The Philosophers' Cocoon

Age and Phd Programs

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, Anon #21 writes:

How old is too old to be admitted to an elite philosophy PhD program? (the type capable of placing at least some students some of the time in tenure track positions at research universities)

And, how can older (30-35 yo) candidates make themselves credible to elite PhD programs?

In my case, I have studied and worked in another academic field at very prestigious universities for many years after doing my undergraduate degree in philosophy. I know that I am unsatisfied with the kind of work I can do in my current field and that working as a philosophy professor would be incomparably more satisfying and fulfilling than being a professor in my field. I have publications in credible peer-reviewed philosophy journals though not top journals.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

I'm curious to hear from readers about this who are in the know. For my part, I've known a few older people who entered PhD programs after other careers who fared very well in the profession--but beyond this, I don't know much here. Anyone have any insight?

Network for European Early Career Philosophers

A reader brings my attention to this relatively new organization, which looks to me on its face to be a great resource for early-career philosophers in Europe!

What's it like to be a philosopher in Chile?

This is our eighth contribution for The Cocoon Goes Global, a series that give a sense of what the philosophy profession looks like outside of the Anglophone West. Today: Chile. This is a guest contribution by Leandro De Brasi, Director of the Master in Philosophy,, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile

Philosophy in Chile

Chile is a bit of a rarity in Latin America. For the last 30 years it has largely been, politically and economically speaking, a rather stable country. This certainly doesn’t make it a terrestrial paradise. There are, for example, many social injustices in Chile (as the recent, massive, nation-wide protests made it clear to everyone that had ignored it, see here).

Having said that, as an academic who has an employment contract with a Chilean university, you won’t get to suffer many of those injustices yourself (although you will easily become aware of them, for instance, by talking to your students). However, this shouldn’t put you off Chile: the country is currently changing and is likely to become more egalitarian (although how much more is to be seen). Moreover, injustices are everywhere and Chile is not much worse than, for example, the USA in that sense (in fact, for better or worse, Chile has mirrored many American policies and economic approaches). Also, the income/cost-of-living quotient of a junior academic philosopher is likely to be higher in Chile than, say, in the UK.

Chilean Academia

In Chile, there is no tenure (i.e. guaranteed permanent employment). Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for academics to get contracts for an indefinite period, which are subject to regularly decent academic evaluations. These jobs normally involve research, teaching and service work. The number of hours per week dedicated to each depends on a series of factors (and anyway percentages can, in practice, be set differently for different people regardless of research performance and other evaluations). Some universities differentiate between teaching-focused and research-focused academics, but even in the latter case it is unlikely that the proportion of the job devoted to research will be greater than 35% (and it is likely that you will need to work longer than your contracted hours to carry out the research you are expected to do given that many teaching and service hours, such as supervising ones, are normally not properly counted).

However, Chilean universities are gradually starting to appreciate the value of research. This is in part due to the fact that there exists a governmental accreditation system in place since the beginning of the XXI Century that aims to assure the public about the educational quality, including importantly the research quality, of both higher education institutions as a whole and their particular undergraduate and postgraduate programs (see here, link in Spanish).

How are co-authored papers regarded for tenure?

An anonymous reader writes in:

I am now in the the tenure process and one question that naturally arises is the value of certain kinds of publications. Since co-authored publications become more and more common in philosophy, the question arises how they count, esp. in the tenure procedure. There was some discussion about this topic on Brian Leiter's Blog in 2013 (https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2013/02/co-authorship-in-philosophy.html). One commentator argues that co-authored papers should not count that much towards tenure because they do not demonstrate that the candidate has the potential to publish in the future. This argument rests, however, on the contingent fact that most philosophical papers are single authored. If more philosophers publish co-authored papers, the ability to contribute to such papers becomes an important aspect of successful publishing. I would thus see co-authorship is an additional skill that will become more and more important in our scholarly context. Hence, I would not value co-authored papers against single-authored papers, but see them as their "own beasts". I am curious what colleagues think about this issue

This is a good query. Although we've discussed co-authorship on at least a few occasions, I'm always happy to return to the issue because I think it's an important one. Judging from past discussions here and elsewhere, there seems to be something of a prejudice against co-authorship in philosophy, though this may be changing. In any case, having just read the Leiter thread anonymous links to in their query, I think the following comment by Mark van Roojen is probably fairly accurate:

Tenure is a global judgement, not about a person's past work, but about how they'll continue to contribute. Coauthoring a good paper where there are other single author papers of similar quality is more evidence that one will continue to contribute over time, perhaps even in a different collaborative way from the way the single author papers display. Writing *only* coauthored papers is something that less clearly presents evidence of continued contribution. The mixture seems to me greater than the sum of its parts in this context.

Public Philosophy for the Common Good

This is a guest post by Mike Austin (Professor and Coordinator of Philosophy & Religious Studies, Eastern Kentucky University):

I’ve always wanted to do something meaningful with my professional life (the lack of scare quotes around the term meaningful is intentional!). With all of the caveats and qualifications, being a professional philosopher has turned out to be an excellent choice for me and my family. It’s enabled me to spend my days doing things I love, at least mostly. It’s given me great freedom to pursue questions I’m interested in, as well as the flexibility as a parent and spouse that I’ve really valued over the years. I’m certainly fortunate that I received a tenure-track offer and have found a professional home for the past 15 years at Eastern Kentucky University.

Being a tenured full professor means I have less time for research than I had during the early years of my career. I have a 4/4 teaching load and teach one course every summer. Other responsibilities eat into research time as you progress in your career, at least at a teaching-focused institution. I’ve continued to make scholarship a priority. I’ve also made writing for a popular audience a priority for over 10 years now. I was able to begin doing public philosophy back in 2007, editing a book on running and philosophy. I contributed to several books in the popular philosophy genre, and edited or co-edited several more volumes on popular culture and philosophy. I also regularly write a blog at Psychology Today, Ethics for Everyone.

