The Philosophers' Cocoon

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.