The Philosophers' Cocoon

Non-Traditional Paths into Philosophy (Guest post by Luke William Hunt)

This is the fifth entry in the Cocoon's series, Non-Traditional Paths into Philosophy, a series of guest posts by people who entered academic philosophy later in life or otherwise took a non-traditional path into the field. Today's post is by Luke William Hunt, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama. If you took a non-traditional path into philosophy and are interested in contributing to the series, feel free to email me at [email protected]!

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Don’t be an FBI Agent

Luke William Hunt

Here is one concrete piece of advice, for what it’s worth: Do not become an FBI agent as a way to break into academic philosophy. There are probably worse ideas (bank-robber-to-philosopher?), but surely FBI-agent-to-philosopher is near the top of the list of bad ones.    

My sense is that the best way to get a job in academic philosophy is to take a look at the Philosophical Gourmet Report rankings, and then be sure to do your doctoral work at a school that’s very close to the top of the list. Having an article or two in the Philosophical Review would be a good idea, too. I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say this approach gives one the best shot at getting a job in academic philosophy, all things considered. 

Because FBI-agent-to-philosopher is a terrible idea—and because the surefire path may not be a realistic option for a lot of people—this post is for everyone in between: You’re not a bank robber, but neither are you traveling the NYU-by-way-of-Princeton route. (Of course, I welcome reformed bank robbers and Princetonians into the profession.)

My guess is that most people are simply trying to overcome the challenges of becoming a twenty-first-century-philosopher—a decidedly radical career choice. Even if the challenges are reserved for those who are privileged - as those of us who read, write, and teach philosophy surely are – they’re no less frustrating. Some of the challenges I faced were unusual, but I suspect others will sound familiar.

When I was preparing to go through the FBI’s lengthy application process—leading to a spot at Quantico for New Agent Training—I was also studying for the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE). So I was drawn to academia from the beginning: Four months “off” every summer? Sign me up. It was a close second to Quantico, but that scene in “Point Break” in which Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze fight Anthony Kiedis on the beach made it seem like the FBI would be more fun than academia.

After four months at Quantico, I posed for a picture shaking Director Mueller’s hand receiving my FBI credentials and was sent into the field as an FBI special agent. I was in the Bureau for seven years, working cases involving everything from crimes against children and, yes, bank robberies, to terrorism and foreign corruption. It was a unique and valuable experience for which I am grateful. 

But I had my doubts. After my wife gave birth to our first child, the prospect of fighting gangs of surfer-bank-robbers began to seem less appealing. Some of my misgivings about the job were more idiosyncratic, including those related to my introverted need for space and autonomy. The FBI was (for me) a bit suffocating; I felt like I was losing my sense of self, so to speak.

This is a long way of saying that I thought I could reclaim some of my autonomy by leaving the FBI for academia. For starters, in academia—unlike the FBI—one is not routinely interrogated by a polygrapher about whether one is the next Robert Hanssen because one failed to lock one’s computer before going to take a piss. True story. 

There were of course more substantive worries, such as misgivings about the way law enforcement officers must handle confidential informants (whom officers use to secretly gather information and evidence in support of investigations). Although I do not think that all use of informants is unjustified, the practice is inherently dishonest and deceptive (and potentially dangerous for the informant). 

Suppose, hypothetically, I had an informant who was in a position to gather information or evidence about criminal or national security matters in another country. Suppose further that engaging in such operational activity would be dangerous (for example, if targets in the other country learned that the informant was an informant). Finally, suppose the informant desperately did not want to engage in such operational activity, including because the informant had regular, domestic concerns regarding safety and family commitments (not unlike myself).

Why would such a person agree to operate for law enforcement and intelligence agencies? One reason is that such agencies often have leverage over informants—such as evidence that the informant committed a crime. In exchange for gathering evidence, the officer might agree to ask the prosecutor to consider reducing the informant’s criminal exposure. In other words, a bargain is reached between the informant and the officer, even if the bargain is steeped in deception and dishonesty. Did the informant have a “real choice” given the nature of the government’s leverage? Was the government justified in subjecting the informant to the risk of harm in order to acquire evidence?

The broader point is that these situations troubled me in part because I could identify with the criminal subjects and informants I handled. That may sound odd. But even if our lives appeared to have taken dramatically different paths (which wasn’t always the case), I could typically see how I (or anyone) could end up in the informant’s position had things been slightly different. I was especially uncomfortable with the institutional power—the power to compel one to engage in dangerous operations relying on deception and dishonesty—law enforcement officers had over people who weren’t much different from you and me (aside from a few chance twists and turns in life).

These are some of the topics that became research areas when I made the jump to academia for my doctoral work at the University of Virginia.  Some of the same themes became important in my first book, The Retrieval of Liberalism in Policing, as well my new book: Police Deception and Dishonesty – The Logic of Lying.

A word about that jump from FBI agent to graduate student at a relatively late stage (I began my doctoral work when I was 33 and finished it when I was 37). It was a bit jarring to turn in my badge and gun at the Hoover building one week, and then find myself in a seminar on Plato’s Metaphysics a few weeks later. But I was fortunate to land in what I found to be a very kind and supportive community at the University of Virginia, both in terms of my fellow graduate students and the faculty—especially my dissertation supervisor.

I certainly wasn’t as cool or smart as the other graduate students, but they were all welcoming and patient with me as I awkwardly tried to settle in and knock off the rust. I suspect my biggest challenge is a familiar one to many others: A general lack of confidence and a feeling that you’re the least knowledgeable person in the room. I do think this sort of thing can improve with time and experience, but it can be especially difficult for us introverts. 

One of the things that helped the most was that I think I was able to figure out the angles. This will of course be a bit different for everyone. But in my case, it involved trying to make sense of my unusual background instead of turning away from it altogether. I tried to write about things I knew from experience—things that were interesting and important to me—with an eye toward showing why those things might be interesting and important to others.  And I tried to stop worrying about looking, sounding, and acting smart, which can seem to be half the game in philosophy.

Another important point is that I quickly understood the need to discard perfectionistic goals. I finished my Ph.D. in four years (my wife and I had mouths to feed), and I didn’t send my work to journals with a 2% acceptance rate. That would have been unrealistic and inefficient in my case, so I looked at my relatively modest goals and worked backwards. The “best” philosophy journal in the world wasn’t in the cards, nor was being a famous philosopher who people discuss in 200 years. But, well, okay.

Being a pragmatist is not always easy in philosophy, where we are naturally driven by ideals. What I do think is important—almost a necessity—in the philosophy racket is a sort of gritted-teeth-optimism: A sense that one will figure out the angles (whether one remains in academia or leaves) in the face of ridiculously bad odds that might include unfairness (bias regarding class, race, gender, ideology, and so on) or simply poor luck.  What else can you do—rob a bank?  

I haven’t said anything new in this post, but I hope that sharing my non-traditional career path (which candidly involved a significant amount of underserved good fortune, along with a lot of support from family, friends, and colleagues) helps others in some small way. Just don’t be an FBI agent.

Non-Traditional Paths into Philosophy (Guest post by Oisín Deery)

This is the fourth entry in the Cocoon's series, Non-Traditional Paths into Philosophy, a series of guest posts by people who entered academic philosophy later in life or otherwise took a non-traditional path into the field. Today's post is by Oisín Deery, Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow Macquarie University and Assistant Professor (on leave of absence) at York University. If you took a non-traditional path into philosophy and are interested in contributing to the series, feel free to email me at [email protected]!

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My Path into Professional Philosophy

By Oisín Deery

I remember being at a certain conference as a grad student. The two well-known philosophers I was chatting with during a break asked each other whether they’d ever worked at other jobs. One scoffed and said he hadn’t, while the other said she’d spent part of a summer in high school working for a picture framer. I began to feel anxious. When they turned to me, I said I’d been a lifeguard once in my teens and left it at that.

Why had I felt so anxious? I was two years into my PhD program, I was 39 years old (which few of my professors or fellow grad students knew), and I somehow thought I needed to disguise my age and my unconventional background from those people on whom my getting a job—if I got one—might depend. I was trying to fit into a world I knew little about. As a result, I was anxious partly because I was afraid I’d be found out, that I’d receive puzzled looks from these philosophers whose work I admired and perhaps make them feel uncomfortable. I’d worked at many jobs. So, I worried that if I regaled them with stories of working on oil rigs or running a business, they’d not only regard me as strange, as though they’d suddenly noticed I had antlers growing out of my head, but also that they’d think I was mocking their relative paucity of experience.