I think all sorts of philosophical writing has value, from the highest levels of scholarship to the trade publication or blog post aimed at a popular audience. Usually, my scholarly work is the foundation of my writing aimed at a popular audience.

I started doing public philosophy, and continue to do so, because I think philosophy has value for non-philosophers, if done in the right way. So many of the ideas we take for granted can be enlightening and even transformative for the general public. We can shed a lot of light, rather than merely increasing the heat, on a variety of significant or controversial issues.

What’s it like to be a philosopher in Germany

This is our seventh installment of The Cocoon Goes Global, a series of posts on what's it like to be a philosopher in different countries outside of the Anglophone west. This is a guest post by Gen Eickers, postdoc at the University of Education Ludwigsburg (Germany).

I am not sure I know what it’s like to be a philosopher in Germany – I am quite young and just finished my Ph.D., I am trans, I do not have an academic family background – all of this makes me somewhat unrepresentative of philosophers here, but, at the same time, this very fact tells us something about the system and tells us something about what it is like to be a philosopher in Germany. A lot of people think of Germany as some kind of philosophers’ nation. At least, this is a comment I have frequently encountered at philosophy conferences and also from non-philosophers at private gatherings. Being a philosopher in Germany is thought of as stepping into big shoes, it seems. However, thinking of Germany as a kind of philosopher’s nation is true only if we think of philosophy as the discipline of white cis men, since the figures that have earned that reputation fall under that label. Philosophy in Germany is still dominated by white cis men and their advantages in accessing the field remain immense. Referring to Germany as a philosophers’ nation plays into this narrative of philosophy as the discipline of white cis men. This is a narrative I resist. For what I know, like all things in Germany, being a philosopher here requires patience, access to know-how that’s not explicitly formulated anywhere, and a lot of paperwork. The access to the know-how is, I think, what makes being an academic philosopher in Germany so difficult for some of us.

Let me try to explain the procedure first. The first step in order to become a professor is the doctoral thesis. Most people here take on jobs in academia before starting to work on their dissertation. A lot work on their dissertation while having a job contract at a university as academic staff. That is why a lot of philosophers here need 5-7 years to finish their doctoral studies. For philosophers, a German-wide rule is that the doctoral dissertation needs to be published. Typically, you need to publish within two years, and as long as the dissertation is not published, you are not eligible to call yourself a “Dr” - publishing one’s dissertation is key to being able to carry the title. Among the hierarchical structure this rule carries and permeates, this practice has also led publishing houses to charge people for publishing their dissertation. Typically, the amount one has to pay is between 800-2000€. The classist and elitist underpinnings of this practice aside, being charged to publish one’s own work downplays the value and amount of work one has put into a dissertation.

With the doctoral degree, you can apply for lectureships or postdocs at universities. The salary is not overwhelming, but you can certainly survive well if your position is full-time and if you do not have to commute. It’s pretty normal for philosophers in Germany to not get a full position and to commute, however. There are very few tenured jobs in academic philosophy in Germany – this is due to the system that requires a “Professor” title in addition to the “Dr” title in order to be tenured. For people who want to become a professor in Germany, publishing papers, teaching, and researching is not enough. Being a professor in Germany means being legally permitted to carry the title “Prof.”. In order to achieve that, philosophers here have to write a habilitation. While some universities have opened up to the option of a cumulative habilitation (i.e., publishing several papers about a specific topic), it is still common practice to have to write another dissertation, one that is supposed to be more impactful and substantive than the first. The habilitation gets evaluated by a committee and typically one has to go through a kind of defense as well.

How grad applications are evaluated?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, Anon writes:

The deadlines for submitting PhD applications are approaching. Any advise for applying in 2019? Any recent shifts in how applications are evaluated? Being an international student, how much of that effect my chances positively or negatively? And how to deal with the demands of the GRE?

I've never done grad program admissions, so unfortunately I have no insight to share. But given that a non-trivial number of our readers may be undergraduates or MA students applying to PhD programs, it might be good to hear from people who have served on admissions committees: how do you and the admissions committees you've served on evaluate applicants? Have things changed at all in ways that it might help candidates to know about?? 

How to teach advanced logic to undergraduates - a guest post by Dr Sara Uckelman

This is the second in a two-part post by Sara Uckelman of the Department of Philosophy, Durham University. It first appeared on her blog, Diary of Doctor Logic. We're grateful to her for allowing us to repost it here.

Last year I introduced a new third year elective logic module at Durham. Over the course of twenty-two weeks I wanted to cover both basic model and proof theory of modal logic (essentially, the first half of Hughes and Cresswell's book) and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem(s), and I was given the option of either one one-hour lecture a week plus a one-hour tutorial every other week, or a two-hour seminar every week. You do the math; the seminar nets me more face-time, so that's what I went for.

One of the most important lessons I learned about learning logic I learned in my very first logic class. I was a senior in high school, enrolled at my local two-year university as a special student, and I was taking intro logic along with eight other people. By the end of the semester, six of the other seven had come to me for tutoring, because I was the only one who had any idea what was going on. And this is when I learned that the single best way to learn logic is to teach it to someone else. It's easy enough to read a textbook, read a proof, listen to someone go through a proof on a board and at each step go, "Yeah, okay, I buy that. Seems reasonable to me." It's a totally different story to be forced to understand the content well enough to be able to explain and justify it to someone else.

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In my last major post, I gave the details on how a major depressive episode radically disrupted my academic year and ongoing job search, but I never specified how that search ended. The job search itself wasn’t the core topic of the post, and it wasn’t over when I first drafted the post. But I did survive the gauntlet, and enough time has passed that I think I can finally catalog everything that transpired.

In this post, I’m going to chronicle some of the noteworthy events  that took place during my 8-month academic job search in 2018-2019 while I was completing the final year of my postdoc at the University of South Florida. As will become obvious, there are some aspects of this story that are extremely idiosyncratic and unlikely to be a part of anyone else’s job search. Still, I think there are some meaningful takeaways from the tale, and since it does actually end in success, it’s a reminder that perseverance does sometimes pay off – a message that is all too often overshadowed by the grim realities of the current job market.

