The Philosophers' Cocoon

A guide for academic self-promotion on Twitter and other fora

This is an expanded version of a thread I did recently on self-promotion. Many academics find the concept of self-promotion on social media somewhat icky, but it is often necessary, especially for junior academics. I find self-promotion by others very useful because it gives me the opportunity to learn new things from them, especially outside of the fields I am working on. 

 

While it's possible to be obnoxious in self-promotion (a topic for another time, perhaps) I think many people err on the side of under-promoting their own work. Here is a list of what I deem best practices, by which I mean, practices that are most helpful for the recipient. Since attention is a limited resource, these practices help the recipient to more efficiently decide: is this something I could be interested in? Writing from the perspective of the recipient, I do not intend to speak for everyone but it's a datapoint you can consider. 

1. Where to promote? I am a fan of Twitter. Facebook etc. is also fine though they are mostly to people who already know you. Twitter helps you to also reach new audiences and expand your network. Put in your bio your scholarly interests, maybe your bylines (recent book published, journals published in). I tend to follow back people who put something professional in their bio (e.g., "Early modern philosophy", "Chinese philosophy", "PhD student at XX"), but it's up to you. 
2. Do not hesitate to use the "pin" feature on Twitter. You can pin one link and you can change it to whatever you want your audience to find. I've found so many wonderful papers and books because people pin them! Especially something that will appeal to potentially a wider audience, you should pin. My personal sense is that a piece of public philosophy in a good venue (such as Aeon or Boston Review) is more useful to pin than a specialist academic article, because you reach journalists and people from other fields this way. Monographs are always good to pin.
3. When you link to the paper/book you wish to promote, put a brief description. I'm likely not going to click on a bald link or "My paper in [journal] just appeared," unless it's centrally in areas that interest me. Better is 1-2 sentences on what your main finding/idea is.
4. Paywalls are horrible. Many people you are in conversation with are not academics and still want to read what you have to say (e.g., alt-ac people, journalists). It's good practice to put a link to a freely available version, such as a latest draft on PhilPapers or your own website. In a second, linked tweet, you can put a link to the published version. This might matter for Altmetric and also for those people who want to see the final published version.
5. If you want to go above and beyond, you might consider a little thread (of linked tweets) summarizing the main points of your paper. I know it's effort but it is effort that pays off.  That helps viewers decide if they want to put in the effort of reading the entire paper, especially if it is not central to what they're working on.
6. If the research is in collaboration with junior colleagues, and you are senior, here's also an opportunity to lift them up. This is especially important for grad students/postdocs e.g., "lead author is [twitterhandle]--see their website for the cool stuff they're up to!"  Similarly, you can tag members of your team.
7. Attention is a zero-sum game, but it always pays to give credit generously. If you work with communities e.g., Indigenous communities, refugees etc, also important to make link to any web presence they have and amplify their voices. 
8. Worries about how often to promote yourself? While it may start to look self-aggrandizing at some point, the fact of the matter is there is so much out there, so much competition for attention, that I think it is OK to repeat-tweet something that had little uptake (don't retweet, just make a new tweet). The pin feature also gets rid of this worry.
9. I like to tweet works by others I find interesting. While this seems like it competes with self-promotion it makes your profile a more interesting place to spend time with. What I've seen some people do (but I don't have the discipline for that) make a challenge of reading/tweeting a new paper every day for a set period of time. It is also just nice to help to amplify work you find valuable, also work you had no hand in creating.
10. When to tweet your new publication? To me it seems fine to pick the following moments: when the paper is accepted (note, I like to play safe and not when still minor revisions are pending, YMMV) you could write "my paper [title] just got accepted in [journal]. If you like a copy, DM me". Once it appears you tweet a link to the paper and your own archived copy (see above). You could even be cheeky and reamplify once it gets assigned an issue. 

There's a lot competing for our attention--while there's only so much research people read in a day it's important to reach the widest potential audience. We benefit from reading widely, especially outside of our normal areas.

 

Good synergy happens.  So don't feel shy to self-promote. 

Public philosophy is an oligopoly--and here why this is a problem

Some recent takes on the Enlightenment resonated strongly with the broad public. This includes Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress  (2018), and David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021).

I'm not going to write a detailed analysis of these books (I have done so for Graeber and Wengrow, which will appear at some point). Suffice it to say here, while I think there are some merits in both works, they also suffer from deficiencies in the conceptualization of what the Enlightenment is, its influences, and also the broader implications. 

And this is not a surprise, given that any scholarly domain of expertise requires significant research and experience, which neither of these authors can profess on the Enlightenment. Maybe you, like me, would love to see a book on the Enlightenment reach the big public that is written by an actual specialist in 18th-century western philosophy or history. Sadly, no Enlightenment scholar has been able to resonate so well with the public as these two works (if I am mistaken and there is a NYT bestseller book on the Enlightenment, please let me know!) 

This is a symptom of a larger phenomenon, an oligopoly within pop culture. As backed up with detailed data in this post by Adam Mastroianni, a few franchises (reimaginings, live-action remakes, sequels, same universe movies) dominate pop culture and the phenomenon has worsened significantly over the last decades. A few winners take up an increasing portion of the market share, leading to a decrease in diversity of output.

