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    • Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 3: Transferrable skills and concrete advice

      This is part 3 of a 3-part series of interviews with philosophers who left academia right after grad school or in some cases later. See part 1 to see what jobs they held, and part 2 on how they evaluate their jobs. This part will focus on the transferrable skills of academics. 

      The burning question of academics who want to leave academia is: What transferrable skills can they bring to the private sector? The responses of the seven people I interviewed clearly indicate that the skills that are transferrable are broad and fairly high-level.

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    • Searle on formal methods in philosophy of language

      Most readers will have had at least some exposure to John Searle’s interview by Tim Crane, which was published earlier this week. It was then hotly debated in the philosophical blogosphere at large (in particular at the Leiter Reports). Together with Peter Unger’s interview published roughly around the same time, it seems that the ‘old guard’ is on a Quixotesque crusade to chastise the younger crowd for the allegedly misguided, sorrow state of current philosophy. Now, I do think there is some truth to be found in what Searle says about the role of formal modeling in the philosophy of language, but his objections do not seem to apply at least to a growing body of research in formal semantics/philosophy of language. Moreover, it is not clear whether his own preferred methodology (judging from his seminal work on speech acts etc.) in fact does justice to what he himself views as the primary goal of philosophical analyses of language.

      Here are the crucial passages from the interview (all excerpts from the passage posted by Leiter), the main bits in bold:

      Well, what has happened in the subject I started out with, the philosophy of language, is that, roughly speaking, formal modeling has replaced insight. My own conception is that the formal modeling by itself does not give us any insight into the function of language.

      Any account of the philosophy of language ought to stick as closely as possible to the psychology of actual human speakers and hearers. And that doesn’t happen now. What happens now is that many philosophers aim to build a formal model where they can map a puzzling element of language onto the formal model, and people think that gives you an insight. …

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Cinema big butts’

      Last week I had a post up celebrating Chico Buarque’s birthday, and among other things I mentioned his relationship with young singer Thaís Gulin (I’m not sure if they are still together or not, but that’s not the point obviously). But it would be utterly unfair to portray her only as ‘Chico Buarque’s girlfriend’, and so to dispel this image of Gulin, here is one of her own songs, ‘Cinema big butts’. It is the strange mix of her own ‘Cinema americano’ interjected with her cover of the 1990s ‘trash-classic’ ‘Baby got back’. The result is at the very least  surprising and refreshing. It is the kind of song that provokes reactions of either love or hate, but in any case no indifference; to me, it is strange and compelling at the same time. So, ‘shake that healthy butt!’

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    • Analytic philosophy and rules bloat

      If I could go back in time and change the Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy anthology in one way, I would make sure that it included an essay on rules bloat.

      Nearly every role playing game suffers from this. At the outset the impetus is to present something that is easy for new players and game masters to figure out and play. After the game hits a kind of popularity threshold the only way to make new money on it is to produce expansions with new character classes and rule-based mechanics. To get people to pay the money, there has to be some sort of ludological advantage to using the new characters and mechanics. So if you just stay with the old set, at a minimum your characters will be underpowered.

      But each expansion makes the game more complicated, until it finally reaches a point where it becomes borderline unplayable for everyone (except for the Simpsons Comic Book Guy who loves this kind of thing). And it gets so slow. Where you could have had twenty combats a night in the unexpanded version, now you can only complete two, and you spent long increments of time thumbing through various books figuring out the proper algorithm for how the dragon-spawn Barbarian's grappling ability works during attacks of opportunity when the opponent is half submerged in water.

      Since the industry needs non-Simpsons Comic Book Guys to remain viable, a new edition* is then released, and the process starts all over again.

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    • Top Ten Reasons to Visit the PhilSci-Archive

      PhilSci-Archive-Advert(This is a companion piece to Top Ten Reasons philosophers of science should post their papers to PhilSci Archive)

      10.You can be the first to know what's new in philosophy of science.

      9. It's a fast way to survey recent work on any topic in philosophy of science.

      8. It's a fast way to find out who is working in any topic in philosophy of science.

      7. You can search on any keywords or parameters you like.

      6. It's a chance to help an author with a draft before it is too late.

      5. You can download complete conference proceedings.

      4. It offers one stop shopping for open access journals (more coming soon).

      3. It's easy to get to from anywhere.

      2. It's free.

      1. Not sold in stores. Available only through this exciting, time unlimited web offer.

      Bonus reason: find out whether rocks think.

      (Thanks to John Norton for most of this and Ken Waters for inspiration).