Once the lengthy recap of the job search is complete, I’ll highlight some general lessons that can be gleaned from the journey.

How to teach introductory logic to undergraduates - a guest post by Sara Uckelman

This is the first in a two-part post by Sara Uckelman of the Department of Philosophy, Durham University. It first appeared on her blog, Diary of Doctor Logic. We're grateful to her for allowing us to repost it here.

I am quite optimistic about the prospects for the students in my tutorial group, and at the urging of a friend, I'm going to reflect on the things that I've done that I feel have had positive impact.

First, a bit about the course: The course runs from Michaelmas term (October to December) all the way through the start of Easter term, and has a one hour lecture, once a week, and a one hour tutorial with groups of 12-13 students, once a week. Thus, we get 44 contact hours over the course of the year. The course this year has six tutorial groups, of which I am in charge of one, and most of my comments in this post are going to be directed at things I do in my tutorials, because the one on one contact students get with me I think is just as valuable, if not more so, than what they learn from me in lectures.

Barriers to learning logic: Two common barriers to learning logic are (a) laziness and (b) fear.

(a) Logic is a cumulative endeavour that cannot be done without regular practice. It cannot. A lot of undergraduate students do not have much experience with working hard, over and over, at something until they learn how to do it, and so do not realize just how important this is. A lot of people who do poorly at undergraduate level do so because they simply never devoted enough time to it. Because we have weekly tutorials in my class, there are correspondingly weekly assignments that students are expected to do, giving them ample opportunity to practice. But while you can lead a student to water, you cannot necessarily make them drink...We'll come back to this below.

(b) Many undergraduate are negatively predisposed to anything that smacks of math. Maybe they haven't done math since GSCEs, or did poorly in math in high school. The method of learning something via definitions and rules is very foreign to the usual practice of philosophy, a practice which undergraduate students are predisposed to, because otherwise they wouldn't be doing philosophy at the university level. The use of unfamiliar symbols and things from the Greek alphabet can be very off-putting. (I made a point of telling all my students to go look up the Greek alphabet on wikipedia the first week of lecture, and to start learning how to recognize and draw the letter forms.) Both laziness and fear need to be counteracted in order for students to be able to succeed in a logic course.

Remarks on the Peruvian philosophical profession

This is our sixth installment of The Cocoon Goes Global, a series of posts on what's it like to be a philosopher in different countries outside of the Anglophone west. This is a guest post by David Villena Saldaña, Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, National University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru. 

Peru stands out as one of the most cultural and ethnic diverse countries in Latin America. The linguistic indicators of such a diversity are striking. Apart from Spanish, which the law establishes as the official language, 47 other languages are spoken along the country, among them the most spoken indigenous language in all the Americas: Quechua. (Other languages with an important population of speakers are: Aymara, Asháninka, and Awajún.)

Notwithstanding this rich cultural plurality and the lively and elaborate world views it encompasses, the philosophy which is taught at tertiary level for both philosophy and non-philosophy majors is overwhelmingly Western in perspective and scope. It is not uncommon for Peruvian professional philosophers to approach philosophy in complete alienation from Peruvian reality, pressing problems, and intellectual history. In fact, inside the mind of local practitioners philosophy amounts mainly to the consumption of the history of Western philosophy – which in most of the cases means summarizing the works of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and so on, and seldom trying to expand or reinterpret the ideas and problems addressed by these thinkers.

The alienation is not restricted to the nature of the problems and the way in which they are approached. It also happens that Peruvian professional philosophers tend to work in complete isolation from other Peruvian professional philosophers. There is a pervasive and bewildering mutual ignorance. In addition to ignoring what other philosopher colleagues publish or what they specialize on, in my experience (more than 10 years teaching in several institutions and regions) they even ignore who the others are: their names and numbers. There are islands. Philosophers working in different universities and cities barely know anything about the very existence of their fellow compatriot philosophers.

This phenomenon – which is an epistemic and social deficiency – is not a consequence of the big number of philosophy schools and programs in the country. Actually, out of 143 universities in Peru, only 7 offer currently a degree in Philosophy: 1 in Arequipa (National University of Saint Augustine), 1 in Cusco (National University of Saint Anthony the Abbot), and 5 in Lima (Antonio Ruiz de Montoya University, Federico Villarreal National University, Lima’s Pontifical and Civil Faculty of Theology, National University of San Marcos, and Pontifical Catholic University of Peru) – not quite a disproportion in the distribution of Schools of Philosophy if it is taken into account that around one-third of the country’s population (which is 32 million of inhabitants) lives in Lima. (It is interesting to notice, on the other hand, that 4 universities (Catholic University Sedes Sapientiae, Female University of the Sacred Heart, Alas Peruanas University, and University of Piura) that offered a master degree in Philosophy shut down their respective programs within the last decade. This gives an idea of the local philosophical market’s contraction.)

Pub-Impeding VAP vs. Pub-Conducive Adjuncting?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, anon writes:

I received my PhD this spring. No pubs yet. Extracting papers from my dissertation has taken a long time. I'm well-positioned for 3 decent, but far-from-elite pubs over the next year. As for this year’s job market: at best, 1 pub *very* late into the job-market season.

I gather there’s a good chance I’ll face the following choice:

(A) Pub-Impeding VAP: Take a VAP with a 4/4 load that includes major preps, not to mention moving. Being realistic, this will lead to little pub-work getting done.

(B) Pub-Conducive Adjuncting: Local adjuncting with classes requiring very little prep. This would be highly conducive to getting pubs over the next year.

I would pick (B) in a heartbeat but have heard that doing so would have significant costs when going on the market in 2020-2021, especially since it took me forever to finish the PhD.

Would it?

I think this is a great question, and am very curious to hear what everyone thinks. My own sense is that (A) is probably the better bet, and for a couple of reasons.