Sometimes philosophers are still asked "Why don't you do public philosophy?" as if this is a supply-side issue. It is not. There has never been more public philosophy available than at present, many of it is publicly available. Magazines such as The Philosophers' Magazine, Aeon, Psyche, and many others feature public philosophy from a wide range of thinkers. Podcasts such as Hi-Phi nation, Philosophy without Any Gaps, and What's Left of Philosophy  offer professionally produced, engaging and intellectually stimulating content. Individual philosopher YouTube channels make philosophy accessible to everyone, including Ellie Anderson's continental philosophy series, Greg Sadler's Speculative fiction series and Bryan Van Norden's Chinese philosophy class lectures. 

So, when the public turns to Jordan Peterson to look for life advice, rather than to philosophers, it is not because of the supply side. There is really no reason to shame, say, an Aristotle scholar into doing public philosophy in the hopes that her work will reach a disaffected teen who is wondering how to live the good life, and faute de mieux, turns to Peterson. There is already a lot out there (of course, we should welcome and support this hypothetical Aristotle scholar if she wants to do public philosophy!)

We should also recognize that there are very, very few academics who can make it as public intellectuals, for reasons that are totally unrelated to the intrinsic merits of their work, or even to their communication skills. 

What's happening is that public intellectuals are working in an ecology where a small number of winners get a disproportionate share in public attention and media capture. This is on the supply side part of a more general winner-takes-all mentality. For publishing with the four major fiction publishers, for instance, it was fine a few years ago to be a decent "midlister" (i.e., someone who sells books that make a profit for the publisher but will never reap high figures). But now, a beginning author must exude that ineffable quality of being a rising star, of a potential NYT bestseller author to even get a deal with an agent (and hence a publisher). As a result, many authors are querying in vain, and some have turned to self-publishing. Few self-published authors can break through into traditional markets, though several have a decent readership and make decent money from their work. 

Fortunately, as academics we can still survive and thrive as small fish. Our scholarly books get contracts based on their perceived academic merit rather than on sales potential (especially in academic presses, which are often heavily subsidized). And many of us do reach/have a significant platform beyond academia. This platform is valuable. We should support colleagues and provide institutional support for people who wish to engage in public scholarship. But it is important to note how skewed the field is, and to adjust expectations accordingly. 

It is worth thinking about why people are happy with this oligopoly--differently put, what explains the increasing homogenization in pop culture. Mastroianni speculates: 

As options multiply, choosing gets harder. You can’t possibly evaluate everything, so you start relying on cues like “this movie has Tom Hanks in it” or “I liked Red Dead Redemption, so I’ll probably like Red Dead Redemption II,” which makes you less and less likely to pick something unfamiliar. 

Philosophy is difficult. While the public struggle with philosophical questions on a daily basis (on e.g., the meaning of events in their lives, the abortion debate etc), trying to actively seek out philosophical resources that are publicly accessible is hard. People also have many other non-material needs, such as entertainment, comfort, a bit of joy, spiritual assurance, and philosophy is not a sure route to any of these things. This is why, although I think many people would benefit from engaging with philosophy, their bandwidth for it is very limited. Moreover, without media attention and platform, it is hard for the public to reach sources they might resonate well with.

I've got no easy solution how to fix this problem, but I think it is worth fixing.

We benefit from intellectual diversity in the public sphere. When diversity is mentioned, it is often in the context of viewpoint diversity (which often means that a few contentious polarized positions get a platform, e.g., on abortion and gender), but I'm interested in the broader phenomenon of a shared intellectual authority, as Helen Longino and other have detailed. 

It is no coincidence that many of the most high profile public intellectuals are at research-intensive universities, often Ivy League, where they largely compete with other similarly advantaged people for the limited attention from the public. Competition is fierce, which also provides bad incentives for giving unnuanced hot takes on recent issues. Public intellectuals at smaller colleges are sidelined, and we are the poorer for it. Public philosophers with a significant platform, who get 5-figure speaking fees (I know that this in fact happens!) should try to lift up more voices, especially when asked to speak about areas far outside of their expertise. But because the goods of being a high-profile intellectual are so significant (connections, money) there is little incentive to do so. 

I'd be interested to discuss what we can do to make more of the excellent public philosophy that is being done to trickle toward the general public. Contrary to perception, it is not a zero-sum game. If more people get interested in public philosophy, they might be tempted to engage with more public philosophical works. This would be to great mutual benefit, I think. 

Tips for navigating high-profile, public-facing opportunities as an introvert?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I am writing for a friend. Really, though! I have a friend who is a wonderful philosopher at a private R2. When they received tenure (recently), they were recognized by several of their external letter writers as doing “cutting-edge” work in their subdiscipline. They are starting to get requests from high-profile, mainstream venues to talk about their work and even collaborate (think: interviews at fancy interdisciplinary journals, books distributed by Harper Collins, requests to work with what I think are called “internet personalities” (lol), and an offer of funding to start a research center in their subdiscipline). Insofar as my friend wants their work to be widely read and impactful, this is all great! Except, my friend is strongly introverted. As such, navigating the high-profile and high-stakes social dynamics in these contexts is both overwhelming and intimidating. Which has me wondering if there is someone who can help with this part of the job.