    • Aereo, Cable TV, and the Privatization of the Public Sphere

      In the most anticipated Copyright decision this term, the Supreme Court today ruled, 6-3 (opinion by Breyer, dissent Scalia) that Aereo’s service for watching broadcast TV online violates the Copyright Act.  Briefly:  Aero operates a large number of tiny antennas.  Subscribers pick a program they want to watch, and get exclusive access to an antenna.  That antenna then receives the broadcast in question, sets it up on a private folder for that user in the cloud, and then streams it to him/her over the Internet.  The broadcast networks sued, claiming that Aereo’s actions constituted an infringing public performance of their content.

      There is and will be endless discussion about this case, because it may very well have enormous implications for cloud computing (the opinion tries very hard to limit itself: it includes an entire section about why it doesn’t apply to cloud computing, and the argument hinges on an analogy to cable TV and specific statutory language adopted in 1976 to deal with cable TV).  But there’s something else more interesting, I think, under the radar.  I sort of saw it in the opinion, but it came into sharp focus in Scalia’s dissent, so I’ll start there.

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    • Job Placement 2011-2014: Departments with Relatively High Placement Rates (Updated 9/17/2014)

      As discussed in the comments at a previous post, I have been looking at department-specific placement rates. "Placement rate" is the number of reported placements*** divided by the number of graduates. I looked at reported placements between 2011 and 2014 and graduates between 2009 and 2013. I do not have data on many departments that reported placements in this time frame**, but of those 94 departments for which I do have data, 32 appear to have placement rates higher than 50% for tenure-track jobs and 51 appear to have placement rates higher than 50% for a combination of tenure-track, postdoctoral, VAP, and instructor jobs (both sets are listed below).****

      Update: I have removed the following departments from both lists because I do not have updated graduation data from them: University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. These departments may well have placement rates as high as these others, but the graduation data I have from them comes from the 2012 APA Graduate Guide, since they did not complete the 2013 APA Graduate Guide. If the department chairs respond to my email of June 10th with updated information, I will update their status.

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    • Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 2: What’s it like to have a nonacademic job?

      This is part 2 of a 3-part series of interviews I conducted with seven philosophers who went on to a non-academic career after obtaining their PhDs. For more background on these philosophers, the work they currently do, and the reasons they left academia, see part 1: How and Why do they end up there?  This part will focus on the realities of having a non-academic job. 

      One of the main attractions of an academic job, especially one of a tenured academic professor, is the autonomy (intellectual and in terms of time management) it provides. However, there are downsides as well: the increasing pressure to churn out publications (which some of the respondents already alluded to in part 1, lack of support, and isolation lead to mental health problems in some academics. So how do philosophers with experience in academia and outside evaluate the work atmosphere? 

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    • Sean Carroll on the Tyson/Kraus/Hawking Phenomenon

      here.

      and more from Sean in response to a query from Wayne Myrvold here.  Wayne is hosting a series of posts from Physicists on "Why they talk to philosophers" that was inspired by his guest post here at NewAPPS.

    • Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 1: How and why do they end up there?

      This is the first of a three-part series featuring in-depth interviews with philosophers who have left academia. This part (part 1) focuses on their philosophical background, the jobs they have now, and why they left academia. Part 2 examines the realities of having a non-academic job and how it compares to a life in academia. In part 3, finally, the interviewees reflect on the transferable skills of a PhD in philosophy, and offer concrete advice on those who want to consider a job outside of academia. 

      Does having a PhD in philosophy mean your work opportunities have narrowed down to the academic job market? This assumption seems widespread, for example, a recent Guardian article declares that programs should accept fewer graduate students as there aren’t enough academic jobs for all those PhDs. Yet academic skills are transferrable: philosophy PhDs are independent thinkers who can synthesize and handle large bodies of complex information, write persuasively as they apply for grants, and they can speak for diverse kinds of audiences. 

      How do those skills translate concretely into the non-academic job market? To get a clearer picture of this, I conducted interviews with 7 philosophers who work outside of academia. They are working as consultant, software engineers, ontologist (not the philosophical sense of ontology), television writer, self-employed counselor, and government statistician. Some were already actively considering non-academic employment as graduate students, for others the decision came later—for one informant, after he received tenure. 

      These are all success stories. They are not intended to be a balanced representation of the jobs former academics hold. Success stories can provide a counterweight to the steady drizzle of testimonies of academic disappointment, where the inability to land a tenure track position is invariably couched in terms of personal failure, uncertainty, unhappiness and financial precarity. In this first part, I focus on what kinds of jobs the respondents hold, and how they ended up in non-academic jobs in the public and private sector. Why did they leave academia? What steps did they concretely take to get their current position? 

      I hope this series of posts will empower philosophy PhDs who find their current situation less than ideal, especially—but no only—those in non-tenure track position, to help them take steps to find a nonacademic career that suits them. And even if one’s academic job is as close to a dreamjob as one can conceivable get, it’s still fascinating to see what a PhD in philosophy can do in the wider world.

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