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Salvatore Florio, currently reader in philosophy at the University of Birmingham, will be moving to the University of Oslo, where he will be associate professor of philosophy.
Professor Florio specializes in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and philosophy of mathematics. He is the author, with Øystein Linnebo (Oslo), of The Many and the One: A Philosophical Study of Plural Logic (OUP, 2021), along with other works, which you can learn about here and here. He also serves as Coordinating Editor of The Review of Symbolic Logic.
In addition to his position at Birmingham, he is also a professorial fellow at Oslo. He takes up his new position at Oslo in September, 2023.
The post Florio from Birmingham to Oslo first appeared on Daily Nous.
Alastair Wilson, currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, has accepted a position as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds.
Professor Wilson’s research is in philosophy of physics, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and epistemology. He is the author of The Nature of Contingency: Quantum Physics as Modal Realism (Oxford University Press, 2020), among many other works, which you can learn about here and here. You can read an interview with him here.
He takes up his new position at Leeds in September, 2023.
The post Wilson from Birmingham to Leeds first appeared on Daily Nous.
Simon Kirchin, currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent, will be moving to the University of Leeds, where he will be Professor of Applied Ethics and Director of the Inter-disciplinary Applied Ethics (IDEA) Centre.
Professor Kirchin works in ethics, and is the author of Thick Evaluation (Oxford University Press, 2017; open access), among other works, which you can check out here and here.
He takes up his new position at Leeds in January, 2024.
The post Kirchin from Kent to Leeds first appeared on Daily Nous.
Utrecht University has hired 11 new philosophers.
They have each been hired as “Universitair Docent,” which is a permanent position, pending a standard one-year probationary period.
(The following information has been supplied by Daniel Cohnitz, head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht.)
Uğur Aytaç will be appointed in the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Political Philosophy of Technology in September 2023. He will be a PPE Core Teacher.
Marie Chabbert will join the History of Philosophy group as universitair docent for History of Modern Philosophy.
Sanneke de Haan will be appointed in the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Ethics, starting September, 2023, while continuing her 0.2 FTE appointment as Socrates Professor of Psychiatry and Philosophy at the Erasmus School of Philosophy & Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam (funded by the Stichting Psychiatrie en Filosofie).
Jamie Draper was appointed in 2022 and will take up a position at the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Political Philosophy and Environmental Ethics, starting September 2023.
Chiara Lisciandra will be appointed in the Theoretical Philosophy group as universitair docent for Practical Reasoning, starting September 2023.
Uwe Peters will be appointed jointly in the Theoretical Philosophy group and the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, starting October, 2023.
Carina Prunkl will be appointed in the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Ethics of Technology, December 2023.
Janis Schaab will be appointed in the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Moral, Political, and Social Philosophy, starting September 2023.
Emily Sullivan will be appointed in in the Theoretical Philosophy group as universitair docent for Philosophy of Science.
Juri Viehoff will be appointed in the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, September 2023. He will be a PPE Core Teacher.
Sarah Virgi will be appointed jointly in the department’s History of Philosophy group and in Islam and Arabic Studies as universitair docent for Islamic Philosophy.
You can learn more about philosophy at Utrecht here.
The post Utrecht Hires 11 New Philosophers first appeared on Daily Nous.
Kenny Easwaran, who until recently was professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, has accepted a position as associate professor in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine.
Professor Easwaran works in epistemology, decision theory, and philosophy of math, and related areas. You can learn more about his research here and here.
He takes up his new position at Irvine this summer.
The post Easwaran from Texas A&M to UC Irvine first appeared on Daily Nous.
Carlos Gray Santana, currently associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, will soon be associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Professor Santana works mainly in philosophy of science, with an emphasis on environmental science, as well as linguistics. You can learn more about his research here and here.
He takes up his new position at the University of Pennsylvania in July, 2023.
Related: “2019 Popper Prize Winner Announced”
Stacie Friend, currently reader in philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, and Milo Philips-Brown, currently associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, will be moving to Edinburgh University.
Stacie Friend works in aesthetics, philosophy of fiction, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. You can learn more about her work here and here. At Edinburgh she will be reader in philosophy.
Milo Philips-Brown works in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of technology, and applied ethics. You can learn more about his work here and here. At Edinburgh he will be lecturer in philosophy.
Edinburgh also made two additional lecturer hires (at the junior level): Marion Boulicault (feminist philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of technology), a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Eli I. Lichtenstein (aesthetics, philosophy of science, environmental philosophy, history of late modern), currently a teaching fellow in philosophy at Edinburgh.
All four will take up their new positions at Edinburgh in the next academic year.
(via Michael Gill)
(Note: The original version of this post contained mistaken information about Eli Lichtenstein. My apologies for the error.)