Do some academics have agents? Or maybe professional assistants? Someone who can help navigate public-facing work and engagement?

As a shy introvert myself, I think this is a great query! My sense is that some philosophers who do high profile, public-facing work do have agents, I don't know much beyond that. So, I think it would be great to hear answers to the OP's questions. Do any readers have any helpful tips or experiences to share?

A query on the ethics of authorship

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a grad student writes:

What are the ethics of publishing a paper/idea that originated from someone else, given that they consent?

Suppose I came up with a paper for class X. The paper would contribute positively to the debate, and so there are good reasons (independent of the benefits to whoever is the author) for the paper to be out there. However, I don't want to publish the paper because I'm worried it might affect my career (e.g. it defends a political issue like abortion, or it's on a religious topic, or it takes a controversial stance on gender which could result in backlash, etc.). Suppose my friend/classmate/spouse, however, thinks the idea is great and would benefit from publishing it (e.g. they are applying to religious schools who appreciate a conservative stance on political issues).

In short, we think it is good for the community if the paper is published. It dis-benefits me to publish it, but benefits my friend. Given this, is it permissible to give the paper to my friend and for my friend to publish it?

We have two main ethical worries. One worry is that it is objectionable because it is originally my work and my idea. Contra this worry, however, it seems permissible to give my property to others. So, if I consent to giving the idea/paper, then the idea/paper should belong to my friend, who can then use it as his/her own property.

Another worry is that since the main bulk of the work is done by me, it is unfair that my friend benefits. Contra this worry, however, it is not unfair to me since I consent and perhaps I also benefit in other ways (e.g. I get to see the idea out there). In addition, the friend would also have to revise it (especially if major revisions are required after comments from reviewers), and so the friend still contributes.

What are people's thoughts on this?

I have to confess to being very puzzled by this query. The OP seems to be presupposing that the only morally relevant features of the case concern abstract questions of individual property rights and potential unfairness toward their friend. But surely these aren't the only morally relevant things: when one enters a profession (such as academia), one is bound by settled norms of conduct which are grounded in considerations of fairness and rights of others. For example, when one sells a product, one has an obligation not to engage in false advertising, as false advertising takes advantage of third-parties. By a similar token, when you enter into a university, you're bound by a code of student conduct to do your own work and not pass off others' work as your own--even if they give it to you. The same is true in academia more generally: if you enter into the profession, you are expected to publish your own work, not the work of others.

Another reader submitted the following reply:

Everything hangs on the details of the case. If your friend is taken a draft paper you wrote and then submitting it (even revised) as their own, then you have crossed a line. You should read about publishing ethics and scandals in science - in some countries scientists buy papers. This looks a bit like that. If on the other hand, you have drawn attention to a topic and your friend is now going to write something on it, that seems fine. Perhaps ask yourself: would you want this to be made public - including your involvement? If not, then do not do it.

Indeed, this seems exactly right. Perhaps the OP has a libertarian conception of individual liberty and property rights--I'm not sure. But even a libertarian thinks one is morally bound to keep one's contracts, and a decision to enter into a profession surely carries all kinds of explicit and implicit contractual requirements to obey professional norms, such as that people publish their own work. Finally, if the author doesn't want to publish controversial work under their own name out of concern for their career, there's surely a better option--one that many scholars have done over the course of history: publishing under a pseudonym (although it's a bit controversial, there's even a place for this in philosophy). But these are just my thoughts. What are yours?

Logic based therapy?

In our January "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Has anyone heard logic based therapy and is it legit?

I saw a friend who had become certified or something on social media and I am somewhat skeptical.

Honestly, I hadn't heard of this until now, so I looked it up! Apparently, it's a form of philosophical counseling, which I have heard before but don't know much about. Based on a cursory reading of the Wikipedia entry's section on criticisms and limitations, as well as a Google Scholar search, there appears to me to be a fair amount of theory on logic based therapy, but not much (if any?) empirical research on its effectiveness in treating anything. But again, this is just what I gathered from a couple of quick web searches, and I might be entirely wrong.

However, irrespective of the idea that 'therapy' is (I think) standardly understood as a kind of treatment for disease or illness, I like the idea of philosophical counseling for helping people to grapple with (e.g.) existential, moral, political, and social issues. As I think we see with many of our students (as well as laypeople who are interested in philosophy), a decent proportion of people appear to crave the kind of deeper analysis of life and the world that philosophy can offer--and for good reason: we all face deep existential, moral, spiritual, social, and political questions that are profoundly difficult to grapple with and which personalized guidance from a professional philosopher may very well be helpful regarding.

So, I guess--again, just offhand--I'm inclined to be a fairly skeptical of logic based therapy, but not so skeptical of philosophical counseling (understood not as therapy but rather as philosophical guidance and cultivation). But these are just my thoughts. What are yours?

Good public philosophy venues vs. ones to avoid?

Earlier this week, we discussed how public philosophy is perceived on the job-market. Perhaps surprisingly (to some of us, at least), most commenters seemed to think that public philosophy is a positive, at least if a candidate has a good record of peer-reviewed academic publications. As a follow-up to that discussion, I'd like to run a thread on these questions raised in our newest "how can we help you?" thread:

How are magazines like "Philosophy Now" viewed in the profession? Or others, like Aeon, Nautilus or The Conversation? Is there a ranking of prestige among these kinds of venues in philosophy? Ones that are good to publish in, or ones to avoid?

