The Philosophers' Cocoon

Race equality work in Philosophy @Sheffield (Guest post by Tareeq O. Jalloh)

By Tareeq O. Jalloh (PhD Student, University of Sheffield)

There is an astounding lack of demographic diversity in philosophy, especially academic philosophy. BAME–Black, Asian and minority ethnic–students make up 8.6% of philosophy postgraduate students in the UK (Pozniak, 2020). In the US, 2.5% of philosophy PhD recipients and 4% of philosophy faculty are black (Schwitzgebel, 2021). Many other disciplines encounter the same lack of diversity. This is especially true for disciplines in the arts and humanities. For instance, whereas BAME students make up 22.3% of UK postgraduates, they only make up 11.5% of humanities postgraduates and 9.2% of arts postgraduates in the UK (Pozniak, 2020).

This lack of diversity in turn tends to centre dominant perspectives in academic disciplines. History, for instance, often centres a very narrow and constrained view of British history where black history is relegated to the margins (Arday, Brachu, & Boliver, 2022). Further, topics in race and ethnicity often seem to be marginalised and taught as add-on or specialist modules as opposed to being a fundamentally integrated part of the curricula (Arday, Brachu, & Boliver, 2022). BAME students engage with curricula that don’t reflect their socialisation, history or lived experience.

There are multiple benefits to improving the demographic and conceptual diversity of disciplines. For instance, improving demographic diversity will lead to students interacting with a variety of different people, and interacting with diverse peers leads to gains in cognitive abilities such as critical thinking (Pascarella & Loes, 2012). We might think improving critical thinking skills would be good for all university students, but this especially rings true for students in disciplines like philosophy, where critical thinking is an integral part of philosophising well. Another reason demographic diversity is necessary is that it exposes people to members of a commonly stereotyped social group who don't fit stereotypes–countersterotypical exemplars. The exposure to counterstereotypical exemplars helps reduce implicit bias (Holroyd & Saul, 2018).

Call for guest posts: 'Non-traditional paths into philosophy'

A reader writes in:

I have a suggestion that I think would be very nice to have. This would be a series on people who have started doing philosophy later than their peers, maybe only going to graduate school in their forties, with the idea of showing people alternative career paths and encouraging people who feel out of place because they are older than the average graduate student. I also know someone who has done an MA in philosophy and has started on philosophical work (not yet published) in his 60s after retiring from a permanent position in a psychology department. The literary magazine The Millions started a series like this about ten years ago about authors who published their first book in their 40s or later. This includes many of my favourite authors, eg Barbara Pym. This has now grown into a separate website called Bloom https://bloomsite.wordpress.com/

I think this would be a great feature to have, showing that being an early career academic does not necessarily mean being young by age and you don’t have to be some kind of wunderkind to succeed. This could also showcase alternative career paths, like starting to publish philosophy after retirement or writing philosophy alongside an alt-ac job. I think there is a good chance that if I cannot get an academic job, I would try and continue research and writing alongside another (paying) career, so it would be nice to see other people doing this.

I think this is a great idea! If you took a non-traditional path into philosophy and are interested in contributing a guest-post on your experience and path in the profession, please just email me at marvan@ut.edu. Also, if you know someone else who took a non-traditional path who might be interested in contributing a post, please feel free to direct them to me or to this post. 

Should philosophers lead interdisciplinary projects? (Guest post by Mandi Astola)

One of the Cocoon's readers, Mandi Astola (PhD Candidate, Eindhoven University of Technology), submitted the following guest post:

We are doing interdisciplinarity wrong

A lot of young philosophers are being educated to become interdisciplinary philosophers. And many philosophers scoff at that. Journals that publish interdisciplinary work tend to be seen as less prestigious, as are papers with many co-authors (which is what often happens in interdisciplinary work). There is a sense in which interdisciplinarity can involve a “watering down” of philosophy, which philosophers don’t love.

However, even for all the negatives: the rise of the interdisciplinary philosopher is probably a good thing in the long run. The ecological, technological and political crises that we are facing cannot be solved with single disciplines. It is important that philosophers learn to talk with other disciplines. However, I think that the way in which we are doing it is often counterproductive.

Before I tell you why it’s counterproductive, let me explain how I came to think this. I have worked on an interdisciplinary project, in the role of an ethicist. I also took part in writing a project proposal, where I would have a part as an ethicist. Apart from that, I have been in close contact with various other projects where there was an ethics component. I have always felt a little dissatisfied with the place of philosophy in these projects.

Potential roles for conference commentators (Guest thread by Jonathan Ichikawa)

Jonathan Ichikawa (University of British Columbia) posted the following thread on Twitter this weekend on roles that commentators can play at conferences. Because it seemed to me to be a really helpful thread, I asked Jonathan if he would allow me to re-post it for discussion here:

This is a thread about potential roles for commentators at conference talks. I would like to remind/emphasize to philosophers that offering objections is only one of the many interesting and valuable things commentators can do.

I think there's some tacit social knowledge of this already. Certainly I've seen some commentators do some useful things besides give objections. But they sometimes act apologetic about it, like they think they're "supposed" to object. Not so! (imo)

And while some of the things I'll list below are sometimes done, there are also some that I never or almost never see people doing in their comments. I'd like to!

(I am agnostic on the applicability of/need for this advice in fields other than philosophy. I don't know those cultures well enough to write a thread about them. Others knowledgable about those fields should feel free to weigh in!)

OK so here's a list of things you can do in your commentary! Some of these are obvious but maybe some of them will be helpful to notice as options.

OBJECTION. "A argues that P; here's why that argument is uncompelling, and/or, here's my argument against P." Everyone knows this one's an option. But it's only one option.

OBJECTION WITH ALTERNATIVE. "A argues that P; but the argument is consistent with Q or P, and I think Q better captures A's motivations here." Better, but still quite negative.

OBJECTION AND REPLY. "One might argue thus against A, but that argument won't work for this reason."

EXIGETICAL CHALLENGE. "A argued against B, saying that P. But here's why I don't think B is really committed against P, I think you may be agreeing after all."

CLARIFICATION. "A said that 'S'. This is actually ambiguous between P and Q; here's what each option would look like, and some advantages and disadvantages for each. Which did A mean?" These are all still pretty standard but I'm just getting going!

STRENGTHEN. "A gave three arguments for P. Here is a fourth. Notice that it is nonredundant, since some ways of resisting As arguments would make resisting this one harder."

HIDDEN VIRTUE. "A's argument for P has unusual virtue V. This is a really good feature for arguments to have! Let me show you how useful V can be for other kinds of arguments, perhaps including arguments in other areas."

ANALOGY (IMPORT). "A's move is in topic X. Topic X is interestingly similar to unrelated topic Y, with parallel ideas and moves happening in each. The analogue of A's move in Y has such-and-such advantages and disadvantages, which may carry over to A's move here."

ANALOGY (EXPORT). "A's move is in topic X, which is parallel to Y. The analogue of A's move in Y would be totally novel there! Here's what that would look like. This would be a good contribution to that literature!"

GO FURTHER. "A argues that P. I think the arguments are good, but actually push much further. We shouldn't just accept P, we should accept stronger claim Q! Or: we should also accept P in these other domains!"

LITERATURE SUGGESTIONS. "Here are some related papers that would interact in interesting ways with A's project."

CONTEXT IMPLICATIONS. "A answers question Q. A didn't discuss this, but here's why Q has been an important question, and how it connects to bigger issues. Let's work out the implications of A's answer for those broader matters."

OK I'll stop listing for now but I might add some more if I think of them. Others should feel free to add your own suggestions too! I have nothing against objections, I just think commentators should be more creative about what the most interesting contribution they can make is!

One thing to say about all of these — one might worry about going off-topic and being self-indulgent. That is a reasonably worry, but the answer to is is to make sure that you're still engaging with the details of the talk itself a lot. This is possible for all of these forms.

What do readers think of Ichikawa's suggestions? Are there any of them you like (or don't like) more than others? Are there any alternatives that you like (or don't like) that he left out? I'll just say briefly that my own preference is that when commentators give objections, they suggest a possible reply or two that might help the author grapple with it: call this Objection with Positive Suggestion(s). This approach generally seems to me more helpful than just raising objections, which (depending on how serious or numerous they are) can seem needlessly hostile. But this is just my perspective. What do you all think?

Being on the job market: some application statistics & takeaways (by Michael Walschots)

Hi Everyone,

My name is Michael Walschots and I’m a postdoc in philosophy currently at the University of Würzburg, Germany, working primarily in ethics and the history of philosophy (eighteenth-century philosophy, Kant). I’m participating in this year’s installment of the Cocoon mentoring program (which I’ve found to be extremely helpful) and Marcus has kindly invited me to share some information about my experience on the job market that has arisen from my chats with my mentor. One of the reasons I signed up for the mentoring program was to get an outside perspective on my profile as a job candidate to see if there are things I might do to improve my chances on the market and also to get general advice on whether there are things about my profile/my application documents that might be contributing to the relatively low success I’ve had so far. Something my mentor encouraged me to do right away was to take stock of my job application statistics (where I applied each year, what kind of jobs they were, whether I was successful or not, etc.) to get a sense of where I was having success and where I wasn’t, and thereby help me get a more realistic picture of the jobs that are within my reach, and which are not. It’s these statistics that I’d like to share with you in this guest post.

