosophy would be that of the natural sciences was not a throwaway remark or provocative soundbite, but seriously meant as the starting point of an encompassing research program and as a core tenet of his school. Given his distinction between internal and external perception, you might think that this would then lead to a strict distinction between the natural sciences and the mental ones, the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften. However, I also mentioned in my first post that Brentano had petitioned the Austrian government for funding for a psychological laboratory to do experimental research. So which kind of perception is involved in psychology? Is his science of consciousness a natural science or not? How should we investigate the mind and consciousness?

This is still an open problem and it would be great if an analysis of Brentano’s approach could contribute something to current debates. So what are the current requirements for a “science of consciousness”?

What should we be reading?

I've been so preoccupied the past several months with working on a book and, more recently, preparing for my fall courses that I haven't had much time to read many new books or articles. What have I missed? What are the best books or articles that you've read recently? Feel free to suggest things in any area!

Course proposal bleg: contemporary theories of justice

I'm putting together a new course proposal for an upper-level undergraduate seminar entitled, "Contemporary Theories of Justice." However, I haven't taught a course like this in a while, and would like to put together a really great syllabus: one that exposes students to cutting-edge work from a diverse variety of perspectives. Because it's hard to keep abreast of everything out there (my own research interests have at least temporarily drifted away from theorizing about justice), I'd like to ask you, the Cocoon readers, for some recommendations.

Which book(s)/articles/authors do you consider "must-reads" for a course like the one I described above? Why? Many thanks in advance to everyone who chimes in!

Brentano’s Project of Philosophy as Science

By Carlo Ierna

The topic of my current research project is exactly as it says on the tin: “Philosophy as Science: the Project of the School of Brentano”. The main goal is to provide a reconstruction and reassessment of the ideal of philosophy as science as unifying project of the School of Brentano in the context of nineteenth century philosophy. As I mentioned in the previous post, commentators have argued that the school lacks unity, to the point that it is up for debate whether we should call it a school at all. I found a strong continuity and overlap in their philosophy of mathematics, so I thought that perhaps, given the vast amount of unpublished manuscripts and letters, we hadn’t looked hard enough or in the right places for unifying factors. While I carved out a somewhat obscure niche by investigating the philosophy of mathematics in the School of Brentano, with this project I went right for one of the most famous and well-known claims by Brentano (which was even selected as the motto of the Cambridge Companion to Brentano).

Job market boot camp, part 20: The British interview

With the American job season warming up and several jobs posted already for the fall, notice the several British philosophy jobs one can apply to. The UK academic job market does not operate on a timetable; there are jobs all year round. I've been on both sides of the interview table in the UK, and here is my take-down of the British interview process. For another, more comprehensive survey of the British philosophy job market, see here, and for a more general review of the European job market, see here. I refer to the Daily Nous post linked to earlier for terminology about the terminology for positions (e.g., lecturer = assistant professor in permanent position).

Before the ad is posted, the search committee decide on a set of essential and desirable criteria which will be specified on the job ad. The ad almost always appears on jobs.ac.uk, and also often (but not always, so be on the lookout on jobs.ac.uk) on PhilJobs and the mailinglist Philos-L, maintained by the University of Liverpool. Usually, a job needs to be advertised for a month or longer before the deadline.

The Brentanist Philosophy of Mathematics

By Carlo Ierna

While writing my MA thesis, I still thought that Husserl was developing an original application of Brentano’s method to a new area. The mainstream interpretation generally considered Husserl’s early works as an innovative combination of his mathematical background (after studying mathematics in Berlin he did his dissertation on the calculus of variations in Vienna) and the philosophical teachings of Brentano and Stumpf, who supervised his 1887 habilitation work On the Concept of Number that formed the basis for his first book, the 1891 Philosophy of Arithmetic.

However, during my doctoral research at the Husserl-Archives Leuven, I had the chance to study notes from Stumpf’s and Brentano’s lectures that Husserl had attended right before his habilitation. These lecture notes suggested that there was far more available to Husserl than merely some general methodological principles. Furthermore, I discovered that nearly everyone from the School of Brentano had already written on the philosophy of mathematics before Husserl! The mainstream picture turned out to be a little too simplistic. The surprising number of works in the School of Brentano on the philosophy of mathematics reduces, or at least contextualizes, Husserl’s originality considerably. This then became the main topic for my first postdoc: to investigate whether there really was such a thing as a Brentanist philosophy of mathematics, working my way back from Husserl.

Reader query: on coming out to one's class

Coming out to your class

By Anonymous

I have a pedagogy question and I am hoping that you cocooners can offer some insight.