On occasion I peruse such magazines, however I mostly ask because I see people sometimes list articles they've published in these kinds of magazines as "publications" on their CVs. That strikes me as odd, and something one ought not do, (right??) - at least without making it very clear the publications are pop-pieces that aren't peer-reviewed.

Point being, I'm on the job market now and I'm curious how much these kinds of publications are worth on a CV, and how they should be listed.

I'm curious too! Which public philosophy venues are particularly good to publish in (or, at least, are likely to be perceived that way)? What about places to avoid? Why?

Public philosophy and the job market

An interesting question was raised on social media the other day about public philosophy counting against candidates on the academic job-market, the idea being that it is not considered 'serious' philosophy. Is this true? I assume that by 'public philosophy', the issue is publishing philosophy-related pieces in places like Aeon, Slate, etc. Does this kind of work really count against job-candidates? If so, why? Or, do (some or many) search committees look upon it favorably?

I guess my vague sense here is that doing public philosophy could be looked at unfavorably under certain circumstances--for instance, for jobs at R1's or if the candidate isn't also publishing more traditional peer-reviewed research in good journals. But my sense is also that public philosophy is probably also looked at quite favorably at other types of institutions, for instance, at liberal arts colleges and universities (whose administrations often care about having a 'public face'). Of course, it might also matter what kind of public philosophy one is doing, such as whether it is highly political--though I'm not exactly sure whether this would be considered a positive or a negative.

Anyway, I'm curious: do readers have any evidence that doing public philosophy is a positive or negative on the academic job-market? It would be great to hear from search committee members in particular, as well as from readers who do public philosophy!

'X and philosophy' books

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I was wondering what people think about contributed chapters to "X and philosophy" books. Are they just considered a 'popular publication' or are they closer to a contributed chapter to an edited volume? Are they peer reviewed in any serious sense?

Good questions! I contributed a chapter a few years ago to Westworld and Philosophy, a book in Blackwell's Philosophy & Pop Culture Series. I enjoyed writing the piece a great deal, and it was cool to have the piece featured on a major fan site--and in addition to being fun to write, I think it's good for our discipline to be engaged in public philosophy and outreach like this. Obviously, given that the series is written for the general public, the piece wasn't technical or very advanced. But I do recall it being peer-reviewed, going through one round of minor revisions.

As for "what people think" of pieces like this, my sense is: it depends. Presumably, hiring and tenure committees at R1's aren't going to assign much (or any?) weight to these pieces, but I know second-hand that people at teaching-oriented colleges and universities--including tenure committees and (especially) administrators--love stuff like this. Remember, at teaching-oriented places, the primary focus is on students. More down-to-earth, popular-facing pieces like these can not only interest students in our disciplines, but also be featured in college magazines for parents, alumni, and donors--particularly if and when the pieces are featured various places online, increasing the university's visibility. In terms of how they should be listed on a CV, I'm not sure there is a clear-cut answer. On the one hand, my experience is that they are peer-reviewed, and often 'do real philosophy.' On the other hand, they are pitched toward a popular audience and presumably not reviewed with the same kind of rigor as more professional-facing work does. 

What do you all think? How do you view these pieces, and how do you think they should be listed on a CV?

 

Kinds of writing (guest post by Kwame Anthony Appiah)

This is a guest post by Kwame Anthony Appiah (New York University) on reading and writing fiction, for a series of blogposts we are hosting on philosophers who write fiction or poetry (see here for an earlier installment).

My mother was an artist who became a writer because she found that it was easier, while raising children, to compose fiction than to paint. (A brief teenage conversation with my mother: “Mummy, why did you stop painting?” “You were born.” Guilty silence.) The first draft of my own first novel was written in about a week. For no recoverable reason I had imagined on paper the scene of a young man dying, probably poisoned. I showed it to my husband, Henry, who said: “Now, you have to explain how it happened.” He then set me up in the study of our sabbatical house in Ithaca and brought me sandwiches every few hours and regular cups of tea. Taking the first draft to a final version took longer, of course; and had the assistance of a splendid editor, the late Miles Huddlestone at Constable, in London. But I have never had another writing experience quite like that.

My mother’s writing didn’t proceed that way, either. Like most of my other books, her novels were made in pieces over a longish period of time, interrupted, in her case, by us children and, for both of us, by the rest of life. I think it’s true that fiction-writing can be done in the in-between times, when you can focus intensely for a few hours on making the next brick of the edifice. Novels—even the mystery novels I have written, which need both a structured unfolding of discoveries and an underlying set of events, a working plot—can be made in bits and out of order, then assembled later. I wrote mine by composing a murder to solve, one whose solution I didn’t know in advance, placing some characters into a context around it, and then moving their world forward and inventing slowly a way to make sense of the crime. Then, of course, I had to go back through what I had written and seed the clues and make sure people were in the right places at the right times. An odd process, but it worked well enough. But there are other ways to do it: one real novelist I know well plans his novels out in meticulous outline before he gets going.