To its credit, the Department of Philosophy at National University of Singapore, in a timely manner, emailed some applicants to its recently advertised open rank position to inform them that they were no longer being considered for the job. Unfortunately, the email addresses of all of the recipients of the rejection letter were visible in the “cc” section of the message.
The result was that over 200 people were exposed as having applied to the position.
For some, this is no big deal, for others, it is. It’s a kind of privacy violation, but as one reader of Daily Nous put it in an email, the error also puts some “scholars in precarious positions at risk, since many do not want their employers to know that they are applying elsewhere,” for fear of upsetting them, or giving them reason to not renew their contracts.
Once notified of the error, the search committee member responsible for it wrote to the affected candidates to apologize.
When contacted about the mishap, the Department also issued a public apology:
While notifying unsuccessful job applicants to our open rank position, the candidates were mistakenly cc’ed instead of bcc’ed by a search committee member. This was a horrible mistake on our part. It did not show respect for those job applicants who applied for our position; it was an egregious violation of privacy; and worst of all, it has potentially harmed many vulnerable members of our profession, particularly those who might be in precarious employment. Going on the job market is a stressful enough experience at the best of times; to our shame, we have made things unequivocally worse for those who have trusted us enough to apply to our position. There’s no excuse. We have to do better, and we will do better. We are reviewing our application handling procedures, including communication with applicants, to ensure that there is no repeat of this incident. We sincerely apologise to everyone affected by this error.
This is the kind of mistake that anyone is susceptible to making, and so perhaps all hiring departments should take a moment to review the procedures they have in place for communicating with job applicants so as to decrease the risk of these and similar errors.
David Bronstein, previously lecturer in philosophy at the University of New South Wales, last fall became Senior Research Fellow/Associate Professor at the Institute for Ethics & Society at The University of Notre Dame Australia in Sydney.
Dr. Bronstein works in Ancient Greek philosophy, and has interests in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, and metaphysics in Plato, Aristotle, and beyond. He was recently awarded a 2023 Future Fellowship by the Australian Research Council. Valued at $777,019 over four years, the grant will support his research on “Virtue with Aristotle: Recovering an Ancient Ethical Theory for Our Time” The project aims to show how Aristotle’s theory of virtue can guide our individual and collective attempts to live good human lives in challenging times. You can learn more about Dr. Bronstein’s work here and here.
Sven Nyholm, currently associate professor of philosophy at Utrecht University, will be joining the Faculty of Philosophy at LMU Munich, where he will be Professor of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.
Professor Nyholm works in applied ethics (especially the ethics of technology), ethical theory, and the history of ethics. You can learn more about his work here and here.
He takes up his new position at LMU Munich this summer.
(via Christian List)
Katharina Kraus, previously associate professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, is now, as of this term, associate professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University.
Professor Kraus works in the history of modern philosophy, especially Kant. She is the author of Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation: The Nature of Inner Experience (2020), along with several other works. You can browse her writings here and here.
(via Steven Gross)
Rachel Fraser, currently associate professor of philosophy at Oxford University, has accepted an offer from the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy at Australian Catholic University.
Dr. Fraser works in epistemology, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of language. You can learn more about her research here.
At the Dianoia Institute, she will be associate professor of philosophy.
Additionally, the Dianoia Institute has hired Tushar Menon, currently a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge, as a research fellow (equivalent to an assistant professor position). Dr. Menon works in philosophy of science and physics.
Professors Fraser and Menon will take up their new positions in mid-2023.
(via Stephen Finlay)
How has the 2022-23 philosophy job market looked so far?
In the following guest post, Charles Lassiter (Gonzaga) takes a look at the data, sharing information about trends in the number and types of jobs on offer, and about which areas of specialization are most sought after by hiring institutions.
(A version of this post previously appeared, in two parts, at Professor Lassiter’s blog.)
[photo by J. Weinberg]
Hey friends. We’re going to take a look here at the primary cycle (July 1 – December 30). This is when most job posting happens. Here’s a look at postings across all job types:
Remember 2020? Oof da that was a rough year. Anyway, we’re trending a bit higher than usual on junior posts relative to previous years. In fact, the trend for junior posts over the last seven years has been more jobs. Open rank, postdoc, and senior posts are down slightly but still within a normalish range historically. Visiting fellowships are up slightly, but still within a normal range. In case you want the numbers for junior, postdoc, open rank, and non-academic, here are those:
Let’s zoom in on junior positions:
This one is tricky to interpret. Trend lines (not included) suggest that the TT market has been trending downward over last 7 years, but that includes 2020, which is an outlier. Excluding 2020, we find that the market is trending towards having more jobs. Even so, it’s not a huge trend. The NSF’s Survey of Earned Doctorates reports that there were 399 new PhD’s in philosophy in 2021. So even though it’s an upwards trend, it’s not moving fast enough to accommodate all the new PhD’s.