Unconventional teaching ideas that work: training students to communicate to 'non-academic' audiences (Guest post by Andy Fisher)

A guest post by Andy Fisher (University of Nottingham, UK)

If you think that it is valuable and worthwhile to teach employability skills to undergraduate philosophy students – and you want to do it! - what should you do? This was the question that we set ourselves in the Nottingham Philosophy Department in 2016. The answer has led to a popular, unique module: Communicating Philosophy, which brings in professionals from outside the academy to train undergraduates how to communicate their ideas to non-academic audiences.

Developing the module

We knew that large numbers of students only really engaged with content that is assessed. This meant that when we put on employability workshops, students generally didn’t turn up. The difficulty was in working out how to put an employability module within the assessed programme of a philosophy degree – it is, after all, a philosophy degree! The answer was deceptively simple: teach them how to communicate new philosophical ideas in such a way that gave them a set of useful employability skills.

I like to think of it as employability by stealth. Of course, in some sense we all do this anyway with all our philosophy modules. We can all list those skills that our students will find useful in their future career – critical thinking, time management, independence etc. However, we wanted to be much more strategic and focused, and with a genuinely practical component, too. Giving students transferable skills is one thing. Actually training them in how to transfer their knowledge, ideas, and understanding is quite another.

Writing diversity & inclusion statements

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, Anon writes:

Nearly every single job ad I read says something like the following: "Please explain how your research, teaching, or service would/do contribute to a climate of diversity and inclusivity."

Are there effective ways to do this without sounding too on the nose, so to speak?

I would love for committee members to speak to how they think this can be done effectively because it is so pervasive in job ads now.

What are you looking for?

My general worry is that things I say come across as forced/disingenuous, i.e. "I make sure I include non-canonical texts in my courses."

Good questions. I have heard a lot of job candidates raise similar questions, saying they have no idea what to write in these things. My guess is that the thing to do is to simply report any clear ways you have been involved in diversity and inclusion efforts (at a department or university level), as well as any things you actually do in the classroom like the kinds of things anon mentions. But beyond that, I have no idea. It would be great to hear from some search committee members on this!

How can we help you? (October 2019)

Seeing as it has been well over a month since our last "how can we help you?" thread, I figured now may be a good time to run another one.

For those of you unfamiliar with this series, this is a chance for you to post openly or anonymously in the comments section below on anything you could use help with related to the profession. After you post your query in the comments section, I will then post new threads for readers to discuss your query.

Please feel free to ask questions on anything (within the Cocoon's mission) that you could use help with, including but not limited to:

• The job-market (applying for jobs, etc.)
• Graduate school
• Publishing
• Teaching
• Issues in the profession
• Work-life balance
• Personal struggles
• Etc.

Fire away - we're here to help! 

Student evaluations: what to include in a dossier

In the comments section of the teaching portfolio entry in our Job-Market Boot Camp, Grad Student Z writes:

Thanks for this (and all the other) helpful posts. Do you think there is a reason to include unedited student comments as opposed to a selection of student comments along with a website link to the original evaluations (including student comments)?

I'm also wondering how to approach the quantitative data in the following cases:

(i) You are slightly below university and department averages (e.g., less than a 1 point difference with 5 being the maximum) for a particular semester (e.g., your first time teaching), but above those averages for subsequent semesters. Is it worth including all of the data with the the hope that committees will interpret this as exhibiting improvement over time?

(ii) You are above university averages, but slightly below department averages (e.g., less than a 1 point difference with 5 being the maximum). Would you recommend only including a comparison to the university averages (and excluding the department averages)? Or could that come across as if you have something to hide?

(iii) On some metrics, you are above university averages, but below department averages; on others, you are above department averages, but below university averages. Should you include everything? Nothing?

Good questions! I don't think there are any hard and fast rules for any of these things, but want to suggest it is probably best for candidates to try to (A) frame themselves in the best light, while (B) not looking like they are trying to hide anything. Let me explain.

Against letters of recommendation

Helen has an important post up at the APA blog about why job-apps should no longer involve letters of recommendation. While I am personally very thankful to those who have written me letters, I wholeheartedly agree with Helen's take that letters in general are more problematic than they are worth. I'd just add that I think the "ghostwriting" issue is a very serious one. Helen writes:

I’ve also seen and heard (especially in Europe, but  I’m not sure how widespread this is elsewhere) that letter writers request the candidate to write their own letter. This demand puts candidates in a terrible bind—it is very difficult to sing one’s own praises with conviction. There are even blogs detailing how to ghostwrite your own letter. The evidential value of a ghostwritten letter is zero.

At a recent event, I met several people who told me they did this as a job-candidate: that their letter-writer(s) had them write their own recommendation letter. I have to confess to being totally flummoxed as to how common this apparently is, and how anyone could think it is ethical!

Timmerman's philosophy-writing advice

Travis Timmerman (Seton Hall) shared the following helpful writing advice on facebook recently, and consented to me sharing it  for discussion here. Timmerman's original post is public, and he wanted me to note that he accepted some additions and qualifications. 

I am supervising an undergraduate student's thesis and this student is very advanced philosophically and a truly excellent writer. I am giving him advice on his thesis, and on how to write for publication. He started to fall into the trap of trying to read literally everything in the literature before he put a pen to paper (so to speak).

Here is my first stab at step-by-step advice about how to approach writing a paper. Comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome! I am curious to see what my philosophy friends think, should you wish to share.

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Don't try to read everything in an area of philosophy before you start writing. If you do that, you will never start writing, or you will significantly and unnecessarily delay your writing. Rather, you should do some variation of the following that you find works best for you.

(1) Jot down your initial ideas and save them.

(2) Start combing through the literature, working from, or creating, a bibliography. (See if there is a bibliography in PhilPapers.)

(3) Look at the papers and abstracts to make sure your exact idea hasn't already been defended in the literature. If your exact idea has, you've been scooped. Move on to another idea, or something new related to this idea, or another project entirely. If not, continue to step (4).