A few notes before I list the numbers:

1) My main purpose is not to complain or despair about the state of the market (despite my temptation to do so). Nor am I trying to throw a pity party. My main purpose is to provide a window into what the job market has been like for me so that: a) others with similar, or indeed different, profiles have a point of comparison, b) people who are earlier in their careers than I am can get a sense of what they might expect in the years to come, and c) so that those who are not currently on the market can see exactly what things are like for job candidates.

2) On the one hand, these numbers are really only relevant to me personally because they concern jobs that are relevant to my AOSs/AOCs (I’ve mainly applied for ethics/history jobs). And my relative success (or lack thereof) presumably has to do with my particular profile, at least in part (if you’d like to get a sense of my academic record, you’re welcome to visit my website: https://mhwalschots.wordpress.com/).* Someone at the same career stage with a more prestigious PhD, more publications in better places, etc. would of course have different results. On the other hand, I think there are a number of general lessons to be drawn from my experience and I hope that this can be helpful for others, if only it encourages them to take stock of their own application statistics themselves so that they, too, might get a realistic picture of their experience.

*I should also say that I have put in a considerable amount of effort to make sure that my application documents themselves are in the best possible shape. I’ve consulted with numerous colleagues and mentors to get feedback on my CV, cover letters, teaching dossier documents etc. I’m sure there is still room for improvement, but at this point it would shock me if these things alone have been a main contributing factor to my relatively low success.

Some things to note about how I’ve compiled the data:

1) Although this is probably self-explanatory, a job cycle approximately ranges from the fall of one year to late spring of the next year, for jobs starting the following fall. My Ph.D. was granted in Feb. 2016 and I first officially went on the market the fall before defending, so the first job cycle of my statistics is 2015-16.

2) I have classified the kinds of jobs I applied for somewhat artificially into 3 categories: TT (tenure-track) is any permanent job, so includes UK lecturerships; LTA (limited term appointment) are all contractually limited (often primary teaching) jobs; and Postdocs (which can range in number of years and teaching requirements, which I haven’t specified).

3) Sometimes postdocs are offered without interviews, in case you’re wondering why numbers in those categories don’t add up.

4) My application patterns change pretty drastically (as you might expect). Years when I have a secure position the following year, I rarely, if ever, apply for temporary positions for that following year and only apply for permanent jobs or longer-term postdocs.

5) It’s possible that I applied for even more positions than the ones documented here. I tend to keep good records, though, and these numbers represent the jobs I still have records for.

With this out of the way, here are the statistics from my experience on the job market over the last 6 job cycles (including this cycle).

Poetry and philosophy (guest post by Sophie-Grace Chappell)

The Cocoon will be hosting a series of guest posts by philosophers who write fiction or poetry. The aim of this series of guest posts will be to explore how we can express philosophical ideas in formats that go beyond the standard academic article or monograph. By looking at the work of philosophers who do this, the hope is also to demonstrate that philosophy is much bigger and broader than narrow norms of professionalization suggest. We will feature blogposts by established academics, as well as graduate students and academics outside of the tenure track. Our first guest post is in the form of an interview, and features Sophie-Grace Chappell (Professor of Philosophy at Open University), who tells us about her poetry. 

How long have you been writing poetry and fiction and other non-philosophical writing?

 Longer than I’ve been writing philosophy. The first philosophy I tried to write was A Theory Of Everything, a complete metaphysics, a catalogue of all existents, when I was about 9. But that lasted about three pages, and it was a one-off, because I went to the town library and discovered that Aquinas had beaten me to it; most annoying. And before that I had already written lots of non-philosophy.

I had various ambitions as a small child, including joining the “clever men at Oxford” that Mr Toad compares himself to in The Wind in the Willows. Specifically, I wanted to be Oxford Professor of Greek. I didn’t start wanting, intermittently, to be a Philosophy professor till I was about 16. And even when I did encounter the formal study of philosophy, at Oxford in 1984, one of my first main objections to it as a subject was that it wasn’t creative—it was about criticising, not making; it was pulling things apart, not putting them together. As an undergraduate I didn’t like that about philosophy; but then, I didn’t like it about lit crit either. It took me a long time to see, first, how criticising things is valuable too, and secondly, how, anyway, writing philosophy can be creative. And literary criticism as well.

Whatever else changed, I always wanted to be a writer. So, from the beginning, I wrote. From about seven onwards, when I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, there was lots of sub-Tolkien stuff, both prose and verse, and I invented maps and languages like Tolkien too. My made-up languages were probably better than my made-up worlds. But surely this is one of the main roots of being a writer—parallel in its way to one root of being a musician, I suppose. You read things and you think “That’s marvellous, could I do that? Or anything like it?”

Probably it was partly Tolkien’s fault, and partly the Lake District’s, that as an adolescent trying to write poems I got stuck on the Romantics, all cloud-capped crags and babbling becks and trumpeting torrents. I was, in James Stephen’s wonderful phrase, bleating articulate monotony. I needed, of course, to do something more than mere imitation. And I couldn’t find a voice of my own that wasn’t sub-Wordsworth or, worse, sub-Tennyson or sub-Tolkien.

When I was in the sixth form, so between 16 and 18, three things unstuck me. One was Mel Shewan, an English teacher at school whose persona was Geordie working-class down-to-earthness. Via Dylan Thomas, and William Blake, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Philip Larkin, and Ted Hughes, and R.S.Thomas, and Seamus Heaney, and Coleridge and Keats and Shakespeare and Yeats and, yes, even old Wordsworth and Tennyson, Mel Shewan helped us see that poetry is neither swords-and-sorcery, nor a stuck-up fop in a floppy shirt swooning over a snowdrop. It’s elemental, it comes from the dark places within you, from the cellars or Minotaur-labyrinths of the psyche, from the gut. But it’s also real, and this-worldly.

The second thing was the Mersey Beat poet Steve Turner, whose sharp, witty, hip, up-to-date, and (again) down-to-earth free verse showed me that poetry can be completely contemporary, unpretentious, straight-talking, streetwise—and funny, too. (I love comic verse, and I think in general it’s not taken seriously enough. The best comic poets are never just comic: Michael Rosen, Wendy Cope, Hilaire Belloc, Betjeman, Kipling, Pope.)

And the third was seeing Tony Harrison’s Oresteia at the National Theatre with my parents—my 19^th birthday treat in November 1983. That was one of the two greatest theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. (The other was the English Shakespeare Company in Southampton in 1989, all the history plays, Richard II to Richard III in a single day.) Harrison’s Aeschylus was a revelation to me of what a translation from the Greek can be. Again, it’s elemental, it’s verse from the gut, studiedly proletarian, very psychically immediate and powerful. And about as far from Gilbert Murray, God help us, as it’s possible to be.

I’ve been writing poetry, on and off, ever since. I haven’t really kept up other kinds of non-philosophical writing. There’s been a little writing about mountaineering, but only the odd bit, and what I wrote when for example I described this climb was really a prose-poem. If that doesn’t sound too pretentious. All I mean is that I wrote to get it across what it felt like to be there, and to climb that; like most things I write, the narrative subserves the feel, not the other way round.

I don’t think I’m cut out to be a novelist; not sure why, perhaps because of this prioritising of feel over narrative. When you write a novel you show, not say, in the sense that you pare down the description of feeling to let it emerge from the story. And when you write a film script you keep going past where a novelist stops paring down and pare down even further, to make space for the actors and the camera-work to fill back in. It’s not like that with poems; with poems, essentially it’s all there on the page. Poems come naturally to me. Novels don’t, and I imagine a screen-play would still less, if I ever tried to write one.

Maybe it’s also a lack of long-distance stamina. Apart from the translations, my poems tend to be short; if I write something long, it’s probably a philosophy book. On the rare occasions when I’ve tried to write a novel myself, what I write never stands up even to my own scrutiny; I reread and I think “No, people don’t talk like that or act like that; your take was so naïve, and I’m not sure what’s changed since you wrote this, but somehow, now, you know better than that.”

Or maybe it’s because, with a few exceptions (Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, A.S.Byatt, Evelyn Waugh, John Updike, E.M.Forster), I don’t myself much enjoy “the modern novel”. I love Dickens and George Eliot and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Victor Hugo and Moby Dick, but most things after that just bore me. Also some very canonical novels, in particular those of Hardy and Lawrence, I actively detest. It’s ideological, I’m afraid: I think both Hardy and Lawrence, in their very different ways, had quite preposterous world-views. And their novels are nothing without their world-views. One would, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, need a heart of stone to read the dénouement of Jude the Obscure without roaring with laughter. Which at least beats Sons and Lovers, where there’s not a laugh to be had in all its 350 pages of portentous, lugubrious, tortuous, ill-digested adolescent angst. Can’t be doing with it.

Also—the feel/ narrative contrast again—the things in modern novels that I do enjoy are very often the lyrical set-pieces: Moby Dick is I think the greatest American novel for just this reason, for Melville’s fantastic set-pieces. But then when I read the purple passages I’m going “Why not take away all this plot-flannelling, all this he-said-she-said yada-yada, all the tedious logistics of getting X and Y from A to B as the plot boringly requires, and just cut to the chase already? But you know, when you get to the chase, the fact that it’s typeset as prose is merely accidental: the chase is actually a piece of poetry.”

The Job Application Materials Arms Race (guest post by Shane Ralston)

Shane J. Ralston is currently the Dean of Wright College, Woolf University.  He was formerly the founding Human Resources Director at the American University of Malta and a tenured Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.