Poetry, too, which requires great concentration, can more readily be done in unconnected blocks of time. (Wallace Stevens had a full-time job as an insurance executive, and still managed a Pulitzer Prize for poetry!) I published a poem once about doing philosophy, but otherwise the only poems I’ve published, since high school, were in a slim volume of family poems by my grandfather, my mother, my sister and me, that my mother produced many years ago. They are old-fashioned, metrical, verse, often rhymed. Some of them work for me like a diary, as a record of experience, as Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” must have been for him. I wonder about his famous assertion that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” I do not doubt that this was true for him, but for me poetry has often been a way of managing feeling rather than a spontaneous expression of it. But I agree with him that you can only do it in tranquility and after the event. And sometimes, at least for me, poetry is the expression of an attitude or idea rather than a feeling; as in two poems called “Books” and “Heritage,” about how tradition encumbers and enables, which you can see among the few verses on my website.

I have only ever published one short story, which came about as a result of an invitation from Melvin Dixon to contribute to an anthology written by gay men of African descent. For some reason, I never took to the form. I think it may be because I like closure, the sense of an ending, and in the modern short story that isn’t so much of a thing. Which doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy reading them. I do. But, for what it’s worth, my one short story was also possible to compose in bits and pieces, between teaching and writing philosophy.

Do my novels have anything to do with my philosophical work? Avenging Angel is set in Cambridge and has philosophers among the characters, but Nobody Likes Letitia is set on a remote Scottish Island, free of philosophers, and Another Death in Venice is also a philosopher-free zone … like Venice itself, mostly, though Giorgione’s Three Philosophers, one of my favorite paintings, was commissioned by a Venetian merchant. None of the novels has much real philosophy in it, though the philosophers in the first discuss a real philosopher’s puzzle, the surprise exam paradox. It’s more like the philosophy in Stoppard’s Jumpers, though: it’s meant to sound like philosophy, without actually doing any philosophy. If there’s anything in these novels relevant to my philosophical work, it is that they explore questions of identity. I’m not sure you could write a novel that wasn’t in some sense “about” identity, even Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities! (Strange fact: Musil wrote a PhD dissertation on Ernst Mach.) My protagonist is an upper-class English Catholic, an insider-outsider in the complex world of class and religious identity in Anglican England. I was raised as an Anglican, but not being white made the parts of my childhood spent in England, a sort-of insider-outsider thing, though I have to say that no amount of racial condescension ever made me feel out of place in the villages in the West of England where I grew up alongside my white cousins. A lot of the English poetry I love—a love I learned from my mother who loved it too—is, like “Daffodils,” about landscapes I love. I am writing a new kind of fiction, for me, now, started in the last month, about a childhood growing up across places. We shall see if it comes to anything: I get less done during the teaching term, but I’ll try to keep it moving ahead in those in-between times.

People want you to connect the parts of your life. The conventions of autobiography, though not, perhaps, of modern auto-fiction, don’t encourage you to say, “I did this, and then I did that different thing. No connection.” But I think I started writing novels precisely because it was so unlike writing philosophy. The disconnection was the point. It didn’t take away from my energy for philosophy; instead, it provided a respite from it. Serious philosophical writing is exhausting, and I have to be in the right mood for it. Writing fiction helped me recover the mood by taking me away from philosophy for a while, if you see what I mean. But the key to writing fiction, I think, is reading fiction. My mother placed a pile of her favorite novels on my bedside table in our home in Ghana at the beginning of the summer vacation, and we lived in a house full of novels; Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Galsworthy, Trollope, D. H. Lawrence, the Russians (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev), some Goethe and Flaubert and Hugo in translation, but also African novels by Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye and Ama Ata Aidoo and Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer.

I continue to read novels as much as I can, even though there is too much philosophy that I haven’t read and should be reading. It is a habit I can’t give up. And two years ago, as the chair of the judges for the Booker Prize, I read a hundred and seventy odd new novels in nine months, which was a wonderful but also a strange experience! Discussing them with my fellow judges was like being in a fabulous book club. But reading novels in order to rank them is an eccentric artifice. Only people who don’t understand literary criticism think it is a matter of grading stuff. (That’s what’s so odd about F. R. Leavis’s criticism: the only question seems to be, Is this part of the Great Tradition? … but I suspect I am being unfair.) This sort of grading gets in the way of really immersive reading.

The one writing task I do that involves finishing a complete “work” in a single session is my Ethicist column for The New York Times Sunday Magazine. I settle down, usually on a Saturday morning, and open the file of questions from readers that sits on my laptop and answer them usually in order, doing anything from three to ten at a time. Then I put them together in groups of about the right length—1200 to 1500 words. (I’m told the final length of the next column on a Thursday or Friday, which depends on arcane newspaper-layout mysteries I do not pretend to understand.)

One final thought, which is a point about reading fiction, not about writing it. There is a connection between my fiction reading and philosophy, which shows up through the presence of discussions of fiction in my philosophical writing. I find I learn a great deal about ethical life by thinking through the experiences of characters in the sort of densely realized worlds that novels imagine. Our philosophers’ examples are often very thin, schematic and sketchy; and that may be good for some purposes. But moral life is thick, dense, luxuriant. Philosophy that doesn’t recognize this can be of great theoretical interest: but it can’t do the thing that the heirs to Socrates, from Plato and Aristotle to the Roman Stoics, thought they were doing, which is helping you to live well. I’m not claiming that my mystery novels are much assistance there. But literary fiction—including mystery novels like the one I read last night, John Banville’s marvelous Snow—can be. I learned that at my mother’s knee.