(4) Read what seem to be the seminal articles in the literature.

(5) Read the articles that seem most relevant to the specific question you are focusing on, and not everything in the subfield.

(6) With (1) and your knowledge of the literature, write an outline.

(7) Write a draft of the paper.

(8) With a complete, semi-polished draft, see if you can get a few philosophers who are experts in the literature to read it, and a philosopher or two who knows nothing about the literature to read it.

Ask the expert(s) to give you critical comments, particularly ones that may highlight any misunderstanding of the positions discussed, potential oversights of articles that need to be cited, and the viability of your argument.

Ask the non-expert to give you comments, particularly ones that may highlight a lack of clarity in your argument, discussion of the positions, and so on. Without having read any of the literature themselves, they should be able to read your paper and understand literally every sentence in it. That's the ideal anyway.

(9) Revise in light of their good comments.

Follow something like steps (1)-(9), and repeat.

I generally think this is very good advice. But I'm curious whether everyone agrees with it, and whether people have alternative strategies to share. Me? Like some other people on Timmerman's facebook thread, I've never written a paper (or book) outline in my life! I just write, working things out on paper. I also often go straight from Timmerman's step 1 (having an idea) to step 3 (checking on philpapers and elsewhere to see whether anyone has defended the idea in print), as I don't see any reason to waste time putting together a bibliography if I've already been scooped! Then, if nothing like the view I want to defend has been defended, I may read just a couple of seminal articles (step 4) before proceeding straight to step 7 (drafting the paper). Indeed, oftentimes I'll only give a good variety of other potentially relevant articles in the literature a read (step 5) after writing a full draft, so that I can cite the literature well and address alternative views, objections, and so on. Let me explain why.

I don't remember exactly where I came across it, but a long time ago I heard a senior member of the profession say that immersing oneself in a literature before developing your own ideas in detail can be stultifying, encouraging you to see an entire philosophical problem as others have seen it, whereas it can be really important to try to 'see the problem anew.' Ever since hearing this, I've always thought there is something important to it. First, earlier in my career (i.e. in grad school), I often felt 'boxed in' by the contours of how problems were already understood in a given literature--as though I had to begin with the problem where others had already left off (which I think in retrospect sometimes led me to preemptively reject lines of argument that I now consider to be good ones). Second, sometimes when I dive deeply into a given literature even now, I find myself surprised by the contours of the debate, disagreeing with the dominant dialectic.

Consequently, I'm often inclined to develop ideas and write up rough drafts of things before Timmerman's step 5 (reading relevant articles in the literature). To clarify, I don't mean to say here that one should avoid what other people have written. The issue for me rather is when to dive into 'relevant articles' in the literature. I sometimes do this as Step 5, but I think just as often I do it between steps 7 and 8 (i.e. after writing a full rough draft but before polishing it into something I would want to send to anyone), the aim again being to "get outside of the literature" and think about a philosophical problem, developing an argument in detail before even seeing what other people have had to say about it. Finally, I'll be honest here in saying that this approach can be a 'double-edged sword.' In particular, it can result in "wasted time", as when you spend a lot of time developing something only to later come to the conclusion (after drafting it up and reading the literature) that the argument has problems one didn't foresee. Nevertheless, compared to how 'boxed in' I often felt as a graduate student, I've often found the method to be helpful.

Anyway, I'm curious whether other people do this too, and for similar reasons. I'm also curious whether other people deviate from Timmerman's advice in ways they find helpful, and if so, why!

Being a philosopher in Singapore

This is the fifth installment of The Cocoon Goes Global, a series on what it's like to work as an academic philosopher in countries outside of the anglophone west. This is a guest post by Bob Beddor (National University of Singapore). Many thanks to Bob and the contributors so far for such a great series of posts!

Back in 2016 when I was finishing up grad school, I saw a PhilJobs ad for a position at the National University of Singapore (NUS). At the time I knew very little about Singapore. But it seemed like an exciting adventure, so I tossed off an application. I’m very glad I did! In the weeks before my fly-out, I read a lot of papers by philosophers here and grew increasingly impressed. During the campus visit, I had stimulating discussions with both faculty and students, and came to see Singapore as a place I’d enjoy calling home. My partner was also enthusiastic about Singapore (she’s a software engineer, and Singapore has a burgeoning tech scene), so when I got the offer, we decided to give it a go.  

Some background about Singapore:  Singapore is an island city-state in Southeast Asia. For many people coming from the West, it’s a fairly easy place to live. It’s clean and safe, there’s a good public transportation system, and English is the primary language of education and commerce. One thing I’ve found refreshing about Singapore is the high value placed on education:  Singaporean schools are regularly ranked among the best in the world, and educators are widely respected. I’ve also really enjoyed the travel opportunities: I’ve been able to explore lots of places in the region that I probably never would have visited had I stayed in the US. (You can easily do weekend trips to Bangkok, Bali, Angkor Wat, etc.) For a Michigander like myself, the main challenge has been getting used to the weather. Singapore is right on the equator, with a tropical rainforest climate. But even this downside has a silver lining:  while friends back home are complaining about polar vortexes and whatnot, it’s nice hanging out by the pool!

A bit about my university:  NUS is a large research university, with about 35,000 students. While the vast majority of the students are Singaporean, you get students from all over the world. The students here are really impressive:  they’re very bright and tend to be genuinely passionate about philosophical questions. While teaching is highly valued, hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions are primarily based on research.  

In many respects, being a philosopher at NUS is similar to being a philosopher at a well-funded research university in the states. The teaching load is light (2:1). There’s a lot of funding for conference travel; larger research grants are also available. In a time when philosophy lines are drying up around the world, we’re fortunate to have been able to make lots of hires recently. Since I was hired three years ago, we’ve made four tenure-track hires in philosophy, and we’ve just been approved to make two more TT-hires this year.  