The Job Application Materials Arms Race

How many times have you read a job announcement, decided to apply, read the required application materials and then felt your heart drop with disappointment?  In the current job market, there is an arms race in required applications materials. (Besides an arms race, I’ve elsewhere called it a ‘paper chase’.)  Fail to submit one of these required items and you’re immediately eliminated from the candidate pool. 

One common complaint against application material inflation is that search committees and human resources professionals are insensitive to the applicant’s time. More time invested in assembling and submitting job applications means less time spent with family and friends, conducting research and prepping for courses.  Why don’t human resources departments or search committees cap the number of required materials in the job announcement?  Why not request the bulk of the materials only after the first or second round cuts?   

Here’s a list of materials typically required of applicants in the initial round approximately ten years ago. (I assembled this list from my own job applications when I was on the market in 2008-9.)

1. Cover letter (usually tailored to the institution and the position, explaining how your qualifications make you a good fit).
2. Unofficial transcripts
3. Teaching statement
4. Writing sample
5. List of references with contact information

Teaching applied social epistemology in a critical thinking course - by Carolina Flores (Rutgers)

Caught in a Bad Epistemic World: Teaching applied social epistemology in a critical thinking course

Carolina Flores (Rutgers University)

The traditional critical thinking course couples an introduction to logic and inductive reasoning with telling students how to detect a litany of fallacies. In my view, we can do much better by our students. Students in critical thinking classes are mostly not philosophy majors, and they are likely in your class because it fulfills some university-wide requirement. The best a critical thinking class can do for them is help them develop applicable skills to reason better about the world outside the classroom. Being able to detect fake news, or explain to their relatives how to do so, for example, is much more useful for that purpose than knowing truth tables for logical connectives.

More generally, we should make space to discuss questions such as: who should we trust and why? What news sources should we read? When and why should we question science and medicine? How should we engage with people we deeply disagree with? How can we make sure that we are not caught up in epistemic bubbles or echo chambers?  These are questions in applied social epistemology, a discipline concerned with the social dimensions of knowledge in real-world cases.

If you need more persuading that you should add material on applied social epistemology to your critical thinking course, here are five reasons to do so:

1. It is directly applicable material. Your students will have constant opportunities to return to this material. It is relevant every time you open social media, find yourself in a political disagreement, or check the news. This both makes it more useful for students and more likely that they will learn, given constant opportunities for reinforcement (especially if your class explicitly articulates such applications).
2. It brings up heavy-weight philosophical questions in a friendly guise. Questions about whether we should trust specific pundits or news sources and why, how we can know we are not in an echo chamber, why it is generally good to trust science though scientific findings despite bad science, and so on, are common-sensical questions that students might have thought of themselves, or which are easy to motivate. But they also get you close to traditional philosophical questions about the nature and value of trust, Cartesian skepticism, the nature of reasonable doubt, and so on. This means that this is a great way to get students to actually do philosophy in your class, applying the logic and argumentation skills a critical thinking class should help them develop and maybe motivating them to take more philosophy courses. (see Thi Nguyen’s twitter thread for more on this)
3. Students like this material and engage in the classroom. Because the material is applicable, it is easy for students to bring up their own examples. These examples are often funny or entertaining, which helps with classroom engagement. In turn, this makes this material fun to teach, and it helps you connect with students and get to know them better. It’s a win for you and a win for the students.
4. It provides opportunities to recap and apply classic critical thinking skills. Addressing questions in social epistemology requires careful argumentative reasoning, providing students with opportunities to practice their deductive argumentation skills. Considering problems with conspiracy theories, vaccine skepticism, and bad science requires students to return to material on inductive reasoning to detect what the problems with these kinds of reasoning are. If, earlier in the semester, you explicitly covered this material, this gives you a chance to reinforce that learning and show students why it matters.
5. Teaching applied social epistemology might make the world a little better. Here is a small dose of idealism. Imagine your students leaving the class with a good (or, at least, much improved) understanding of what a good news diet looks like, of how to detect fake news, of why conspiracy theories and science skepticism are dubious, of why they should make efforts to trust members of marginalized groups more than they naturally might, and so on. This is a win well beyond the classroom. It will make them more likely to form and maintain good beliefs and good epistemic habits. It will also give them tools to engage, and maybe even persuade, family members and friends who have fallen prey to some of these vices. In sum, helping students in this domain can make some difference to halting the spread of bad epistemology, which tends to seriously compromise democratic deliberation.

So You Think You Want a Tenure-Track Job? (Guest post by Liz Swan)

By Liz Swan (Real Estate Broker & Lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric, UC Boulder)

[This was originally posted at ChronicleVitae in 2016. Many thanks to Liz for allowing me to re-post it]

I wanted one, too. Badly. In fact, in 2010, I wrote an article for The Chronicle called “Message in a Bottle” in which I likened a Ph.D. sending out countless applications for tenure-track jobs to a castaway on a remote island, tossing messages out to sea in hopes of being rescued. But then, miraculously, three years later, I was offered a tenure-track job, and took it.

Exactly one year after accepting the position, I resigned from my first — and very likely, last — tenure-track job and eagerly coordinated my family’s return to Colorado. Here’s what I learned in the process, some of which I hope will be helpful to those currently in the depressing throes of bottled message tossing.

Loss of perspective. Being on the academic job market year after year — in my case, five years — means getting whatever employment you can along the way while holding out hope for a tenure-track position that may or may not come through. It’s akin to skiing downhill with no idea of how you’re going to stop at the bottom without crashing into a bunch of people. Weird analogy, maybe, but what I mean is that battling it out on the academic market year after year builds such a momentum, and you become so singularly focused on getting the job, that you lose all perspective. You don’t think about what it will actually be like when you do get it, and whether it will in fact satisfy your career needs and desires, not to mention be in the best interest of other people in your life like a partner and dependents. The pursuit itself is so all-consuming that it takes on a dangerous life of its own, everything else be damned.

 

Setting Boundaries: Personal & Professional (Guest post by MAP)

The following is a guest post by Elise Woodard (Michigan), Carolina Flores (Rutgers), Milana Kostic (UCSD), Angela Sun (Michigan), and Jingyi Wu (UC Irvine), graduate students who comprise the organizing team of Minorities and Philosophy (MAP). 

‘Boundaries’ has become a buzzword in academia. We often hear about the importance of setting boundaries and cultivating work-life balance, yet many of us still struggle to set boundaries effectively and confidently. Moreover, the language of boundaries is often not subject to explicit scrutiny, yet like other buzzwords such as ‘self-care,’ it is liable to be co-opted or misunderstood. 

At our Central APA session, Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) attempted to open up the conversation about how to set boundaries and how to talk about them. Here we share some tips on how to set, communicate, and think about boundaries in a salutary and non-individualistic way.

My Path into Project Management (Guest post by Katharine Schweitzer)

The following is a guest-post by Katharine Schweitzer, a former academic philosopher who recently transitioned to a non-academic career in project management, and who also kindly volunteered to be listed in my new Philosophers in Industry directory. Katherine's post seems to me a profoundly helpful step-by-step guide detailing the general kind of process that an effective transition from academia to non-academic industry can involve. I am very grateful to her for putting it together and encouraging me to share it here!:

By Katharine Schweitzer 

Many job descriptions include “project management” as a responsibility. Project management is also a profession. Learning about how to manage projects is useful in many domains of life.

The Project Management Institute defines a project as “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result.” A project has a beginning and an end, is carried out for a purpose, and is comprised of a series of related activities. As a graduate student or a university professor, you have probably managed many projects, such as:

1. 1. Applying for a grant or fellowship
   2. Creating the curriculum for a class and teaching it
   3. Designing and carrying out a piece of independent research
   4. Supervising a student’s independent research project, such as an honors thesis or independent study
   5. Establishing and running a research lab
   6. Organizing a conference or a conference session
   7. Creating and publishing a website for a professional organization
   8. Chairing a search committee to hire a colleague
   9. Chairing a committee to create a component of your university’s core curriculum

Many of my friends and family are engineers, and project manager has become an option in the professional advancement of engineers after they prove that they are competent individual contributors. I learned about the profession of project management from my engineer friends. When they told me about their job responsibilities, I thought, “I would be great at that!” Managing projects involves being attentive to details, communicating clearly and concisely with people at all levels of the organization, and gauging the interpersonal dynamics of the team members who are carrying out the project work.

In summer 2018, I had no technical qualifications in engineering or IT, but I had plenty of project experience after five years of being a philosophy professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. For three years, I considered leaving academia. In June 2018, I communicated to my department chair that I intended to resign my position as a tenure-track professor, effective June 2019. In my final year as a professor, I created and executed a plan to start a non-academic job in project management in July 2019. Here’s how I did it. I hope that sharing my story will help others if they are considering a similar career pivot.

On norms against self-promotion (Guest post by C. Thi Nguyen)

By C. Thi Nguyen (Utah Valley University / University of Utah)

The following is a post I made to Social Epistemology Network, a Facebook group that has become the de facto online hub for social epistemologists. I started out just wanting to suggest a small change in the social norms of the group — to encourage people, especially less well-known people, to post more about their work. But it evolved into a discussion of the unfair social impact of various norms of humility in our discipline. Basically: who benefits from the norms of humility, and who loses out?

(This post was originally composed on my phone, with a toddler in my lap, while supervising him on a vaguely educational app. This circumstance that may have resulted in some extra warts in the writing, but also more honesty. Take it for what you will.)