Don’t Write “Public Philosophy”, Write Public Philosophy (guest post by Tamler Sommers)

This is the third installment of our series on publishing popular philosophy books, written by Tamler Sommers, University of Houston. 

Helen De Cruz invited me to write a post on writing for non-academic audiences in connection to my 2018 book Why Honor Matters – to give advice to early career philosophers about the process of writing and promoting a trade book.

Unfortunately, that experience isn’t the best model for this purpose. First of all, the “how it got made” story behind Why Honor Matters is too idiosyncratic. My podcast Very Bad Wizards (which debuted in 2012) attracted the interest of Russell Weinberg, an agent at a top agency for popular science books. Russell reached out to me sometime in 2014 and asked if I was interested in writing a trade book. I pitched him some topics – and the only one that excited the agency was honor. Next, I had to come up with a proposal. Trade book proposals are excruciating to write – for me at least. I tried and failed for more than two years to come up with a viable way to do a book-length exploration of honor. The topic was too broad, too amorphous, to bring into focus. I struggled with the tone too - I didn’t want to write an alarmist screed, I wanted the book to be upbeat, informative, to make readers rethink core convictions they take for granted…but also fun to read. I can’t stress enough how often I wanted to give up on this project, but Russell kept pressing me to get it done. Without that external pressure, along with a bunch helpful of ideas for revision, I would have quit years earlier. This was not a project I could’ve brought to fruition on my own.

And that was a big part of the problem. I’m convinced my struggles with the proposal were because I decided to write a piece of public philosophy without having anything specific in mind at the outset. I was doing this backwards, I knew the genre before I had the argument or even an idea of what I wanted to write about. I won’t do that again and I don’t recommend this approach to writing for the public. Before Why Honor Matters I started with a project I wanted to pursue, and the “for the public” side of it was almost incidental. My podcast (which led to the book) is a prime example. I wanted to do a moral psychology podcast not for public engagement purposes but because I loved podcasts, and I thought we could do it well. We do reach a wide audience - Very Bad Wizards gets well over 100,000 downloads per episode, and over 25 million in total. But we’re doing the show the way we want to do it and have from the beginning. My other public philosophy work, my interviews for The Believer magazine (which eventually led to two books of interviews), came about the same way. I wanted the chance to talk to researchers doing exciting work in science and ethics. My friend had just started a new magazine and she offered me the opportunity. I’m happy the interviews got some public attention but that wasn’t my goal at the outset.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been interested in reaching audiences beyond the small professional world we inhabit. I just think that the project itself should be your primary motivation, not its value or appeal as public philosophy. This is why until now I’ve mostly stayed out of the discourse on public philosophy on blogs and websites. “Should we write public philosophy” or “what is the value of public philosophy” are not good questions to discuss in general terms. The real question comes when you have an idea for a project, one that might count as “public philosophy” - should you devote your efforts to making that particular thing happen? And if you’re excited about the project, and you think you can pull it off, then who cares what people think about value of public philosophy in general?

I think debates like this are part of a more general tendency among younger academics to overstrategize or overthink their careers. In my view, success in this profession is too unpredictable to try to game the system. So do work you’re happy with and hope for the best. Back when I was publishing interviews and small popular pieces, some professors warned me the field wouldn’t take me seriously as a scholar if I did too many of them. As it turns out, my non-academic work was a boon for my academic career. The first person I interviewed for The Believer, Galen Strawson, ended up as the external member of my dissertation committee. My first academic book Relative Justice came about because Rob Tempio at Princeton UP reached out to me after reading 2005 Believer interview with Jonathan Haidt. The advance contract he was willing to give me helped me land the job I still have and love today. Why Honor Matters was the centerpiece of my file for full professor. Many of these connections were flukes, lucky breaks. It would’ve been crazy to undertake those projects as part of some sort of career plan.
Having said all of that, let me at least briefly perform the task that was requested of me: give some concrete advice to early career philosophers about writing for the public, and writing and promoting a trade book in particular.

The value of some wastefulness: robustness and serendipity

In academia, it's very common to think that you could have done more: work more efficiently, work better.

This perpetual guilt plagues all of us, particularly those of us on the job market, but even people with  tenured positions (which Covid-19 has also made less secure). 

Closely related to this idea that you could always have done more is the notion that you should optimize the time you manage to carve out for research. Job market consultants advise grad students and others on the job market not to waste their time doing such things as writing book reviews and other things with low CV value. You should be writing single-authored papers for top generalist philosophy journals! 

To this, I want to offer a bit of pushback. A bit of inefficiency and wastefulness is good. The idea that we should be hyper-efficient and streamlined is revealing itself as a failure on the level of society. In this article in Aeon, Barry Schwartz explains why efficiency is a dangerous idea: 

Why hadn’t we stockpiled key supplies and machines, built up hospital capacity, or ensured the robustness of our supply chains? The reason, of course, is that it would have been seen as inefficient and profit-robbing. Money spent on masks and gowns gathering dust in a warehouse could always be put to more ‘productive’ use in the marketplace. Likewise, employing more people than needed under ‘ordinary’ circumstances, or making products yourself rather than relying on international supply chains, would have been seen as inefficient. One lesson, then, is that to be better prepared next time, we need to learn to live less ‘efficiently’ in the here and now.