One challenge of being a philosopher in Singapore is that it can be a pain to get to philosophy events overseas. (Getting funding for travel is much easier than doing all the long-haul flights!) However, the philosophy scene in Singapore is quite tight-knight and dynamic. We have a weekly reading group at NUS where faculty give each other feedback on papers in progress, and there are fantastic philosophers at a number of other Singaporean universities – e.g., Yale-NUS, Nanyang Technological University, and Singapore Management University.  (My colleague Mike Pelczar estimates that Singapore has more philosophers per square meter than any other country on earth.) We’ve also been working to bring more of the philosophy conference scene to Singapore: we recently hosted an epistemology workshop at NUS and hope to organize more events in the future.  

Marcus mentioned that it would be helpful to say a few words about what makes an applicant competitive for a philosophy job in Singapore. Hiring practices vary from university to university; I can only speak for NUS. Typically, our searches are Open-Rank, Open-AOS, and get around 300 applicants for a position. The main thing we look for when deciding fly-outs is a strong research record – pretty much everyone we’ve flown out in recent years has had at least one or two publications in top journals. Of course, this isn’t the only factor; ability to contribute to the department’s teaching needs, breadth of the applicant’s research program, and evaluation of the writing sample also play a role. At the campus visit stage, the two most important components are the job talk and the teaching demo. (We are a bit unusual in that we require an hour-long teaching demo.) In our department hiring decisions are made democratically – everyone in the department gets an equal vote - which I think has been a helpful practice for ensuring everyone’s voice is heard.

Looking ahead, I think there are grounds for optimism about the future of academic philosophy in Singapore. Indeed, I think there’s reason to hopeful about the future of academic philosophy in Asia more generally: a bunch of universities across Asia have started investing in analytic philosophy. It’ll be exciting to see how this development shapes our field going forward!

The job-market across time

In response to my previous post asking how the job market looks, Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced) posted the following graph on Twitter on how the academic job-market in philosophy has looked up to this point in time (8/1-10/10) over the past seven years:

As you can see, the job-market has been basically flat. Last year's market was a bit better than this year's at this point, but this year's market is roughly on par or a bit better than several years prior. Many thanks to Carolyn for sharing this!

How does the market look?

A few weeks ago in our job-market discussion thread, some people remarked that the job-market looked pretty bad so far, with fewer jobs this year than last year at the same time. I've been following job listing at PhilJobs and Higher Ed Jobs, and it seems to me that there's been a deluge of jobs posted recently. So, how does the market look on the whole now? Also, which areas seem to be hiring this year? Which areas aren't? I'm curious to hear people's impressions.

Tips for editing books

In our September "how can we help you?" thread, Anonymous writes:

I’d love a post for both those editing books, special issues of journals, etc. and for those who get asked to contribute about what kind of information should be communicated to contributors and/or what questions contributors should get answered before they commit. I’ve seen wildly different levels of information communicated. Some initial thoughts of things that should be communicated before commitment: word count, what kind of review process will happen (I.e. will it be peer reviewed? Will the editor just look at it? Does it need to be blinded? If it is for a journal special issue, is the review process the same as the standard review process?), how much editorial advice one should expect to get, what the expected publication date is (though of course take this with a major grain of salt), an abstract or infgormation about the theme (as opposed to e.g. just a title for the collection), what kinds of subfields contributors will be drawn from, etc.

I've never edited a book myself, but I have contributed to edited volumes as an author and am curious what people think. What are authors owed in terms of up-front communication? One thing that I think may be relevant is an expected timeframe for publication. I've heard a few horror stories about people who contributed papers to volumes only to be left hanging for many years without any clear picture of if or when the volume would actually come out. Another thing I think may be relevant is whether the volume will be reviewed after publication. I know of cases of edited volumes that have come out (in some cases we very good presses) that, for one reason or another, never received a single review, either in a journal, NDPR, etc. I can imagine it being very frustrating to put hard work into a piece, only to see the book get no attention at all. How much control / responsibility do volume editors have for this? I don't know - but it does seem to me to be something that authors should be informed about heading in (if possible, of course).

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours? What should a good book editor communicate to contributors, and at what stage?

What's it like to be a philosopher in Argentina?

This is our fourth installment of The Cocoon Goes Global, a series of posts on what it's like to work as an academic philosopher in countries outside the anglophone west. This is a guest post by Ignacio Silva, Research Fellow at the Philosophy Institute, Universidad Austral in Buenos Aires, Argentina. 

After twelve years in the UK, I returned to Argentina in 2017 to join the research philosophy institute at Universidad Austral, a small, internationally well-ranked, private university. During my time abroad I did my doctorate and worked as a post-doc in several research projects (the classic story of an early-career scholar going from one post-doc to another, though luckily in my case – as I like to think – these positions were all at the same institution). Perhaps naïvely, I thought that returning to my home country after this experience would mean easily landing a permanent position. Mine were nothing but vain hopes: soon I realised that several private universities were happy to hire me as long as I brought external (international) funding to cover my own salary and research costs; that was the only deal I could get, and the same applied to a bunch of my friends who studied and worked abroad. So I did in the end, and, though I’m not technically a post-doc any more, I’m still looking forward to the time when I can say that I have a permanent position. I start with my story simply to illustrate how difficult it is to find a job in a country where experience abroad is certainly a meaningful thing. In fairness, though, it is not the same for those who stay in the national state system. I shall come back to this later on this post (two disclaimers here: 1) I work with Templeton funding, which made my landing back home by far easier than that of many of my friends; 2) this post is but my take on Argentine philosophy today… of course, other stories could be told, and mine does nothing to invalidate them). So let me first try to describe the philosophical environment in Argentina.