——

Hey all. I wanted to talk about the norms for using this group, to encourage better information dissemination.

Let me briefly claim some credibility first. I think this group exists because, at an APA a few years back, I met Sandy Goldberg and asked him if there was an mailing list or group for disseminating social epistemology Information, and he said, “You know, I don’t know if there is. That’s a great idea!” And a week later, this group was born.

This was super important to me because, at the time, I had zero connections into the social epistemology world. I had no ins to the conversation. I didn’t know what to read or what people thought was important. There was no place to find out about conferences. I would pick up random bits of information, but I was definitely not PLUGGED IN.

When this group started, I had a particular hope: that people would post all their new papers. That it would become a one-stop shop for finding out about new relevant publications. This seems particularly important for us, since social epistemology publications are scattered across all sorts of journals. And the group seemed to be headed that way for a while, but then the norms settled in a different direction. Most people now seem to be following some kind of norm against self-promotion.

Basically: I think this de facto norm is a bad one, and I’d like for us to talk about it. And I would like to throw my support towards a different norm. I will, as is appropriate, offer a quick social epistemology argument for this.

Here are two plausible norms:

The No Self Promotion Norm (NSP): you should not post about your new articles here, nor should you mention when you have a relevant article in another person’s query thread. This is bad self-promotion. The properly humble thing to do is let others mention your articles when relevant.

The Expected Publicity Norm: when you have a new article or potentially useful blog post, post about it once here. Also mention it when relevant on other people’s threads. No shame for basic self-promotion. (Perhaps there should be some shame for spamming many posts to the same article).

The Expected Publicity Norm seems standard in science networks on social media, and works very well, in my opinion. But philosophy tends toward the No Self Promotion Norm on social media.

But the NSP seems bad to me, because it preserves status quo social imbalances that are often arbitrary, unjust, or simply not useful. NSP best serves people that are already well known and well connected in the field. It makes it very difficult for people that aren’t already well-embedded in the community to make their work known, or to find out about new work.

Before social media, a lot of knowledge dispersal happened through whisper networks and informal social networks - like chatter at conferences. This is particularly good for people who are well-known, or who have ready access to various forms of casual professional contact. You have a major advantage here if you have good travel funding, or live in one of the metropolitan hubs for active philosophy, or already know tons of people in the field and chat all the time. But if you don’t have these advantages, you’re cut out of the information network. NSP is a norm that amplifies inequities — many of them arbitrary ones.

Groups like this one could help to even that out. They offer the hope of better and more equitable access to information and distribution for all. But when we adopt the NSP norm, we push things back towards the old imbalances. (Also: some people seem to have adopted a norm where they post about new work on their personal thread, but not here. But this also preserves imbalances in social connections. This group is nice because anybody can join and get access to the information.)

So: I think we should try to shift norms. It would be better if the norms were such that it was expected, normal, and almost obligatory to post your new articles, with brief description, so we can ALL keep track of all the posts. Creating better awareness of relevant articles inside our community is an epistemic good. (I think a lot about Karen Jones’ suggestion in “Trustworthiness”: that the fully trustworthy person works to predict other people’s epistemic needs and actively tries to fulfill them - especially when others aren’t yet aware that they have a need.)

And also: if you’re afraid that this would create too much traffic: if this ended up generating one or two posts a day with new articles, that’s a drop in the bucket. Do you seriously think that I’m going to be annoyed to see a daily new article SE article pop up between the zillion baby photos, COVID armchairing, and social media crap? I mean, this group is 100% voluntary and mutable and filled with people whose lives are devoted to this topic.

Posting your articles isn’t the noise; it’s the signal.

What I learned from leaving academic philosophy (Guest post by Samuel Kampa)

By Samuel Kampa

By the end of April 2019, my academic career was over. My on-campus interview did not yield a TT job. For personal reasons, I made the wrenching decision to turn down a one-year postdoc offer. Every other opportunity ended in polite rejection, impolite rejection, or ghosting. With mixed feelings, I applied for non-academic jobs and eventually accepted a position at an education technology start-up called Yellowdig.

My story is not exactly a page turner. So why am I telling it? I'm encouraging you—no, urging you—to consider a similar "alternative" path, especially in light of the inevitable recession to come. A year ago, "TT or bust" was a common but ill-advised attitude toward the job market. That attitude should be unthinkable today. COVID-19 is an accelerant to a fire in academia that has been raging for at least a decade. When that fire is finally extinguished, the landscape of higher education will be unrecognizable at best and decimated at worst. Philosophy departments will stop hiring. Universities will receive less funding from states and lower yields from endowments. Enrollments will shrink at an even faster rate. Driven by the necessity to teach at scale, colleges will increasingly shift classes online. One by one, non-elite liberal arts colleges will shut their doors. And all but the most elite graduate students will feel the pain of the contraction. You might have thought staying in academia during a pandemic was the safest course of action. You'd be wrong.

If my story matters, it's only because it highlights lessons I learned too late. Like many of my grad student colleagues, I knew less about what it took to get non-academic jobs than I thought I did. My current position is a product of dumb luck, charitable interviewers, and just enough personal preparation. Be smarter than me; learn these lessons now. My intention is not to scare you, but to inspire concrete action. And if I'm "catastrophizing", it's because graduate education really is a catastrophe⁠—albeit a very white-collar, first-world catastrophe. How you respond to this catastrophe will determine the amount of needless pain you'll experience in the near future.

Moving from academia to a think tank (Guest post by Jason Schukraft)

I’m a senior research manager at a small, academically-unaffiliated think tank called Rethink Priorities. I’m paid to conduct original research, much of it philosophical in nature, that helps charities decide how to allocate their resources. It’s not a career I planned for, but it’s a great job, and my doctorate in philosophy turned out to be pretty good training. The demand for the sort of work I do seems to be increasing, and newly minted philosophy PhDs would be a good fit for many comparable positions. I’m writing about my experience so that others might pursue similar opportunities.

My Alt-Ac Journey

When I was accepted to PhD programs in philosophy in the spring of 2010, I naively believed that becoming a professor was more-or-less a given. Over the next several years, I was exposed to a variety of evidence to the contrary, but through a combination of confirmation bias and wilful ignorance, I convinced myself that the base rate of failure I observed on the academic job market didn’t apply to me. Since nobody in the department was talking much about alternatives to academia, I never really investigated my options, and I certainly did not tailor my research interests to appeal to the non-academic market. (My dissertation is in metaphilosophy.)

In my final year of grad school (2016-2017), I applied to 50 academic jobs and was rejected by all of them. At the time, my wife was pregnant with our second child. I could have applied to even more jobs, but I wasn’t willing to move my family across the country for a one-year VAP or adjunct position with uncertain prospects. (I’m not certain I would have received a VAP or adjunct position even if I had tried.) I was pretty despondent and totally unsure what to do with my life.

I assumed I would end up in a boring, entry-level, nine-to-five office job, probably in the tech industry. (There’s a lot of that around here.) I heard about Rethink Priorities through a newsletter I subscribed to. I didn’t think I was well-qualified for the position, but Rethink Priorities is a remote-only organization and thus offered flexible work hours. As the parent of two young children, that really appealed to me, enough so that I decided to write to one of the founders and inquire more. He encouraged me to apply, and I ended up being a good fit.

Blogging in times of COVID-19

By Gottfried Schweiger (University of Salzburg)

At the moment most of us are sitting at home and are observers of events that are radically changing our lives and for which the outcome is open. The universities are closed and what remains for philosophers is online teaching, writing papers and books. As long as there are no childcare obligations that make all professional activities much more difficult and tedious, if not completely impossible, one might think that the COVID 19 pandemic does not change much for philosophers. Yes, there are no more conferences and jetting from one talk to another is no longer possible. Also the change to online teaching is challenging, but is possible in philosophy in principle, unlike laboratory-based teaching. My impression from my own experience and conversations with colleagues is that productivity is decreasing. On the one hand it is often not so quiet at home, on the other hand the overall situation is stressful, exhausting, even frightening for some. The COVID-19 isolation at home is not a nice writing retreat for most people. This can become a problem especially for early-career colleagues who depend on publications for job applications.

But since we are all thinking about the current situation and what is probably still to come, it is a chance for philosophy and especially for philosophical blogging. Many philosophical questions arise: Allocation of scarce resources, the weighing of different goods (health vs. economic losses), the legitimation of far-reaching state measures and surveillance. At least three debates are now needed: First, a public debate in which all sciences with their different expertise should participate. Secondly, internal debates within the discipline, including a debate in philosophy on the above questions. Thirdly, a debate on the role of philosophy in interdisciplinary and public debate and what role philosophy can play for the public right now. The COVID-19 pandemic has an existential dimension, which is also reflected in all kinds of practical advice on how to deal with it and reflections on the changes in our everyday lives. Questions about the meaning of life and one's own vulnerability now arise for many. This should also be a field for philosophy.

Publishing popular philosophy books (and a travel book during an international lockdown) - Guest Post by Emily Thomas

This is a guest post by Emily Thomas of the University of Durham.

I recently published a popular book, The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad. Written partly as a travelogue, it explores philosophical issues around travel, from the Age of Discovery to the present day. I learned a few things from writing it, and I hope describing them might be useful.

 

Why write a popular book?

Not as an easy route to career advancement 

Academic monographs aim at the highest levels of scholarship: diligent, rigorous world-leading research. Although popular monographs can evince a great deal of research and undergo peer review, I assume most do – perhaps even should - fall short of this highest level. The kind of precise, pernickety attention to detail required of the highest scholarship fits awkwardly with works which aim (at least partly) at making ideas accessible and engaging. If you can produce accessible, engaging and world-leading research, then congratulations - you can stop reading now. 

Academics write books for all kinds of reasons. To prove something, explain something, tell a story. Here’s a reason not to write a popular book: to land an academic job or promotion. At least, I believe this is true of countries with established ‘research excellence’ frameworks, such as the UK, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, and Australia. In these contexts (and many others) what matters above all else is publications in leading peer-reviewed journals and academic presses. Universities are not motivated to hire or reward colleagues engaged in other kinds of publishing: popular books are neither ‘essential’ nor ‘desirable’ criteria for academic appointments or promotions.  

 
Philosophers might want to write popular monographs to facilitate public engagement or societal impact. The UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework saw case studies built around books by Clare Chambers, Marina Warner, and Robert Macfarlane. However, this involves much more than just writing a book. Publishing is a one-way communication between you and your readers, whereas public engagement or societal impact requires two-way communication. (On alternative ways to achieve impact as an early career scholar, see here and here). 

Please do a bad job of putting your courses online (Guest Post by Rebecca Barrett-Fox)

This post first appeared on Rebecca's blog on 12th March 2020. We're very grateful to her for allowing us to repost it.

I’m absolutely serious.

For my colleagues who are now being instructed to put some or all of the remainder of their semester online, now is a time to do a poor job of it. You are NOT building an online class. You are NOT teaching students who can be expected to be ready to learn online. And, most importantly, your class is NOT the highest priority of their OR your life right now. Release yourself from high expectations right now, because that’s the best way to help your students learn.

If you are getting sucked into the pedagogy of online learning or just now discovering that there are some pretty awesome tools out there to support student online, stop. Stop now. Ask yourself: Do I really care about this? (Probably not, or else you would have explored it earlier.) Or am I trying to prove that I’m a team player? (You are, and don’t let your university exploit that.) Or I am trying to soothe myself in the face of a pandemic by doing something that makes life feel normal? (If you are, stop and instead put your energy to better use, like by protesting in favor of eviction freezes or packing up sacks of groceries for kids who won’t get meals because public schools are closing.)

Remember the following as you move online:

1. Your students know less about technology than you think. Many of them know less than you. Yes, even if they are digital natives and younger than you.
2. They will be accessing the internet on their phones. They have limited data. They need to reserve it for things more important than online lectures.
3. Students who did not sign up for an online course have no obligation to have a computer, high speed wifi, a printer/scanner, or a camera. Do not even survey them to ask if they have it. Even if they do, they are not required to tell you this. And if they do now, that doesn’t mean that they will when something breaks and they can’t afford to fix it because they just lost their job at the ski resort or off-campus bookstore.
4. Students will be sharing their technology with other household members. They may have LESS time to do their schoolwork, not more.
5. Many will be working MORE, not fewer, hours. Nurses, prison guards, firefighters, and police officers have to go to work no matter what. As healthcare demand increases but healthcare workers get sick, there will be more and  more stress on those who remain.
6. Some of your students will get sick. Others will be caring for people who are ill.
7. Many will be parenting.
8. Social isolation contributes to mental health problems.
9. Social isolation contributes to domestic violence.
10. Students will be losing their jobs, especially those in tourism and hospitality.

Teaching Bullshit and Assholes - Part 2 (Guest Post by C. Thi Nguyen)

“Awesome and Asshole”

For the rest of “Bullshit and Assholes” week, I was going to cover the notions of “asshole”, “jerk”, “awesome”, and “suck”. The “asshole” part involved comparing Aaron James’ account of an asshole, Eric Schwitzgebel’s account of a jerk, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ account of an asshole – using YouTube videos and Aeon pieces and blog posts to try to make it manageable. Still, the discussion of "asshole" did not go well, due to the (retrospectively now obvious) total overload of material. Also comparing three subtly different definitions of the same account is not a great idea for intro. Maybe one of you can come up with a better lesson plan for this.

But the “awesome" and “suck” class was fantastic, and students were far more into it than I expected. I taught Nick Riggle's Aeon piece on defining "awesome", "down"," and "suck". This piece later spawned a book, On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck. Reading the book definitely enriched my teaching, but everything you need to know is in the Aeon piece. Here, if you want it, is my lesson plan for that:

Practicing Academic Kindness in the Classroom (Guest Post by Philipp Schulz)

This is a guest post by Philipp Schulz, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) at the University of Bremen. It first appeared on Duck of Minerva on 17th February 2020. We're grateful to both for allowing us to republish it here.

Academic competitiveness and pettiness is alive and real. From expediting demands of the competitive academic job market, disrespectful peer review comments, to micro-aggressions and open hostilities at conferences – in particular to early career, women and/or people of colour scholars – there seem to be countless examples for an acute absence of kindness and empathy in the academy. Probably most of us, although to varying degrees, have been confronted with the unkind aspects of academic environments. In many ways, of course, these problems are embedded in wider structural problems of racism and sexism within the academy at large.

Fortunately, there seems to be increasing (albeit slow) recognition of the toxic practices of academic work cultures. As an early career researcher, I am particularly excited about some of the kindness that many of my peers are extending and the horizontal generosity that is beginning to spread across conferences, workshops and social media. Yet, I do believe that the (sub-)field of feminist international relations is particularly unique in that way, perhaps not unrelated to some of the disciplinary sanctioning and marginalizing that the field still experiences in the discipline more widely.

Teaching Bullshit and Assholes - Part 1 (Guest Post by C. Thi Nguyen and Imree Parma)

Teaching “On Bullshit”

by C. Thi Nguyen

I recently taught a "Bullshit and Assholes Week" in my introductory ethics class, and just had a lifetime peak teaching experience. It was for my first attempt at teaching Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit". Raw, pure, unrefined teaching ecstasy.

I was actually prepping for the class the day before and totally freaking out that I'd picked something too hard for gen-ed, intro ethics – that it was too dry and too tediously analytic. But it turned out to be a TOTAL DELIGHT. It is, in fact, a perfect way to introduce students to conceptual analysis. Because the article is, I now realize, this perfect escalation of gradually improving attempts at getting the right analysis of "bullshit," in a wonderfully teachable sequence.

First pass: is bullshit the same as lying? The answer: no, because there's plenty of bullshit (administrative red tape) that's not lying. Second pass: is bullshit pretentious lying? No, because some bullshit is pretentious, but not lying (excessively precious artisanal-signaling food). And some bullshit involves lying, but no pretension.

The moment the article really hit, for my students, is when Frankfurt proposes the account that bullshit is bullshit because it is sloppy. And the students all saw it at the same moment: that excessively precious artisanal-signaling food may be bullshit, but it is certainly not sloppy. In fact, it is bullshit because *too much care has been put into it," perhaps in the wrong sort of way. And so "bullshit" needs to be an abstract enough concept so that it encompasses some bullshit which is bullshit because it is sloppy, and other bullshit which is bullshit because it is too carefully crafted.

When the students saw it, they were, like, jaws agape in illumination and pleasure. I think they went from laughing at the fact that the professor was talking about bullshit, to laughing at how deep the analysis could go.

Teaching ethics to engineers

6 things to realize when teaching ethics to engineers

By M.A. (Mandi) Astola (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Recently, I had a discussion with 30 people about all our frustrations. There were people from all over the world, from all kinds of backgrounds. “Our colleagues do not understand us,” “people think we are just here to point fingers” and “and because of that we have bad image.” “Students ask me: why do we have to do this?” What connects us is that we teach ethics to engineers.

Luckily for us ethicists at technical universities, ethics as a subject is becoming more and more important in engineering curriculums. At my university, every bachelor student takes a mandatory ethics course. This is obviously amazing. But teaching ethics to STEM-students, especially as a non-STEM teacher, is also frightening. I wrote up a couple of things to remember when teaching ethics to engineers, based on my own experiences and the experiences of my colleagues.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Organizing good conferences (guest post by Alex Grzankowski)

The following is a guest post by Alex Grzankowski (Senior Lecturer - University of London, Birkbeck College):

I organize quite a few events each year and I go to more talks and conferences in a year than I'm comfortable admitting. Presently I'm the organizer of the London Mind Group but I also typically put together a couple of workshops/conferences every year and I help out on the edges with the London Aesthetics Forum. As a result, when I go to other events these days, I really notice the little things that bug me (like not having coffee in the morning or an overpriced conference meal that isn't very good) and sometimes big things that bug me such as having so many talks jammed into a day that the last thing I want to do by the end is think more and talk shop. I'm sure that I build into the events I organize various preferences of my own that aren't widely shared and that there are preferences I miss by not having them myself. And I suspect this is true for other event organizers. I'd be very interested to hear from readers what sorts of things have made for especially good conference/workshop experiences and what have made for bad experiences. I don't have in mind here huge events such as an APA meeting or a summer school that lasts for many days - those raise many of their own issues. I have in mind what seems to me a pretty typical event - a one or two day affair with a handful of speakers. As far as what makes for not so good experiences, I don't have in mind things that ruin events such as a participant who is a jerk or worse. Of course that's very important and knowing who you are inviting matters a lot, but I think it might be helpful to focus on the nuts and bolts of the event as such with an eye towards general conference/workshop input. I'm sure any feedback at all will be helpful for me (and I hope for others!), but below are some of the questions I've been thinking about.