Maybe it was just me. Perhaps they’d have been fascinated. But I wasn’t going to take that risk. I was playing it safe, trying to fit in, putting big chunks of myself into storage.

I’m now 51 and I’ve currently got two jobs—a continuing position (tenure-track equivalent) in the philosophy department at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the philosophy department at York University in Toronto, Canada. It’s all worked out for me in the end, even though it took me years on the job market in postdoctoral and limited-term positions before I landed my job at York in 2019. I’m so grateful and happy to be a professional philosopher.

How did I arrive at this happy state of affairs? How did I even get to be at that conference, feeling anxious about being found out? It’s a long story. But I’ll try to be brief.

Non-Traditional Paths into Academic Philosophy (Logan Scott Mitchell)

This is the third entry in the Cocoon's new series, Non-Traditional Paths into Philosophy, a series of guest posts by people who entered academic philosophy later in life or otherwise took a non-traditional path into the field. Today's post is by Logan Scott Mitchell, a first-year PhD student at UNC Chapel Hill who is also a mindfulness instructor, musical theatre performer, and Certified Nonprofit Professional. If you took a non-traditional path into philosophy and are interested in contributing to the series, feel free to email me at [email protected]!

By Logan Scott Mitchell

My path to pursuing a PhD in Philosophy is quite non-traditional – prior to pursuing any type of higher education I spent several years as a professional actor, singer, and dancer in musical theatre. From childhood through my early twenties, performing was my entire life and identity. I dressed up as a “Broadway Star” for career day in the third grade, went to boarding school for two years to study dance, started working professionally in musical theatre at 17, and never even took the SAT.

I moved to New York City when I was 19, which sparked the beginning of my career as a (mostly) full-time musical theatre performer. I travelled across the country working in regional theaters, returning to New York only when I needed more work. I joined the stage actors’ union, Actors’ Equity Association, one year later, and by 2016 landed a role in an international tour of the musical West Side Story, where I was cast as a Jet (aka one the racist white guys). My big break!

Non-Traditional Paths into Philosophy (Paul Taborsky)

This is the second entry in the Cocoon's new series, Non-Traditional Paths into Philosophy, a series of guest posts by people who entered academic philosophy later in life or otherwise took a non-traditional path into the field. Today's post is by Paul Taborsky, a writing/composition Instructor at Centennial College who has published and been involved in academic philosophy as a relative 'outsider' without a graduate degree in the field. If you took a non-traditional path into philosophy and are interested in contributing to the series, feel free to email me at [email protected]!

By Paul Taborsky

I think the series on non-traditional paths in philosophy is a great idea. I suppose one could say that I have followed a non-traditional career path; I teach first-year composition at a Community College (in Canada), mostly to international students. But my real interest is philosophy. I don’t know if my story is of interest to anyone (or even appropriate, as I’m not strictly speaking a professional philosopher, although I have publications here), but I will outline it briefly.

I do have an undergraduate degree in philosophy, but I never went on to grad school. There are probably a number of reasons for that, some of which I am probably only beginning to come to terms with, but from an academic perspective the principle reason was that, as an undergraduate, I really had no idea what kind of philosophical path I wanted to follow. I was very interested in the history of philosophy, and almost all my course work was in that sub-discipline, but towards the end of my studies I began to be aware there was nothing that really stood out for me that could have been a potential area of specialization or inspiration for graduate school focus, much less a dissertation. It is hard to articulate exactly why I felt that way – it is probably a lot easier to explain why one might be interested in Kant, say, than to explain why no particular path was appealing, but that is how I felt. And how could one go to graduate school in such a state of mind? Or so it seemed to me at the time.