Argentina is a country with a long and robust philosophical tradition, with a strong vocation to engage in the international scene and that attracts many regional students. This tradition is characterised in particular for its strong continental heritage, and as such, most Argentine philosophers work either in the phenomenological/hermeneutical traditions or in the history of philosophy. Of late, however, Argentine philosophers have actively engaged in the analytic tradition (in philosophy of science, logic, ethics, among other), a tradition that has grown to be as dominant as the continental one. This is not to say, of course, that these are the only philosophical traditions in the country. In fact, Thomism, within Catholic circles, is rather large in numbers as well. Perhaps the most notorious common feature to all these traditions in Argentina is that they have very little contact with each other (there are some incipient trends to eradicate this incommunicability, which makes me hopeful, though much work still needs to be done on this matter). I’m perhaps the only person teaching and doing analytic philosophy of religion in the country (or undoubtedly one of the very few… so few that I don’t know them! There’s certainly no one doing religion at the Argentine Society for Analytic Philosophy – SADAF – that has about 270 members).

Book review tips?

In our September "how can we help you?" thread, anon writes:

I'm a recent PhD and have agreed to review a book that is directly in my AOS. I've never done one of these before, so I'd appreciate any how-to advice the Cocoon community can offer. The recent(ish) posts this year about writing referee reports were super helpful, both for understanding what a good report should look like, as well as explaining how to actually write one, so something along those lines would be ideal.) Thanks!

Benedict Eastaugh replied:

Thom Brooks, in "Publishing Advice for Graduate Students", discusses how to write a book review in section I, "Publishing 101: Book reviews as an introduction to publishing".

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1085245

I agree that Brooks' guide is a great resource, but I'm also inclined to think that the Cocoon community might be able to give anon some more fine-grained advice. What do you all think? Do you have any tips for writing a good review? Any "do's" and "don'ts"? 

Submitting extra/optional application materials?

In our September "how can we help you?" thread, 'job applicant' writes:

Should applicants submit materials that are "optional"? Will it hurt our chances if we don't? This is a general question, but the ad I'm thinking of gives very specific instructions about the documents the applicant must submit and does not mention any optional documents. It's only while working on the application through the university's website that one sees one may upload additional optional documents (research statement, cover letter, etc.). If submitting optional materials increases one's chances, I'll do it, but if it doesn't, I'd rather not spend the additional precious time it takes to do it. And if it will or even just may make a difference, I wonder why these documents aren't just listed as required.

This is a great question. Someone recently asked me, for example, whether they should upload a diversity statement if they have the chance, in cases where a job ad mentions diversity but doesn't explicitly ask for a diversity statement. I guess I'm inclined to think that candidates should upload exactly what is asked for (and no more), as uploading additional documents might rub search committee members the wrong way (viz. the applicant trying to give themselves an unfair advantage). However, I'm not sure about this. 

What do readers think (not just about the example I gave, but about job applicant's query in general)?

Grading a Sample Paper (Sophie Horowitz)

This is a guest post for our Unusual Teaching Ideas series, by Sophie Horowitz (UMass, Amherst) 

I teach at UMass, Amherst, and one of my regular classes is a large section of Medical Ethics (100-200 students, 3 TAs). After a couple of semesters of teaching the class, I realized that the students felt both intimidated and unprepared for the amount of writing we were doing in the class (currently, two 500-word papers and two 1000-word papers). I was also dismayed by how many students claimed (on student evaluations, for example) that they did not understand how papers were graded, or asking for a rubric, despite my providing them the rubric from day one.

I realized that it would be worthwhile to do more explicit instruction on writing in class. Beyond simply telling them that it’s okay to use the first person, or showing them a sample paper that does everything right, I created two sample papers and ask the students to grade them using my rubric.

The Assignment

 The activity is to grade, and then discuss, two sample papers. These papers respond to Mary Midgley’s “On Trying Out One’s New Sword”, which we read and discuss in class beforehand. One is a “good” paper which, if I do say so myself, deserves an A according to my rubric. The other paper includes several common undergraduate mistakes. (You can see all of these materials on my website.)

1. Before class, students read both papers and grade them according to the rubric.
2. In class, I give them a “scavenger hunt” where they pair up and look for both good and bad features of each paper: each paper’s thesis statement, properly and improperly cited quotations, irrelevant details in the “bad” paper, a place where the “bad” paper’s author contradicts himself, and so on.
3. During the class discussion, the TAs and I circulate around the room to answer questions and talk to students. I also have them answer some questions on Moodle about the assignment: what did they learn? What did they find surprising? Do they want to change the grades they assigned the night before?
4. The next day in lecture I pick out some comments from their Moodle responses to discuss together. We have a broader discussion about academic writing, why it is okay to use the first person, why using signposting is not bad writing in this context, and whatever else comes up.

Results

This exercise has been interesting, helpful, and surprising, both for me and for the students. Here is some of what I’ve found:

* Many students report that they better understand what we are looking for in their writing after doing the exercise

CV's: norms for listing work

In our September "how can we help you?" thread, 'ostdoc' writes:

I was recently invited to write a book review. I am a young scholar, and having the book review on my CV would be useful for job applications. The question is, when can I list the book review on my CV? Since it isn't refereed, it (barring doing a terrible job) won't be rejected. Can I list it as forthcoming already? Can I list it as expected? What the the norms on this?

'An editor...' replied:

I certainly would not list it before you submit it to the journal. It does not exist yet, and it may not. Once submitted it is a different matter.

And I added:

editor is right. Never list something as forthcoming unless it has been officially accepted. You may list it at this point as “commissioned.”

I think this is an important issue. A recent study went around my social media last week indicating that academics routinely misrepresent things on their CVs. My own sense, having seen some CVs with misleading stuff, is that at least sometimes, people aren't even aware that they are misrepresenting things (though I am sure in other cases people are well aware of what they are doing). By my lights, the right thing to do in every case is to be forthright about exactly where a given piece of work is in the process. If it's a paper that's not finished or under review, list it as 'in preparation.' If it is book review or book chapter that you have been commissioned to do, then until it is accepted, list it as 'commissioned.' If you have a book under contract but the final manuscript isn't accepted yet, list it as 'under contract.' Only list something as forthcoming after the final manuscript has been officially accepted. Does anyone disagree? Are there are any norms I'm missing?

