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 marvan@ut.edu!
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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.
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