Last semester as part of a digression in a philosophy of language course I taught, I was trying to explain the concept of common knowledge to the class and, off the cuff, I said something like the following. “Consider the following two scenarios: Scenario 1) I ask each student in this class to visit my office separately. When each of you arrives I tell you that I want to share something personal. And I do, but I ask you not to repeat it to anyone because it is personal. The next day you are all sitting in class knowing something personal about me. Scenario 2) During class in front of all of you, I tell you something personal about me.” I tell you “I am X” [Pause] “Now you are all sitting in class, each of you knowing my secret. What is the difference between the two scenarios?”

Now, I did not say “I am X.” I actually stated something personal, or at least something I would rather not everyone in my class know about me.

Making the first day not the worst day, 2.0

I wrote about this a few years ago, but it's something I still struggle with: the very first day of classes. I've tried all kinds of things over the years--everything from simply going over the syllabus and letting students go early, to teaching actual philosophy, to "icebreakers", and so on--and yet I never feel like I've "mastered" the first day. Actually, that's an understatement. I've been teaching for well over ten years, and I still feel like I have no clue how to make the first day of class fun and engaging. And so I come to you, my fellow Cocooners, to ask for suggestions. What do you do on the first day? Thanks, in advance, to everyone who chimes in!

Two small milestones

I'm happy to report that the Cocoon just passed two small milestones: 1,000 blog posts and 750,000 site visits. Thanks to everyone--contributors and readers--for making the Cocoon such a great place to be!

A brief survey of the School of Brentano and its impact

By Carlo Ierna

First of all, I’d like to thank Marcus Arvan for this wonderful opportunity to present and discuss my research on the Philosopher’s Cocoon. I think I might be stretching the definition of “Early Career Researcher” a bit, but since I am still an untenured postdoc, I guess it is fitting enough. Thematically I focus on areas that are generally considered as part of the “core” of analytical philosophy: philosophy of logic and mathematics, philosophy of science and epistemology, and nowadays increasingly metaphysics and philosophy of mind. However, my work in philosophy has been mainly historical, concentrating on the School of Brentano and the 19th/early 20th century more in general. I’ll structure my posts here around the way I have approached these three broad themes.

How to organize a philosophy conference or workshop

It was suggested on a lively Daily Nous discussion that it would be helpful to have blogpost on how to organize a philosophy conference or workshop for those who have never done so. Organizing a conference or workshop is immensely rewarding and fun (I've organized and co-organized seven of them, and been indirectly involved in more), but it is also very time-consuming and requires careful planning. 

Thanks to a.o. Rachel McKinnon, Marije Martijn, Kate Norlock, and Teresa Blankmeyer Burke for suggestions. Other tips & tricks are welcome in the comments!

1. Think about what you want to achieve
Thinking carefully about your aims can save you headache later on and help you to plan this better. Do you want it for research reasons, to get input on a line of inquiry you're just beginning? For your tenure dossier, in order to show some organizational activity? Do you plan proceedings (see below)?
You need at least 1.5 years from the initial concept to actual event to get a relatively small-scale conference or workshop planned out. Choose a topic that you are working on and that is still relatively fresh so that the conference makes a genuine impact in the field. You can organize a conference with a narrow, highly-specified topic, you can do something broad and open-ended. Both narrow- and broad-scope topics have their advantages: a narrow-topic conference provides a forum for specialists to discuss unpublished work and exchange ideas in-depth; a broad-topic conference can expose participants to ideas they normally wouldn't be confronted with, which can lead to interesting cross-fertilization.

Featured early-career author: Carlo Ierna

It's my pleasure to introduce the Cocoon's newest Featured Early-Career Author, Carlo Ierna (Postdoctoral Reseacher, Utecht). Carlo received his PhD in Philosophy from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 2009, was Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard in Spring 2014, and his research concerns 'the renewal of the ideal of “Philosophy as Science” in the School of Brentano.'

Carlo also has 31 (!) publications, including:

Carlo Ierna (2012). Brentano and the Theory of Signs. Paradigmi 2.

Carlo Ierna (2012). Husserl's Psychology of Arithmetic. Bulletin d'Analyse Phénoménologique 8 (1):97-120.

Carlo Ierna (2011). Brentano and Mathematics. Revue Roumaine de Philosophie 55 (1):149-167.

Carlo Ierna (2003). Husserl and the Infinite. Studia Phaenomenologica 3 (1-2):179-194.

