How Risk-Averse is Academic Philosophy?

“Philosophical inquiry thrives when it is conducted in a spirit that risks overreaching a bit,” yet “the current incentive structure of academic philosophy in the United States favors cautious and modest research agendas for early career philosophers.”

The journal Axiomathes is becoming Global Philosophy, and in a forthcoming editorial about the change, John Symons (Kansas) discusses a variety of obstacles to global philosophy. “Deglobalization” and the resurgence of nationalism is one kind obstacle, he says, but so is hyperspecialization and the pressure to conform to narrow disciplinary standards. Here’s the passage from which the above quotes were excerpted:

In the decades prior to the financial crisis of 2008, when Anglo-American philosophy departments were relatively financially healthy, a narrowly defined research niche in a fashionable topic could provide easy rewards in the early career of a young philosopher. With cleverness (or a good advisor in graduate school) one’s work could be crafted to satisfy the preferences of a manageably small number of specialists. Their approval was a necessary condition for professional advancement. Securing a tenured position in the traditional American philosophy department was largely a matter of adequately conforming one’s work to the demands of local experts in one’s specialization.

This model of how we certified one another as experts and the incentive structure that resulted, gradually cultivated a risk-averse spirit of caution and conformism among philosophers. In defense of this tendency, we tend to cite notions of increased professionalism, we praise the epistemic humility of modest research agendas, and we note the collective and incremental nature of philosophical progress. But less charitable interpreters might suspect that when young philosophers retreat into narrow niches they are simply adopting a strategy for professional advancement. Either way, the current incentive structure of academic philosophy in the United States favors cautious and modest research agendas for early career philosophers. Philosophical inquiry thrives when it is conducted in a spirit that risks overreaching a bit and welcomes criticism. Philosophy thrives when its creative, skeptical, and self-critical core is not subordinated to excessively cautious American-style professionalism or to equivalent demands from other local elites or traditions.

You can read a pre-publication version of the whole editorial here.

I’m curious if readers agree with Professor Symons’ description of contemporary academic philosophy as having “a risk-averse spirit of caution and conformism,” and whether, as Symons suggests we’re too risk-averse and conformist. These are not necessarily bad characteristics. Any successful discipline has some degree of conformism, for the continued use by subsequent researchers of extant methods on extant topics is one kind of evidence that we’re thinking in fruitful ways about worthwhile matters. Of course, any successful discipline also has some degree of disagreement and change, too. Do we not have a good mix of these? If we’re overly risk averse or conformist, in what ways ought we be less so? And how can we as a discipline encourage that?

[above image created with DALL-E]

2022-23 Philosophy Job Market Report (guest post)

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.)

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The 2022-23 Philosophy Job Market So Far
by Charles Lassiter

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: