The Philosophers' Cocoon

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.