Working together: There must be a way

I am a passionate fan of co-working, since

1. I believe that working with other people (especially if one works with always new people and not always with the same group) helps one becoming aware of one's implicit presuppositions
2. working with other people allows me to achieve more ambitious goals (in my case, an example are the volumes on the Reuse of texts in Classical Indian philosophy I edited for the Journal of Indian Philosophy---I would not have been able to achieve that target alone, since I lack the relevant expertise in many fields of Indian philoosophy)
3. working with other people is more fun, and fun motivates one whenever one is stuck in a difficult situation

This being said, however, working with other people is also difficult ---so much that serious workers often end up thinking that "it would have been easier to do all on my own!" (if you have been working with other people and this thought never occurred to you, you are either a saint, or an excellent co-worker with excellent co-workers… or you are the one everyone is complaining about:-)). In this post, I want to explore the possibility of working with other people with mutual satisfaction. There must be a way, if we do not want only saints to co-work.

1. Speak openly about your expectations
In my case, in one case I discovered half-way that my co-editors did not think it necessary to read, correct, send to the authors, re-read, re-correct, re-send to the authors… all the articles of a volume we were editing together. For me, the opposite was so obvious that I did not even deem it necessary to say it explicitly ---now I do.
2. Speak openly about your editorial choices
You will not anticipate how much time you will save if you decide to spend some time arguing about whether to use the Chicago or the Oxford Manual of Style before starting to write or edit articles. Also, decide whether you expect the book/article/… to have sections, numberings and the like.
3. Speak openly about what you want to do yourself
I am a big fan of delegation since I want to focus on more substantial issues than the position of footnotes. Thus, it makes sense for me to discuss well in advance about how much money we can invest in outsourcing proof-reading or the like.
4. Speak openly about the time (and money, about which see above) you want to invest in the project
5. Speak openly about realistic deadlines
6. Speak openly about your rules
For instance: Will any contribution to your edited volume be discussed by all co-editors? Will any comment to the author be previously read by all co-editors? If so, will all co-editors have the time to respond swiftly?

Do you have further suggestions? What works for you? For a fuller discussion of some of these issues, see this post.

Reader query: obtaining outside letters

A reader writes,

I am on the job market for the first time post-degree and I have no outside letters. How does one go about getting them? I made the mistake as a grad student of not networking until my last years in the program. I feel like my work is good enough to get a letter, but I don't think I know anyone well enough to ask for one. It feels sleazy just emailing someone and being like "would you read these papers and write me a letter."

As I wrote in my Job Market Boot Camp entry on letters, I once shared this individual's concerns. For most of my life, I was strongly averse to networking. I'm very much an introvert, for one, and have a hard time approaching people--and, truth be told, I always felt networking to be a bit "icky" (I've never wanting to be a "social climber"). However, I think I've learned better, in a few respects.

Reader query: how many recommendation letters?

A reader writes,

I was wondering about your earlier post on the Philosopher's Cocoon where you said that the more outside letters you had the more interviews you got. How many letters did you end up sending? I could probably get six strong letters. Three of them would be from outside both my current department and the department where I earned my PhD. But I wondered if it would be helpful to get that many? Also, is it mark against one if one sends more letters than the ad asks for?

To answer the reader's first question, I did best on the market with six or seven letters. Alas, as I will now suggest, I'm not sure there is a "sweet spot" for how many letters to send. I suspect it is largely a matter of judgment, as well as trial-and-error. Fortunately, as I will also suggest, the evidence I've come across indicates that one should not worry too much (for the most part) about sending too many letters. Generally speaking, and certain cases aside (see below), candidates appear to do fine on the market utilizing anywhere between four to eight letters.

Would straight to on-campus interviews be better?

As someone who was on the job-market for seven years, I really appreciate the concerns expressed by some commenters at this Daily Nous thread about how much of a gauntlet the academic job market has become, especially as first-round APA interviews have increasingly been replaced by telephone and Skype interviews.

In the old days (the days of APA interviews), things were bad enough. It cost a ton of money to fly to the Eastern APA for interviews, and once there, it was an absolute pressure-cooker, with hundreds of job-marketeers crammed into hotels (and elevators!), running from interview to interview, and jockeying for position at the infamous APA "Smoker" (i.e. reception). It was pretty terrible. Now, however, APA interviews are mostly a thing of the past. Only a few dozen schools interviewed at the Eastern last year, and it was frankly kind of a ghost town.

Job Market Boot-Camp, Part 19: Skype & Telephone Interviews

My initial plan in the Job-Market Boot Camp was to move "chronologically" from job-market prep (cover letters, teaching and research statements, etc.), to interviews, on-campus visits, and so on. Alas, or so the saying goes, even the best laid plans go awry. Although we have already discussed APA interviews and campus visits, I just realized we never discussed the most common types of first-round interviews: namely, Skype and telephone interviews. Since these types of interviews pose unique challenges, it would probably be a good idea to discuss them!