Giving philosophy its due?

A few weeks ago, a number of colleagues on social media shared the following piece, "Want a good job? Major in Philosophy", by Kristina Grob (University of South Carolina - Sumter). I think it's a great, concise summary of why philosophy isn't the kind of 'useless' degree many students and parents think it is, and in my experience information like this can really help attract majors. Just the other day, however, this piece appeared over at New Statesman arguing that it's "an offense against humanism" to try to rebrand higher education in terms of job-training. 

Like many philosophers I've spoken to, I suspect that giving students and parents information about how philosophy degrees can pay off is probably the best short-term way to 'sell the discipline': an important thing to do, I think, given the increasing number of philosophy programs and departments that are being shut down or threatened with closure. That being said, I really wonder whether it is the best long-term strategy, and for broadly the reasons the New Statesman piece points out: it plays right into the narrow set of values and priorities that philosophy and the humanities can get students to question--the latter of which is sort of the point of a liberal arts education: to develop well-cultivated citizens!

However, on that note, I'm inclined to think that the best kind of case for philosophy--at least in the longer-term--may be more than what the New Statesman piece mentions. The NS piece, after all, is not about philosophy per se, but rather higher education more generally. What does philosophy have to offer specifically, in addition to employability and personal cultivation? The answer, I'd like to suggest, is (broadly speaking) that the extent to which societies flourish or fail seems to be a matter of their animating philosophies.

Take for example ancient Athens. It was for a time the preeminent power in the Mediterranean, possessing nearly unparalleled wealth and power. And yet, as we see in Plato's dialogues and in the historical record (such as Pericles' infamous funeral oration), its citizens and political leaders became progressively corrupted by broadly the values that Thrasymachus defends in Book I and Socrates details in Book VIII of The Republic--the belief that justice is power ('might makes right')--as well as by the values that Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles all affirm in Gorgias: that the ability to speak persuasively (rhetoric) is the most important thing for young people to learn. The historical record here seems pretty clear: it was, broadly speaking, these philosophies that sowed the seeds of Athens' downfall. Athenians became so preoccupied with power and rhetorical ability that it enabled Pericles (whose rhetorical skills were legendary) to convince the populace that it would be a good idea to conquer Sparta--a completely unnecessary and reckless plan that set conditions for a plague (!) to decimate Athens, lose the war, and be taken over by the bloody tyranny of the Thirty Tyrants.

Why, then, should people value philosophy? Why should we fund it? Perhaps because in addition to making people good critical thinkers who can get jobs as well as cultivated people who can think about the 'big questions', we should care about it because philosophy really is socially important. Make no mistake about it: Nazism, slavery, colonialism, etc.--these were (and are) all philosophies, ones that have done untold damage. Philosophy, then, is not a luxury. Good philosophies can  improve civilizations, and bad philosophies can destroy them, leading to untold suffering. This, I think, is the deeper story we should be telling. It may well be a hopeless endeavor, of course, for broadly the reasons Socrates detailed in the Allegory of the Cave. But, for all that, I'm inclined to think this is the story we should tell: because it's a true one. Jobs are important. Personal cultivation is important too. But to focus on these things alone is, I believe, to vastly undersell the importance of what we philosophers do. History and the present alike make it all too clear: philosophy matters for the good of society and for the good of us all--and societies that fail to pay appropriate heed to this can and do pay a big price.  

Or so say I. What say you?

Contributing to society qua philosopher?

In our August "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

How can philosophers contribute to society at large? As a new grad student, I feel like I am missing the bigger picture on how philosophers can give back to society beyond teaching students.

I mean, the most obvious answer to this question is to do public philosophy--publishing well-reasoned, philosophical pieces on issues of public importance in highly visible venues (e.g. The Guardian, Slate, Aeon, etc.). Then of course you can volunteer for or otherwise work with public-facing organizations, ranging from think tanks to state or local UN Associations (the latter of which I did for several years, organizing public events and conferences in the Tampa Bay areas). But these are just a few ideas. I'd love to crowd-source more possibilities from readers in the comments section below!

My story of public engagement (guest post by Kevin Zollman)

This is the second installment of our series on publishing popular philosophy books. 

This is a guest post by Kevin Zollman, at Carnegie Mellon University, c0-author (with Paul Raeburn) of The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting: How the Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help You Deal with the Toughest Negotiators You Know--Your Kids (McMillan, 2017). 

When Helen asked me to write about my experiences writing a trade book, I realized that my story cannot be imitated.  Not because I’m an extraordinary talent that others couldn’t emulate, far from it.  Nor am I the most successful philosopher at doing public engagement, others have done a lot more.

Mine is a story with many accidents and lucky breaks.  But, then again, so too is almost every story of academic and public success. In that, I think there is something important: starting to become publicly engaged as an academic requires serendipity. You must recognize it when it comes your way and seize it.  I will tell my story and point out how easily I might have missed an opportunity that turned into another and another.  You can’t follow my path, but in seeing how much it twists and turns, perhaps you can come to appreciate the value of your own meandering.