So, at the end of my last year, I had, for example, no ‘favourite’ philosopher (and I still don’t – I’ve always been puzzled by the way this is supposed to be a helpful way of thinking about philosophy), and no favorite ‘-ism’, no key issue or problem (well, not one that I knew what to do with, see below), i.e. no idea of a research programme at all, other than a general orientation towards the history of the discipline, as opposed to systematic philosophy, and what I guess could be called an ‘analytic’ mindset. I suppose I should have talked to someone or sought advice, or taken a more careerist approach, but somehow none of that happened. I was rather isolated as an undergraduate, and the only close friend I had at the time was in a different department (political science), so perhaps I wasn’t connected enough, but so it was. Also, I had started out as a physics major, not a philosophy major; I had originally planned to go into one or another branch of theoretical physics or possibly astrophysics. I think the general difference in outlook and thinking between science and the humanities might also have been a cause for some of my unease, as well. An anecdote might be helpful here: Once, at a party for foreign teachers in China (I was teaching English in China at the time; see below), I was approached by a middle-aged gentleman who was keeping to himself, apart from the others. ‘So’, he said to me, as I came into the room, ‘Are you a science guy or an arts guy?’. I was a bit taken aback by his question, but I explained that I was a bit of both, as I had initially majored in physics, but switched to philosophy. This fellow then said that he was from Melbourne, where he had taught Chemistry, and pointed to the largely younger crowd in the distance. ‘These people are all arts people’, he said. ‘I can’t understand them!’. So I could say that, despite being in philosophy, I remain largely, (but not entirely), a ‘science guy’ in my habits of thinking.

Non-Traditional Paths into Academic Philosophy (Nicholas Drake)

This is the first entry in the Cocoon's new series, Non-Traditional Paths into Philosophy, a series of guest posts by people who entered academic philosophy later in life or otherwise took a non-traditional path into the field. This guest-post is authored by Nicholas Drake, a PhD Student at Australian National University. If you took a non-traditional path into philosophy and are interested in contributing to the series, feel free to email me at [email protected]!

Nicholas Drake ([email protected]) 

I’m a New Zealander and a second-year PhD student at ANU, and have MAs in philosophy from Victoria University of Wellington and Washington University in St. Louis (WashU).

On my mother’s side I’m from Maimai, on the West Coast of the South Island, and my ancestors are Irish and English. On my father’s side I also have Irish and English ancestors and am of the Kāti Kuri hapū (subtribe), from Kaikoura, part of the iwi (tribe) Ngāi Tahu. I’m married, to Hannah Simpson, who is also a New Zealander. (For Māori, where and who you hail from are more important things about you than what you do for a living, so these things are part of how you formally introduce yourself.)

I started academic philosophy relatively late in life, beginning a BA when I was 40. I did a lot of different things before then, and it’s hard to know what to include in the space available; what follows leaves a lot out.

After I left high school, my focus was studying and teaching classical piano. During my 20s I became increasingly convinced I should be doing more to help other people, so stopped charging people for music lessons so money wouldn’t be an obstacle for poorer kids. I lived off whatever koha (donations) I received.

I increasingly wanted to do more to help others, so started Te Whiti-o-Rongomai House, a house for homeless people, in Auckland. Many people who came to live there came off the street, but there were also newly arrived refugees, people coming out of addiction rehabilitation, and people just at a loose end for some reason. Running the house was very difficult, sometimes because I didn’t know what I was doing or made bad mistakes in dealing with people. I was often extremely tired and stressed. I was able to help some people though, and that was very rewarding. Being able to help people have a roof over their head for a while, or a safer and more comfortable environment, felt very good. The two things that I was most grateful for were being able to raise funds to move over from Zimbabwe the family of a refugee who was staying with me, and spending quite a lot of time looking after the children of a homeless man staying at the house. They were wonderful children, and are now wonderful adults with whom I’m still in touch.

I was also involved in anti-war activism, and helped organize protests against the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, in which New Zealand took part. In a protest action shortly before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 a friend of mine (a Catholic priest) and I made a cross in our own blood on the floor of the US Consul’s office in New Zealand. After the massive demonstrations and other actions across the world failed to stop the invasion it felt like more direct action was necessary. I’ve never felt confident about that action at the US Consulate. It did mean quite a lot for the morale of some people who opposed the war, though. An Iraqi woman phoned me in tears and said, “Thank you for giving your blood for my country.” That makes it sound like much more of a sacrifice than it was, but it is good to know that at least some Iraqi people found the action meaningful in some way.

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 [email protected]. 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.