1. Skype interviews

Because the kinds of questions one receives in Skype interviews tend not to be very different from those of APA interviews, I'm not going to focus much on content, but rather focus on presentation.

Featured Early-Career Author Schedule

I'd like to thank Helen De Cruz for kicking off our resurrected Featured Early-Career Author Series in such strong fashion. I, for one, learned a lot from her posts on skilled epistemic practices, expertise, performance, and perception, and thank everyone who took part in discussing Helen's work. Please join me in thanking Helen!

We will have a short break in our series before restarting on August 17th with our next featured author, Carlo Ierna (Utrecht). Carlo will be with us until September, when Luis Favela (Central Florida) will take over.

Finally, I would like to encourage anyone who might be interested in being a Featured Early-Career Author to email me at marvan@ut.edu. The only requirements are (1) being an early-career philosopher (grad school or beyond), and (2) an interest and willingness to share your work or ideas with others. You can share work you've already published, share ideas you're playing around with, whatever. The purposes of the series are simply to increase dialogue and engagement with early-career people's work!

How to love philosophy

This post's title is intended to be tongue-in-cheek. Following some comments at this Daily Nous post, I don't think one has to "love philosophy" in order to enjoy it, make a successful career out of it, and so on. I also can't give a how-to manual for loving philosophy. Still, I'd like to say a little bit about the topic for a couple of reasons.

First, as a number of comments on the above Daily Nous post indicate, there appear to be a fair number of people out there who have "fallen out of love" with it, or at least academic philosophy--people who find "most philosophy published in journals [to be] hopeless and depressing" (comment #5), "the deep sense of inadequacy I get every time I stick my neck out in front of relatively senior philosophers" (comment #6), "the pressure to publish half-baked articles that make one or two small nit-picky points" (comment #7), and so on. 

Second, as I explained several years ago, I once fell out of love with philosophy but was eventually able to find my love for it again. 

Job market well-wishes

Now that tenure-track jobs are starting to pile up on philjobs, I just wanted to wish all of our job-marketeering readers the best of luck on the market, and encourage those of you who might have any questions the community might help out with during your search (on applications, interviewing, whatever) to send them to me at marvan@ut.edu. The Cocoon is always here to help, and I'm more than happy to post anonymized queries, so that readers can ask questions without fear of repercussions. 

De Cruz on philosophical ruts

Our own Helen De Cruz has a really interesting post up at Philosophical Percolations on how philosophy often appears to fall into ruts "dominated by two well-outlined, opposing positions", and on steps philosophers might take to get out of them. Check it out!

Call for paper recommendations

Academia.edu has asked me to participate in a new Editor Program they are rolling out. Basically, as an "editor", I will be able to recommend papers on the site to everyone else in the field(s) the paper is tagged under. Notifications, then, will apparently go out into everyone in the relevant field, drawing attention to the recommended papers. Although I'm just starting out, it looks like it might be a great way to draw attention to papers that might otherwise be neglected. Some of the fields on the site, after all, have millions of subscribers!

Obviously, I'm not exactly sure how far my recommendations will go. However, one thing I'm hoping to do is help draw attention, in whatever small way I can, to papers by early-career philosophers. It can be hard to get one's work read and engaged with early in one's career, after all. So, while my plan is to recommend any and every paper I think might interest others, I also hope to make a point of featuring work by early-career people. We'll see how it goes!

In any case, because it's hard for me to follow everything that's uploaded to their site (this is, or so they told me, why they're introducing the program!), what I'd like to do is invite you--my fellow Cocooners--to recommend papers on the site that you think deserve more attention. You can either comment below (anonymously or under your own name), or alternatively, email me at marvan@ut.edu. Also, you may recommend anything. You can recommend old work, new work, whatever--and you can even recommend your own work. Although I can't promise I will recommend everything suggested, I will take all of the suggestions I receive seriously, check out the papers for myself, and go from there. Thanks in advance to everyone who helps out! :)

Philosophy and public relations

I've been thinking today about Tim Hunt's open letter to philosophers, "Why We Need Philosophy Communication" (thanks to Daily Nous for drawing my attention to it), particularly in light of:

1. This recent pilot study indicating the usefulness of philosophy in childhood education
2. The recent surge in empirically-oriented philosophy ("experimental philosophy", philosophy of physics, philosophical psychology, etc.).
3. The recent surge in Templeton and other types of grants for philosophical research (although of course I know concerns have been expressed about Templeton). 
4. The small but seemingly growing number of philosophers like Lisa Guenther who are combining philosophy with activism, and
5. The seemingly increasing extent to which philosophers are creating and engaging in popular media (see e.g. John Perry & Ken Taylor's  Philosophy Talk, Myisha Cherry's UnMute Radio, Richard Brown & Pete Mandik's SpaceTimeMind podcast, etc.).