-what time do you think an event should start and end?

-how many talks do you want to attend in a day?

-how many days should a workshop or conference last?

-how long should a talk last?

-how long should Q&A last?

-do you like it when there is a respondent?

-should a conference reception/dinner be on offer?

-how long should a lunch break be?

-how crucial is coffee/tea at the opening of the event?

-is a conference fee acceptable?

-have you been to an event with an unusual format? How was it?

Creating Collaborative Classrooms: Let them Eat Cake! (Guest post by Annie McCallion)

This is a guest post by Annie McCallion for our Unconventional Teaching Ideas That Work series.

Creating the right tutorial atmosphere
When I was an undergraduate, I was terrified of tutorials (or seminars - small group teaching classes). When I did dare to attend one, I would spend the majority of my time there concentrating on how best to avoid eye contact with the tutor in a manner which would most astutely convey just how much psychological trauma they would cause me if they were to call upon me to answer any questions. It is difficult to say explicitly what I found so off-putting about my undergraduate tutorials. It wasn’t the case that I had bad tutors – the vast majority of my tutors were dedicated teachers who worked hard to encourage student participation – moreover, I was fortunate enough to – for the most part – have perfectly friendly peers in my tutorials groups.

When I entered the final year of my undergraduate degree, I began running reading groups for marginalised genders in philosophy. These reading groups were held as part of the In Parenthesis Project, a research project which investigates the biographical and theoretical connections between a group of women philosophers – Mary Midgley, Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot – who were friends in Oxford during the time of the Second World War. Through the process of running these groups, it came to my attention that I was not the only person who was struggling to participate in tutorials, in fact, far from it. During these reading groups, we began discussing the aspects of our course that we each –in various ways – were struggling with. Tutorials, were a central subject matter and it became increasingly obvious that we each shared similar fears of being called upon during them, sounding ‘stupid’ or being told that we were wrong about this or that.

How to write a referee report (John Greco)

This guest post is by John Greco, currently Leonard and Elizabeth Eslick Chair in Philosophy at Saint Louis University, and soon in McDevitt Chair in Philosophy at Georgetown University 

I am sure that there will be varying opinions about how to write a referee report. In keeping with the spirit of this series, I here offer my own opinion, based on my own experience as someone who has written and read quite a few such reports. I have written them as a referee, of course. I have read some as an author, but many more as the editor of a major philosophy journal. It is this last perspective, I believe, that is most useful for present purposes. For referee reports, remember, are written primarily for journal editors.[1] That is, the defining purpose of a referee report—its raison d'etre—is to help a journal editor to make a decision about a submission. And that is what gives us insight into the criteria for a good referee report.

Already I have said something (at least one thing) that is substantive and controversial. That is, I don’t think that everyone would agree that this is indeed the primary purpose of a referee report. Many writers of such reports seem to think (or at least this is what I gather from reading their reports) that referee reports are primarily directed at authors, and for the purpose of improving the paper that is being evaluated. In my opinion, this is a mistake, and it leads to many of the problems that are typical of referee reports. In any case, below I will describe what I think are the essential elements of a good referee report, guided by my understanding that referee reports are supposed to help editors make a decision on a submission. Following that, I will go over what I take to be some common mistakes and unhelpful practices.

The elements of a good report.

In my opinion, the best referee reports have a few essential elements.

Teaching scepticism cross-culturally (Roger Clarke)

This is a guest post by Roger Clarke, Queens University Belfast

I've found myself teaching a class ("module", in the local dialect) on scepticism in Sextus Empiricus, Nāgārjuna, and Zhuāngzǐ. I do so, despite a complete lack of training in any of the philosophical traditions those three philosophers belong to. I think this might be interesting to others as an example of (a) teaching what you don't already know and also (b) including non-Western philosophical traditions without, I hope, either tokenising or taking jobs away from specialists.

Let me acknowledge something important at the start here. I'm a cisgender able-bodied white man. I even wear a beard. I look a whole lot like the stereotypical philosopher. Regardless of how much respect I deserve from my students, I have had to do less to earn it than other folks might. So, some of the strategies that have worked for me might not work as well for other teachers. I am, after all, describing here a style of teaching that involves the brazen absence of a certain kind of expertise usually present and generally expected in a teacher; for this to work, students must be willing to believe the teacher deserves their job and has a sound plan for the class.

Sweat Equity on the Philosophy Job Market

By Greg Stoutenburg (York College of Pennsylvania)

gstoutenburg@ycp.edu

In light of a recent post about basing one’s choice on whether to start a PhD in philosophy on the disvalue of not getting a tenure-track job, and a somewhat related post about choosing a non-tenure-track position over a tenure-track one, I thought I’d share something I have been thinking about for a while, which is my personal experience of four years on the philosophy job market. There is an abundance of job advice available to would-be philosophy graduate students and those late in their PhD progress, but very little of it comes with context that might help with figuring out what one ought to do. A lot of people with interest in philosophy have backgrounds like mine and hope to work their way on to the tenure-track. I now believe that such an approach is fundamentally misguided, as I will share in this story of what I did to prepare for the market that I have now given up on.

Since this is a personal story, I invite anyone who is interested to check out my website. It includes my CV and lots of job market materials: gregstoutenburg.com. You might use that information for comparison.

Writing philosophy papers – some reflections, tips and tricks (J. Adam Carter)

By J. Adam Carter (University of Glasgow)

It will be hard to follow up Neil Levy’s post in this series - he’s published over 200 articles! If my own remarks diverge from his, reasonable principles of epistemic deference suggest you should go with what he says rather than me! In what follows, I’ll give an overview of some of the things that work for me. I don’t mean to suggest you should do all, or even any, of these things. But if you run up against a wall and want to try something different, maybe some of this will be of use.

In no particular order, here are some things that, for better or worse, I both (i) actually do and (ii) am under the impression are pretty helpful.

Keep a Paper Ideas List

Ideas for new papers often strike unexpectedly (in fact, this is something I’ve published about, through the lens of virtue epistemology, here). The fact that new ideas can strike unexpectedly is entirely to be expected: the literature on the psychology of creativity tells us that the ‘Aha!’ experience of an insight often hits when we’re not actively working on a problem.[1](For an amazing story about this phenomenon, read about Yitang Zhang and the twin prime conjecture!) Given that insights are hard if not impossible to channel at will, I find it helpful to write down an idea immediately whenever the idea strikes. I keep a list on my phone (currently about 50 ideas jotted there—just a few short sentences for each, capturing the gist), and, when I’m ready to write a new paper, I go to the list and pick one. Of course, some of the ideas on the list will probably never be drafted (and that might be for the best—some are probably crap, or perhaps already covered by someone else!) But it’s helpful to know they’re there anyway.

The “job market" doesn't start post-PhD

This is a guest post by John Protevi, Louisiana State University

This post has two sections. In the first, I take a wide view at employment practices in philosophy departments in American higher education. In the second, taking that analysis in hand, I offer some advice to people considering entering graduate school in philosophy.

When philosophers talk about "the job market," they presuppose that the job market in philosophy begins post-PhD, that it’s all about people looking for a TT job. 

I suggest that we change our frame of reference on these matters, and specify that when we talk about "the job market" in this way we are discussing only a small segment of the complete system of employment for philosophy instruction in institutions of higher education. So I'd like to suggest we call the analysis of the complete system "the political economy of philosophy instruction." 

When we change the frame of reference like that, we see the context for the (post-PhD) job market includes post-BA labor of graduate assistants (either as TAs in charge of sections, or in charge of discussion groups, or as graders of essays) as well as part-time and full-time instructors with BA, MA, or PhD, and post-docs with teaching duties. 

To put it in a formula that retains “job market”: the *real* job market for philosophy teachers begins post-BA, so that PhDs are not just competing against other PhDs but also against anyone else who teaches philosophy, holders of the BA and MA included. 

When we talk about the "political economy of philosophy instruction" we can then explicitly talk about several factors that are only implicit in the discussion of the (post-PhD) "job market."

First, we can see the role of university administrators, who are, after all, largely responsible for the shifts in employment patterns in philosophy instruction. 

To an administrator, a section of Logic or Intro to Phil or Intro to Ethics or ... taught by a BA or MA is a section taught, and taught at low cost. This focus on administrators enables us to connect "job market" discourse with the analyses of the "corporate university," the "privatization of the university," and like matters.

How to write a philosophy book - the monograph as laboratory

This is a guest post by Donovan Schaefer, University of Pennsylvania

I’ve always thought writing was strange, and writing a book is the strangest of all. A book project is like building a little planet of words from scratch. It’s disorienting and exhilarating at once.

Common sense says that writing is a transcription of what’s in our heads. But that’s wrong. We write to figure out what we think. It’s a laboratory, not data entry. The intuitions that we have in mind about how pieces of information fit together look different when they’ve taken form in a document. Or, put another way, when we write we realize that our watery sense of how an argument will play out has to be given more definition and structure once it actually hits the page. In this sense, writing is problem-solving.

This is strange enough with an article, but book-length writing takes the dizzying self-surveying of one’s own mind and draws it out in extremis. The book spools out, folds back in on itself, becomes a sort of organism, with the different parts and components demanding to be connected and synced up just so.