So there you have it. The job market isn’t looking all that different from pre-2020 levels. Some slight increases but none significant enough to breathe a sigh of relief heading into the market. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the American Philosophical Association and grad programs need to put more time and energy into non-academic career paths.
What about areas of specialization (AOS)? Here’s the big picture:
A note on method: In cases where multiple areas were listed, I’ve counted those separately. So this isn’t a tally of all jobs on the market. Rather, it’s a tally of all the jobs advertised in one of the five main categories on Philjobs. So (e.g.) there are a hair under 50 jobs in metaphysics/epistemology. But some ads listed meta/epist or history of phil as the AOS they were looking for. Here, each of those was counted separately. I opted for this method of counting because I’m assuming that any disjunctions in AOS’s for job ads can draw from two different applicant pools: that is, that AOS pools are exclusive. (I know this isn’t always true but go with it as a simplifying assumption for the model.) For (for instance) a job ad looking for an epistemologist or an ethicist gets listed here as a job for an epistemologist and as a job for an ethicist. So if Jack is an epistemologist and Jill is an ethicist, the job ad counts as a listing for Jack and for Jill individually. In a nutshell, I’m counting jobs by AOS from the point of view of job seekers under the assumption that multiple AOS’s have mutually exclusive candidate pools.
Let’s zoom in on a few of these, starting with value theory:
Ethics dominates, followed by social and political philosophy. We’ll get to “other” in a moment. Sadly, phil of art is at the bottom with two ads.
Value_other is a catch-all for specific areas that don’t fit neatly into any of the other categories. It was a hodgepodge of seemingly grant-specific areas, e.g. citizenship, media ethics, etc. But there were 3 ads for AI ethics and 2 for ethics and tech. So there are more job ads for ethics and tech/AI than there are for phil of art or phil of sex and gender.
Let’s take a closer look at history and traditions to see what’s up there:
Carving up this data was a bit trickier. Some ads just had “history of philosophy” without any detail. Others said “non-Western”. For the former, I listed ancient, medieval, and modern as covering a generic “history of philosophy.” And for non-Western, I listed Asian, Africana, Indigenous, Indian, and Latin American as proxies. So again, keep in mind that these aren’t total job counts but rather (roughly) jobs for which one could apply if one were an expert in (say) ancient or Latin American phil. Given these assumptions, ancient is in greatest demand.
Non-western traditions are on the map, but not in huge demand. “Africana” showed up in 13 ads while “indigenous” showed up in four. Though it’s worth noting that Africana is in higher demand than a number of subcategories in value theory.
Now science, logic, and math:
Philosophy of science is leading the way with relatively few opportunities for other subfields. What’s up with the other category? This is a grab bag of: history of science or medicine or technology; AI; the metaphysics of science; postdoc ads that are too specific to classified anywhere else (e.g. a project on episodic memory).
Lastly, metaphysics and epistemology:
Seven jobs for philosophers of mind? Nine for epistemologists? Yeesh. what’s in the “other” category? Five philosophy of technology positions, a social epistemology, and a couple of animal cognition.
What’s interesting about this from my view is when there are repeated instances in the “other” category. This suggests the emergence of an important subfield that isn’t yet counted among the standard options, or at least not in any obvious way. Decision theory has a subcategory on Philjobs, but philosophy of technology doesn’t. Nor does history of science/STS, even though phil tech and history of science each had more ads than decision theory. I’d say that history of science/STS and phil tech are established subfields. A colleague of mine who works in phil tech once described it as fringe. Kirby, if you’re reading this, I don’t think it’s fringe any more.
Let’s now filter AOS by junior positions and post-docs. Here’s what that looks like:
So trends for junior positions largely follow that of all positions. Most are in value theory, followed by open and history/traditions. Things are a bit different for postdocs, with the greatest number of positions being advertised as open.
In talking with my friend Nader Shoaibi, I wonder if digging into the details makes the picture a bit drearier than the numbers here say. I’ll use myself as a test case. If I were going on the market, I’d apply for open jobs and jobs in philosophy of mind. I’d apply for everything but would really be looking at tenure-track jobs—that’s where the security is at. Filtering for those values, there are 36 jobs: 33 open and 3 in philosophy of mind. I got my PhD at Fordham, so let’s be realistic about my job prospects. I know, I know… that one person went from Oklahoma to Harvard. Fantastic for them but clearly an outlier. At a non-prestigious university, I can cut the Ivies and lots of R1s from the list. And let’s take jobs outside the US off the table because I’m not a superstar and a university outside the US is unlikely to pay for the costs of hiring a foreigner. That leaves me with 16 openings, all advertised as open.
That’s all to say that the numbers don’t look great in the big picture and things only go downhill when getting into the weeds.
I’m hoping to get some help soon for looking at AOS trends since 2015. It’s a lot of data to clean. But I’ll be sure to let you know when that’s available.
As always, if there are any other analyses you’re interested in, please let me know!
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