One final thought: the initial commenter here, 'ostdoc', writes that "having the book review on my CV would be useful for job applications." I think it is worth discussing whether this is true. Back when I was in grad school, I vaguely recall some other grad students thinking that book reviews might help them on the market. I thought then, and still think now, that this is almost certainly not true. Perhaps having a book review on your CV will look 'better than nothing' (if you have no other publications). However, I very much doubt that book reviews play any significant role in how search committees evaluate candidates. When it comes to research, my sense is that people on the hiring side of things are interested primarily (and perhaps entirely) in candidates' capacities for publishing original work. But perhaps I am wrong about this. 

What do readers 'in the know' think?

Being a philosopher in Colombia: Reasons for optimism

This is our third installment of The Cocoon Goes Global, a series of posts on what it's like to work as an academic philosopher in countries outside the anglophone west. This is a guest post by Santiago Amaya is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. You can find more about him at here. 

Being a philosopher in Colombia is a lot like being an academic in many parts of the world. At least, that’s how it looks on paper. I am an Associate Professor at a leading institution in my country. I teach, write, and try to get published, all of which is very stimulating. I also spend quite a bit of time in committee meetings. Not fun, for sure, but I am told that’s how things are almost everywhere these days.

Move beyond appearances and you’ll find texture. Lots of it! The country is going through singular times that bring interesting challenges, new opportunities, and a renewed sense of relevance. There is much that needs to be built in Colombia today. And philosophy here has the good chance of contributing to it.

You’ve probably heard about the Colombian peace process. (If you haven’t, please take a break from reading philosophy blogs and read some real news.) It started in 2012, reached a peace agreement in 2016, and is bringing to an end a 50-year conflict between FARC and the Colombian government. Today we’re going through the process of its implementation. In political terms, it’s been a struggle: war is profitable business for politicians. In philosophical terms, it’s been a Socratic dream.

The questions are out there, in the minds of people on the streets. Is reconciliation possible? How can we turn hatred into respect? What is the point of punishment? Of forgiveness? With my students, we’ve gone over these and similar questions many times in and out of class. As a moral psychologist, I have made a modest contribution, which you can read here.

I moved to Bogotá 6 years ago after finishing my PhD in the PNP program at Washington University in St. Louis and a 1-year postdoc at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. I felt some anxiety about my career when I took the offer. Although I grew up in the city and was returning to my alma mater, my philosophical home was elsewhere. As reasonable as these sentiments were at the time, the worries I had then have now disappeared.

Let me explain. Colombia is far from being at the “center of things,” philosophical or otherwise.  The distance is certainly not geographical. You can jump on a plane in New York and arrive in Bogotá in less time than it would take to get to L.A. If you are in Miami you can get here before you make it to Chicago. It’s more about North-South power dynamics. At any given conference in North America, it’s more likely that people ask me about Narcos than they ask about my work.

Being in the “periphery,” however, has many advantages, as I’ve come to discover. With distance, the gulf between what’s fashionable in the “center” and what really matters philosophically becomes sharper. In my corner of the world, the things that “mainstream” philosophers find intuitive are often regarded as bizarre. Many catchy phrases and terms of art do not translate well. All of this, I believe, makes it easier to find a unique philosophical voice. And that is something really valuable to me.

How to Thrive on a 4/4

This is a guest post by Mary-Beth Willard, Weber State University

As I thought about Jason Brennan’s post on work-life balance, I realized that while I agreed with most of it, I was doing the automatic mental translations I always do when R1 people write advice aimed at more general academic audiences. I thought sharing some of those thoughts might be helpful for someone else who is on the tenure-track at a teaching-oriented institution. 

I’ve been teaching at Weber State University (say “Weeber”, especially if you’re applying for our job this year!) since 2011, having graduated in 2009 into what I’m told was the Great Recession but still feels like a dark abyss I can’t gaze into because it will eat me. 

I teach a 4/4, sometimes a 5/5/2 to pad the salary a bit.  I’ll have a 3/3 in the spring when I take over as Jedi Commander program coordinator. I’m eligible for full professor in two years.

I don’t like the phrase “work-life balance” but “how to have a well-rounded, full life while teaching a lot” sounds even like a TED talk that’s going to begin by telling you to make your bed and end with folding your sweaters while petting cats.

I have no idea how many hours a week I work, but I worked 55-70 hours a week in low-wage jobs once upon a time, and a typically day had me at work doing data entry starting at 7:30AM, working till four with a half hour lunch, then commuting across town to the sporting goods store, where I worked 5-11pm. 

I don’t do that as an academic. It might not be a stretch to say that the main attraction of this career for me is the autonomy over one’s time.  But with great autonomy comes great responsibility, so here are some thoughts:

1. The golden ring’s made of brass, Forking. Brass.

We are acculturated to think of an academic job as something that is supposed to be totally fulfilling, measuring our life out by coffee spoons and publications.  This feeling is intensified by a brutal academic job market that has more in common with a lottery system than any of us would like to admit, where one spends an absolutely stupid amount of time and energy trying to land a job.  We wind up thinking that the job, the job we are so grateful to get, must be the center of our lives, worth every sacrifice.

Meh. While having a tenure-track job is a very cool job that affords one a lot of autonomy and the chance to do philosophy every day, it’s also just a job.  Don’t let your job become your sole source of meaning.  The presence of other goods in your life does not make the good of philosophy valueless. 

2. Actually look at your tenure requirements.

If you’re at a teaching-focused institution like mine, chances are that your institution doesn’t expect you to be publishing like you’re at an R1, nor are they going to support you if you try.  One common trouble spot: we are all trained as if we will need to be publishing like we’re at an R1.  The job market encourages it, too, and it’s hard to get out of that habit.  So, look at what your job actually requires of you.  Of the three common categories of teaching, scholarship, and service, scholarship is likely to be discounted pretty heavily if you’re on a 3/3 or 4/4.