Reader comments

Two anonymous comments seemed to merit a separate post:

I. I would like to know if there are people outside of the profession -- i.e., without having a job, or being a current student, in the academy -- who attempt (successfully or not) to publish in respectable journals. Does this ever happen?


II. Does anyone recall the scandal about the wealthy former philosophy graduate student who paid some big-name M&E people to review his article? I think that happened in 2002 or so, but I can't remember the details.

Talent and perseverance win out...sometimes

Somewhat related to the last post, my understanding is that Eric Olson spent a long time in the wilderness, including a period of unemployment, before finally publishing his way into a tenure track job at Sheffield. (Is it an accident that he ended up working at a British university, where the ability to publish is even more prized than in the U.S.?) What amazes me is that Olson was able to get a book deal with Oxford while he was still unemployed. The fact that the preeminent publisher of philosophical books would give an unemployed philosopher's book a careful and open-minded look gives me reason to hope that this profession isn't all about pedigree and prestige, and that good work, no matter who produces it, will eventually be recognized and rewarded. Am I being pollyannaish? Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing more about Olson's story, if anybody knows anything. Eric?

Making it off the TT

One measure of professional success is one's academic rank and the prestige of one's institution and department: you know you've made it if you're a full professor at MIT. Another measure is the quality and impact of one's work: you know you've made it if you have publications in Nous, Phil Review, and Mind that lots of other philosophers are discussing. It's very rare to find somebody who scores very high on the second measure but very low on the first: there aren't a lot of adjuncts with articles in Nous that everybody is talking about. One reason for this, of course, is that somebody capable of writing really good, "buzzworthy" articles would likely appeal to search committees and would end up with a TT job at a good place. Another reason is that even if you are a brilliant adjunct, teaching 4-4 (or worse) and possibly supplementing your income with another job leaves you very little time in which to produce high quality work. But there are at least possible cases in which these factors are absent: imagine an adjunct who is independently wealthy and has a 2-2 teaching load in a good department, but because she needs to care for an ailing mother or whatever, cannot relocate to a better job. Supposing that our adjunct is really brilliant, would it be possible for her to become a significant figure in her field, all the while remaining an adjunct? Or is it just impossible to get taken seriously if you don't have a "real" job?

Practical philosophy

An email announcing the founding of a new philosophy radio show and institute associated with the University of North Dakota (details here) makes the following claim:

We at IPPL are committed to the belief that all philosophical research is relevant to day to day life (even the most obscure stuff) and that what is needed is a “translation” of the technical or jargon-filled work. General audiences will respond to what we do, we just have to get their attention.

No doubt there are certain bits and pieces of philosophy that might be of some use or interest to the man on the Clapham omnibus, but this strikes me as an outrageous exaggeration. You?

Hot topics

One advantage of being a grad student in a top program, it's been said, is that such students get access to cutting-edge work that might not appear in the journals for several years. It also seems obvious that journals are more likely to reject articles that they perceive as not being on the cutting edge. These facts, if they are facts, might seem to give students at top programs a very significant advantage over their less pedigreed brethren, since only they (and the faculty in their programs) would be in a position to submit articles on a given topic just when the journals really want to publish articles on that topic.

Do students at top programs really enjoy a huge advantage in this regard? If so, what can students at non-stellar programs do to minimize their disadvantage? Does fairness require that philosophers at top programs disseminate their current research more widely?

Graduate student -- faculty relations

In certain Ph.D. programs in the South, graduate students are expected to call their professors 'Doctor', while the faculty of course refer to the graduate students by their first names. This can't make the students feel good, and I can't help but think the practice inhibits their development into professionals who view themselves as their professors' equals. Are there other ways in which graduate faculties create distance between themselves and their graduate students? More generally, how were (or are) the relations between faculty and graduate students where you got (or are getting) your Ph.D.?

'Philosophy as bloodsport' redux

This brief piece by Norman Swartz is worth reading, or rereading. He claims that, unlike other disciplines, philosophy has a vicious streak that tends to alienate women (and no doubt lots of men), and in conference/colloquia settings leads to valuing the devastating "gotcha" point over thoughtful and helpful feedback, even if that "devastating" point looks quite innocuous after a bit of thought. I wonder whether any of you have stories of particularly bloodthirsty conference/colloquium presentations. Is it as bad now as Swartz made it out to be in 1994? And who is this G*** B*** Swartz is talking about?