This is part of the reason why rewriting existing material (from articles or book chapters) can be a mixed bag. On the one hand, the work is there and done. On the other hand, the milieu of the book changes how the material needs to be oriented. This shift is likely to be subtle rather than major, with each paragraph needing to be brought into alignment with the project of the book (which can’t not be different from the project of the article). I find the re-alignment work of bringing an existing piece of writing into the system of the book is always more than I expect it to be. That isn’t to say it isn’t worth it, but it takes a certain kind of headspace that’s different from writing or even ordinary editing. And the further I am from that initial piece of writing, the more likely I find the reworking taking up a disproportionate amount of time and energy.

As Max Weber writes, “[i]deas occur to us when they please, not when it pleases us. The best ideas do indeed occur to one’s mind in the way in which Ihering describes it: when smoking a cigar on the sofa; or as Helmholtz states of himself with scientific exactitude: when taking a walk on a slowly ascending street; or in a similar way.”

This haunting by one’s own thoughts seems to be proportionate to one’s level of immersion in writing. You feel it with an article, but it goes overboard with a book. Coming up with a system for catching these ideas when they fly by is indispensable for me. I have notepads everywhere I go (including by my bedside). Even if it seems so obvious that I don’t see how I could possibly forget it, I force myself to write it down anyway.

One of the strangest parts of writing a book is that the concentrated writing changes you as a writer even as you’re writing. I find I get a stronger feel for my own style (in that moment), my own limitations, and my own methods as I work. Besides, so much of style is about systematization. A stylistic device used once is a tic, used twice is a motif, and used three times is a statement. Writing long-form lets you build that interior in a way that you can’t with an article.

A theory of writer's block

Guest post by Anna Welpinghus, Technical University Dortmund

Over the last years, I have occasionally been struggling with writer’s block. It looks like this: I have an unfinished manuscript that I cannot bring myself to complete. When I work on it, I look at one of the many unfinished sections, write half a paragraph – maybe half a sentence, and that is all. I do not know how to proceed. At some point this condition stirred my intellectual curiosity. I was puzzled by the question, which ability I am lacking when I experience writer’s block. After all, I do know the language of my paper and I know how papers in my discipline are supposed to look like. I know the subject matter of my paper well enough. I am sufficiently motivated to get to my desk and start working on the manuscript. Why is it that I cannot write?

In this blog post, I will present my tentative answer to this question. In other words, I propose a theory of writer’s block. While its vantage point is deeply personal, namely my own experience, I think that the theory resonates with many others. I won’t claim that this holds for all writer’s blocks, however. Most probably there are other kinds of writer’s block. I leave open how widely applicable my theory is. The theory is in its early stages of development and I welcome feedback.

Other treatments of writer’s block that focus on academic writing often deal with fairly course-grained dysfunctions concerning writing: for instance, disenabling habits (e.g. Silvia 2007) or paralyzing attitudes towards oneself as an academic (e.g. Valian 1977). Although Valian and Silvia take different vantage points, some of the remedies they suggest are similar: namely to schedule regular time for writing and stick to that schedule. Silvia has detailed suggestions on how to do so. Valian also suggests to get rid of paralyzing attitudes towards oneself and one’s work. In contrast, Silvia does not recommend any soul-searching. I recommend both texts, especially for anyone who finds it hard to find time for writing. But following their advise only helped me so far. The reason, I think, is that their advice does not tackle dysfunctions during the writing process itself.

Start with an observation about writing: it involves a lot of decisions all the time. We have to decide how to structure a paper. We have to decide how to write a paragraph or how to formulate a sentence. In writer’s block this decision making process does not work. When I experience writer’s block, I am painfully aware of the myriad of possibilities of how to say things. I know that not all of them are equally good. I have to find formulations that are good enough to get the paper published (usually my goal), and I do not know how to do that. Since this is a truly painful state, I sometimes end up avoiding the situation. Blocks like these can stick with me for months, even years. Fortunately, they are also somewhat local. I am blocked with regard to one paper or a few of them. I am usually not blocked when I write emails and I am never blocked when I write notes to myself.

How I (Almost) Became a Philosopher of Cognitive Science

Guest post by Carl Sachs, Marymount University

My graduate school mentor once said that one’s academic career is shaped like an hour-glass: one’s interest grows increasingly narrow as one progresses through graduate school, then broadens slowly afterwards. (Writing a dissertation is the neck, which is why it is so emotionally difficult.) For some of us, it is only after getting tenure that the focus can slowly broaden; others at more teaching-oriented schools can broaden more rapidly. This story is about why I changed research interests and how I did so in order to produce a publishable paper.

For the past several years (after completing my Ph.D.) my research has focused on Wilfrid Sellars and the so-called “Pittsburgh School of Philosophy.” (I use this term with some misgiving but it is becoming more widespread.) I was particularly interested in the question as to whether intentionality and normativity can be “naturalized.” The criticisms I received on my first book led me to realize that I needed a much more careful engagement with evolutionary theory, cognitive neuroscience, and animal ethology. Fortunately I was already on good terms with philosophers who work on those issues – some were old connections from graduate school, others were people I had met at conferences. In addition to my real-world intellectual community I had also cultivated an extensive professional network on social media. Hence I knew whom to ask for advice about how to proceed.

These conversations – some in real-life, and many online – led me deeper into philosophy of cognitive neuroscience. Much of this was entirely new to me (I never even read Fodor until last year!) and much I had not read carefully since my early years of graduate school. This led me to take a renewed interest in enactivism, which I had not read since an early encounter with The Embodied Mind (Varela et al., The MIT Press 1992) in college led me to Merleau-Ponty and Continental philosophy. The question I found myself asking was whether the debate about representations in philosophy of cognitive science rested on equivocation about the word “representation”. One night I was talking with a philosopher-friend over drinks and found myself saying, “what we really need is a distinction between how brains process information and how we use language.” To which my friend replied, “Congratulations, you’ve rediscovered Sellars’s distinction between picturing and signifying.”

Being good at being good at philosophy

A guest post by Ian James Kidd, University of Nottingham

 Some years ago, a then-colleague would occasionally spot me sitting working in a coffee shop and join me to chat. Sometimes, he would ask about whichever paper I was writing, and often offer to take a look. After reading the first couple of paragraphs, my colleague would purse his lips, shake his head, and say, “No, you haven’t quite got it yet.”

What I hadn’t ‘got’ was the skill of crafting a good paper – a skill not only possessed but had fully mastered by my well-published colleague. Almost every paper he wrote soon appeared in the ‘top’ journals, so similarly mastering that skill would’ve supercharged my chances of securing a postdoc or a permanent job. Unfortunately, not once did my then-colleague offer any advice on the skill of crafting a paper, leaving me without a crucial skill – that of translating one’s philosophical ideas into the form of a publishable journal article.

I offer this recollection to illustrate what seems to be a crucial distinction between being good at philosophy and being good at academic philosophy. Sitting in that coffee shop, what I lacked wasn’t the ability to come up with good and useful philosophical ideas (one thing my then-colleague did, at the least, affirm). I lacked the specific performative academic competence needed to successfully understand and exploit the norms and structures of academic philosophy. Without that specific competence, my philosophical abilities were not able to do any professional work for me.

Clearly, there are many super philosophers out there, who can think widely, deeply, and clearly about aspects of existence and our place within it. The problem is that many of them may be good at philosophy but are not always good at academic philosophy – while they have a love of wisdom or craving to understand, what they lack are the practical and professional abilities to enact their philosophising within the accepted forms and norms of academia. Crucially, I don’t say this as a criticism of those philosophers - quite the opposite! My concern is that many good philosophers aren’t being helped consistently to also become good academic philosophers. Before speculating on what one can do about this, let me fill out the distinction a little.

Sustaining Activism

This is a guest post by Mark Lance, Professor at the Philosophy Department and Justice and Peace Studies Program at Georgetown University:

Early in my activist career, I had a mentor, Molly Rush. Molly has done an enormous amount in her life, but was most famous as a member of the first “Plowshares” action. She, Dan and Phil Berrigan, and others broke into a missile plant in Pennsylvania and poured their own blood on documents and damaged Mark 12a first-strike nuclear nose-cones. She was sentenced to five years in federal prison. I worked with Molly a couple years after her release and one day was saying how much I admired her courage. She insisted that this was not the right thing to admire. She felt called to perform this action, but insisted that sustained lifetime involvement was much more important and harder than bold, dramatic, performances.

She told me about, and later introduced me to, a woman in her early 60s. Mabel had decided in her 20s that she could devote one evening a week to social justice work. Sometimes she attended a protest; sometimes stuffed envelopes or worked a phone bank; sometimes she organized teach-ins. But she had not missed a week. In 40 years. (20 years later, when I was organizing one of the large mobilizations around the IMF/WB meetings, she emailed me with a long apology, because her doctor had forbidden her from coming to DC on her broken hip for the protests. In introduced her to a bunch of young activists over the phone.)

I’ve had a second career in activism for roughly 35 years. I have seen hundreds of passionate committed young people jump into the work, doing everything, 80 hour work-weeks, nights in jail, enduring verbal and physical abuse, inspiring the hell out of me and others. And then disappearing after a total burnout, never to be heard from again. I’ve also come to know a smaller number of folks who have made movement work an enduring part of their lives.