The story starts, as so many do, with an email.  A young journalist for the local paper, Andrew McGill, reached out.  Andrew had taken a game theory class as an undergrad at Penn State, and always thought it had interesting real-world applications.  Now at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he had an idea: why don’t we write a “Dear Abby, but with game theory” column.  He knew he couldn’t do it himself, so he searched for local professors who taught game theory and landed on me.

Andrew and his editor, Lillian Thomas, asked to set up a meeting.  I chuckled at the idea and thought “this might be fun.”   I talked with them, and Andrew’s excitement for the idea was infectious.  I agreed to do a trial run.  They would get questions from around the office, send me a long list, I would choose ten and write answers.  They would read the answers, choose a few to print, and run it on a Sunday.  If it did well, they said, it might become a regular column in the paper.

It would have been easy for me to say no.  I was still pre-tenure.  This wouldn’t go on my CV, it wasn’t paid, and it wasn’t particularly high profile.  The Post-Gazette is a nice paper, but it’s not going to get national attention.  Beyond all this, I could have passed it off as something for someone else with more stature.  I wasn’t even the most senior game theorist in the philosophy department at CMU, much less at the university or in the city of Pittsburgh. If I wanted to say “no,” I had plenty of excuses. On the other hand, I wanted to connect with people outside of academia. This wasn’t the way I initially imagined doing it, but it was an opportunity. I decided I wasn’t too afraid of my colleague’s potential criticism.  This seemed like fun.  So I said “yes.”

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

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

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

 

Why write a popular book?

Not as an easy route to career advancement 

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

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

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

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.

Doing better for our graduate students, making a PhD in philosophy worth it

This story, by Rachel Williams, is simply entitled "A PhD in philosophy was not worth it".  The title reflects the contents well. The story's familiar, but that does not make it less sad:  Rachel Williams writes about the disillusionment, lost opportunities, low wages, and a profession that looks increasingly hostile and unattractive.  She lists the problems that plague the profession: the obsession with brilliance, the editorial buddy circles, publish or perish culture, the slim chances of getting a tenure track job out of grad school, or at all (after years of precarious employment), and the lack of support from peers or mentors. 

Suppose you make it in the profession. By 'make it', we will typically mean that someone is in their mid or late thirties by the time they land a tenure track job in a geographical area they will often not have chosen to live in, working on a 3/3 or even 4/4 course load, and earning a starting salary of anywhere between 49 and 76k (often the lower part of this range), which only slowly inches up over the years. While that is still a decent salary, you have to take into account the years of lower earnings and the risk in the market. 

What if you do not make it? Did you then just waste at least six years (at least, in the US) on graduate school that could have been spent better elsewhere? "You don’t really know what academic philosophy is really like before it’s too late." - Williams writes, regretting her lack of opportunities and lack of money in her retirement fund at age 32. 

The solution, some might argue, is to just have fewer PhDs in philosophy. But I'm not at all sure that is a good idea. If we restrict the number of PhDs, the barriers to entry to the profession will shift to earlier on in the process, and it will be more difficult for people without the cultural, economic and social capital (middle class, white, etc) to do a PhD in philosophy. Moreover, I think that a PhD in philosophy has value. I've interviewed people who went to grad school in philosophy who are successful writers of novels and have produced and co-written TV series,  as well as career coaches, statisticians, computer programmers, and  I was recently filmed for television series on science and religion by someone who studied (but did not complete) a Philosophy PhD. A Philosophy PhD is currently running for Member of the European Parliament (see here for an article in Dutch).  

I will be placement officer next year, so I'm thinking about ways to help support our grad students. Absolutely, if our graduate students see academia as their plan A, we should support them in that and help them to achieve this goal. We should be realistic about the range of jobs on offer (not every job is a job at a research-intensive, prestigious university; most aren't and that is fine) and we should help them to prepare and tailor their CV and materials for the places they want to land jobs at. 

But if our graduate students feel some hesitation at academia over time, it is important to recognize that and to support them in alternative career choices. Typically, in the humanities (though I am not aware of any empirical work on this and would like to hear about it), it seems to me people mostly start graduate school wanting to have an academic career. But over time, some grad students start doubting that teaching is for them, or that writing papers is for them, or that the combination of teaching and research really suits them. And then we should also support them in that. Maybe it is prudent to talk about non-academic placement in any case, just as a sensible plan B. 

Volunteering as a philosopher?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, Asst Prof writes:

I would enjoy a post on "volunteering as a philosopher."

I am passionate about reducing climate change (for example), but I am not sure how to jump in and use my skills as a philosopher to advance this cause.

I could of course just volunteer "as a regular person", but I am curious if any philosophers have been able to link up with charitable or activist groups and use their skills as a philosopher specifically--kind of like a doctor or lawyer doing pro bono work.

If so, any stories or advice would be a helpful inspiration to me and maybe others!

This is a great query. In fact, it's one that I would afford to hear some good stories or advice about myself. My own experience 'volunteering as a philosopher' is pretty limited.

A.I. ethics piece at Medium

My first stab at public philosophy, "We're programming A.I. psychopaths - and how to avoid it", is now up at Medium. Hope you all find it interesting!