Basically, it occurred to me that, despite Hunt's concerns, more and more philosophers are working hard to engage and attract the public to philosophy. Indeed, the more I started to think about the cool things people (such as those listed above) are doing, the more excited I started to feel--as though philosophy might really be on the cusp of turning the proverbial corner in terms of public interest.

Reforming refereeing: carrots and sticks?

A number of posts at different blogs recently have raised concerns about prevailing peer-review practices, and what might be done to improve things. Among other things, concerns have been expressed about excessively long turnaround times, desk-rejections and unnecessarily harsh reviews, how anonymized "anonymized" review truly is, and many other things to boot.

I'm inclined to like some of the proposals people have floated at Daily Nous, particularly those that might permit people who submit papers to rate reviewers. However, such ratings are only likely to work if there is some "force" behind them--that is, some form of consequence (positive or negative) for reviewers. After all, suppose Jones is a bad reviewer and gets rated poorly by people who submit to Journal X. Maybe, if this occurred, Jones would no longer be asked to review papers for X. But what of it? Why should Jones care? Indeed, Jones might even be happy to be no longer asked to review. Jones' bad ratings not only may be "no skin off his teeth" (as it were): it might actually benefit Jones, by letting him off the hook.

Skilled perception and mystical percepion

For the last installment of my featured author blog series on skilled perception, I'd like to focus on the question of mystical perception. How do religious believers come to perceive religious beings such as God? If such perceptions are the result of skilled perception - as I will argue - what follows for the justification of religious beliefs formed on the basis of religious perception? 

Authors like Swinburne and Alston have argued that religious experience provides positive justification for religious belief. Religious experience, so they assume, is analogous to sense perception. Given that sense perception has a strong evidential force, religious experience too has a strong evidential force.For Swinburne (2004) it is rational to adopt what he terms the principle of credulity: if it seems epistemically that x is present, then probably x is present.

In the light of recent psychology of religion, we need to revisit this analogy between religious experience and ordinary perception. Alston, Swinburne and many others rely on William James' highly readable but by now quite dated account of religious experience in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Anthropologists, such as Tanya Luhrmann found that religious experience is rarely a spontaneous matter. American evangelicals typically engage in a lot of deliberate practice before they can hear God 'speaking' to them inside their minds: 

Job-Market Boot Camp, Part 18: The Campus Visit

Although it's a bit early to discuss fly-outs/campus visits, I suppose now is as good of a time as any to turn to them in our Job-Market Boot Camp. Alas, when it comes to this issue, I find myself in a bit of a bind--for, to be perfectly frank, I have only had one of them turn into a TT job offer. Consequently, what I would like to do here is (A) direct readers to what I found to be a very helpful series of posts at The Professor is In [link fixed!], and (B) provide some suggestions based on my experiences on fly-outs.

Suggestion 1: know the school and department you are visiting.

This might sound too obvious to waste time on. However, since I think I made a mistake or two on this score--a mistake that I imagine that other people coming from grad school might make--it might be worth saying a few things about it.

Guest post on the costs of applying to grad school

By Anonymous

In recent years, academic philosophy has made an unequivocal commitment to fostering diversity in the philosophical community. Spearheading this effort, the APA has offered resources for diversity and inclusiveness in teaching, arranged committees on diversity in the profession, and now robustly tracks the demographics of our field. In a discipline devoid of much consensus, the commitment to diversity at all levels of philosophy (undergraduate, graduate, faculty and leadership) is nearly unanimous.

Despite this widespread effort to make philosophy a more inclusive discipline, the admissions process to our graduate schools now serves as a filter, insuring that members of underprivileged groups are effectively priced out of the market. Worst of all (or best of all), most of the factors contributing to massively expensive graduate school applications can be easily remedied by those with authority on the admissions committees, and in the departments and universities involved.

Call for referees

So the good news is that submissions to this year's annual Philosophers' Cocoon Philosophy Conference are up almost 200% compared to the last two years. The less exciting news is that it means I could really use some additional referees! :) If there are any of you out there who didn't submit to the conference are willing to lend a helping hand to review a paper or two, I would be very appreciative. I wouldn't ask for a referee report, just a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." If you'd like to volunteer, please either comment below or email me at marvan@ut.edu with your name, academic position, affiliation, and AOS. Thanks in advance to everyone who volunteers!