Reader submission: 'Academic Frustrations: Publications & Jobs'

The following is a post submitted by Rögnvaldur ('Valdi') Ingthorsson (Lund University):

Academic Frustrations: Publications and Jobs

—Valdi Ingthorsson

I recently came across an old post by Jason Stanley in The Philosopher’s Cocoon about the frustration of getting papers through the peer-review process (Stanley on Peer-Review). The post put its finger on a couple of things that have frustrated me for a while. First, why is it so difficult to get philosophically interesting papers published in high-ranking journals? To my mind, these journals seem to be mostly filled with papers that don’t do much more than recirculate received views, albeit in a competent way. Second, why does quantity and ranking still rule over quality in the hiring process? I have come to think the two are closely related. As you can figure, I am looking at this from the perspective of someone who struggles to get published and to get a job. I very much expect that journal editors and tenured faculty in hiring committees will not recognise themselves in the description. But I think it is healthy for them to find out how the whole thing looks from the other side (even if it is all biased and exaggerated, a possibility I cannot rule  out).

Impact and Engagement for Early Career Philosophers: Part III

"History of Philosophy: Podcasting the B Team"

by Peter Adamson

Almost exactly five years ago I launched a podcast entitled “The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps,” mostly because I listen to podcasts myself and wished that such a thing existed. I was listening to a lot of history podcasts, which have the advantage of being able to move slowly and linger over detailed accounts of people, events and cultures. I thought it would be great if someone were to cover philosophy like that, rather than leaping from one famous author to the next, as we usually do when teaching at university level, and without leaving out whole cultures (so far, in part with the help of co-authors for the scripts, I have covered Islam and India in addition to European thought, and will soon be tackling Africana philosophy). Arguably, this was a case of moving too quickly from “someone should really do that,” to “I should do that”; though I realized the podcast would be a lot of work, I underestimated how much of my time and energy it would take up. Still I certainly do not regret having embarked on it, and would encourage any academic to think about what sort of public outreach they might be in a position to do – if nothing else, the feedback you get from a audience beyond the academy makes it worthwhile.

Impact and Engagement for Early Career Philosophers: Part II

“Youtube videos and Metaphysics Consultancy”

by Jonathan Tallant

 For Part 1 in this series, featuring series creator Emily Thomas (Durham University) and Thom Brooks (Durham), see here.

Impact and Engagement for Early Career Philosophers: Part I

Introducing the Problem of Impact

by Emily Thomas (Durham University)

Impact and societal engagement are becoming increasingly important for early career philosophers. We are encouraged to apply for conference grants, research grants, even large project grants. Many of these funding bodies are not merely interested in funding research, they are interested in funding research that can positively impact society.

What’s more, many European countries have introduced university monitoring systems, including the UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Portugal, Italy, Norway, and Sweden. Some of these systems financially reward high performance, which may not just mean producing excellent research. It may also mean research that impacts society. In other words, research impact can lead to money.

If you’re developing new cancer treatments, or renewable sources of energy, the potential societal impact of your research is easy to see. It’s a lot harder to imagine how your work could positively impact society if you’re working on medieval theology, or the philosophy of art, or the metaphysics of time. With the support of an award from the British Academy, I’ve pulled together a short series of posts on ways that philosophers can achieve societal impact. Each of these philosophers have achieved impact in very different ways, which will - I hope - help us to think outside the box.

The first post considers blogging. Enjoy!

Emily

“On Blogging and Policy”

Podcast by Thom Brooks

Impact 1 - Thom Brooks FINAL

Guest-post on perceptions about different types of jobs

The following is an invited guest-post composed by Sam Duncan (Tidewater Community College):

Whether we admit it or not, we philosophers think a lot about how other philosophers view us and our academic positions. In fact, many of us often weigh this more than we should other considerations like the day to day reality of jobs and their larger impact on the world.  I worked as an adjunct and as a lecturer on a year to year appointment for many years and one of the thoughts that dogged me was that my professors and colleagues from grad school thought of me a failure. When I finally landed a full-time gig at a community college I couldn’t shake that thought that even though I liked my job, other members of the profession would view me as a failure. The reactions of some of my former professors only reinforced this. I remember writing one to tell her about the job and her reaction was basically “Well you deserve a better job but it’s a step up.”

The thing is, it’s actually a really good job by almost any objective measure. The pay is good, and my workload and stress levels are much lower than my friends working in research focused jobs. I also have a lot of autonomy in the way I do my job. In fact, not only does administration not meddle in how I do my job but they’ve been extremely supportive of my own ideas and responsive to the few concerns I’ve had as a faculty member. For instance, I wanted to offer a bioethics course here and a number of deans and other administrators did a lot of work to help me through the process and to drum up interest in the course once it was offered. This is a huge contrast to the relationship between the administration and faculty at the research focused school where I worked as a lecturer, which could only be described as acrimonious if not poisonous. And while I don’t have to do much research to keep my job, the college is extremely supportive of research. I get a pretty good travel budget and my dean is overjoyed when I present papers at conferences. So I can do research if and when I feel like it, but there’s none of the publish only to publish pressure that many faculty members feel at research focused institutions. To me at least that seems ideal. Why then would my former professors and others respond in a tone of commiseration? And why would I care?

Thoughts About Emotional Investment in the Philosophy Job Market

By Andrew Moon, assistant professor of philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University.

An important practice I learned while on the job market was to manage my degree of emotional investment. If you are too emotionally invested in getting some job, and you do this for many jobs, then the job market will crush you emotionally because you'll be getting the same rote rejections that everybody but 1 out of 300-400 applicants experiences.  Better, I thought, to just not emotionally invest at all. Rejection is hard when you’ve emotionally invested yourself.

I thought this way for a small period of time.  Then a friend noted to me that if I didn’t emotionally invest at all, then I wouldn’t put in the sort of determination and energy into my applications that they deserved.  I agreed.  So, what should I do?

Well, here’s what I did. There were the "schools I wasn’t particularly thrilled about but it's better to have a job than nothing" schools and the "wow schools! but I don’t have the right pedigree or publications or abilities or whatever, so they won't accept me anyway" schools. These were all worth applying to, but I normally put less emotional investment, time, and energy into those jobs. Somewhere in the middle were the jobs I would put more emotional investment into: schools I was both excited about and also thought I had a little more of a chance at getting than the rest. In the end, I’ll admit that I’d often be surprised about where I ended up actually getting an interview, and it wouldn’t always be at the schools where I put more time and energy into the application.  Still, this strikes me as good advice.

Here’s another piece of advice that compares the job market and romantic relationships. Put only as much emotional investment into something (or someone) as it (or that person) has put into you. In romantic relationships, one errs when one is already daydreaming about a wedding when the person hasn't even said "Yes" to your request for a first date. And the first date is the first-round interview. If you haven't gotten an interview, then you haven't gotten to the first date.

Therefore, all schools, before a first round is offered, should have very little emotional investment from you. For nearly all of my schools at that stage, I expected rejection, and I honestly didn’t even read most rejection e-mails beyond merely seeing that I was rejected. Still, you should submit an application (i.e., ask the person out) and put in due effort while doing so!  But with small emotional investment. Only if you get that first-round interview should you start letting yourself emotionally invest to any serious degree (and you can raise the time and energy you devote to that school), but even then, it should be pretty low.  You can start to ramp it up more if offered a fly-out interview.

Well, those were some thoughts about what helped me when I was on the market.  Maybe they’ll help you too.  Comments, disagreements, and other tips of advice are also welcome!

Guest post: Andrew Moon on getting a TT job after 8 years on the market

By Andrew Moon

(Research Fellow, Notre Dame) - starting TT post at Virginia Commonwealth University in Fall 2017

[This blog post is adapted from an e-mail update I wrote to some people who were supporting me while I was on the job market this year.  Some people suggested that it might be helpful to others.  This was my eighth year on the market, so it will more likely be helpful to those who have been on the market for a while.]

Last year, I had no on-campus interviews, but this year, I had four on-campus interviews, and I received offers from three of them (although one of them was not tenure track).  What was the difference between the two years?  I don’t know, but here are some differences.

1) A pep talk from Bob and Marilyn Adams last summer really inspired me to work with renewed vigor to perfect my job application materials.  Before that, I had sort of gotten into the mindset of, “It’s all just luck anyway,” but their believing in me helped me to think, “Yes, I can do this!  I can make a difference to whether I get interviews.”

2) I made sure, last Spring and Summer, to keep my research letter writers (my dissertation advisor and second reader) informed of my current research and to share my latest papers in epistemology (my AOS) with them.  This allowed me to not only get useful feedback, but also gave them more things to talk about in their letters.  In addition, I had a significantly revised letter from Dean Zimmerman, with whom I was working that year and who also had read my latest work in philosophy of religion (my AOC).

3) I revamped and worked extra hard on my teaching and research statements.  My teaching statement was shrunk from 3 pages to 2 pages, with my points being made more impactfully and concisely.  I made sure to get feedback from people I believed were reliable; each sentence and most words were given careful attention.

4) I deleted my dissertation abstract from both my website and my C.V. and replaced them with a book project (which happens to be based on my dissertation), in keeping with my being a young professional and not a recent graduate student.  I now have a book proposal and a book I hope to publish in the near future.

5) I’d gained three or four more publications in that year.

6) I added high quality pictures of me on my website.

(In case you’re interested, https://andrewymoon.wordpress.com/.  My other materials are there; maybe they will be helpful to you.)

7) I now had a postdoc at Notre Dame. (This was following a 2-year postdoc at Rutgers.)

8) Throughout the application and interview process, I regularly consulted the Philosopher Cocoon boot camp pages and Dan Korman’s advice (http://faculty.las.illinois.edu/dzkorman/Advice.html).

I don’t know what was most important, but I hope that maybe at least some of these points can be helpful for others who have been on the market.