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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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    • Practical deference: Does it matter?

      There are several variants of a list in circulation with skills our grandparents could do but the majority of us can't, for instance, 7 skills your grandparents had and you don't. Examples include ironing really well, sewing, knitting, crocheting, canning, cooking a meal from scratch, writing in beautiful longhand, basic DIY skills… What have the majority of us lost by not having these skills, which I'll call granparent skills for short, anymore?

      As Lizzie Fricker argued today in a workshop held in honor of Charlotte Coursier, trust in other people is common and is a pervasive element of human life. We defer to the knowledge of others (testimonial dependence) and to their expertise (practical dependence): we rely on experts to tell us what the weather will be like, to fix our car, to give us a new haircut. Often, this deference is shallow and dispensable (we could in principle do it ourselves), but it can also be deep and ineluctable, as when we rely on electricians and other specialists. 

      This division of cognitive labor provides us with enormous gains, but does an increased reliance on testimony and expertise of others also come with costs? Fricker feels we do not reflect enough on this question, especially as the extent of both testimonial and practical dependence seems have increased dramatically in recent years. People increasingly rely on Google rather than internally stored semantic knowledge, and they increasingly outsource practical skills – navigation with maps, dead reckoning, and compasses is replaced by user-friendly  technologies like GPS devices. 

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    • The Future of the European Polity II: Institutions (part two)

       Continuing from a post of a week ago where I set up the discussion of renewed European Union institiutions, including a limited from of EU government replacing the Commissioners and the Council of Ministers, composed of a Council of Europe appointed by the European Parliament according to the strength of political groups, and a Council of Nations composed of the government leaders of member nations of the European Union.

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    • First successful British punk single

      The drum sound on this is a thing of wonder.

      I wish George Martin had achieved something like it for Ringo's toms during the White Album sessions. Or maybe Ringo just needed to pound them harder. I don't know. The snare and symbols are wonderful, but the wimpy toms make songs like Helter Skelter fall well short of what Paul intended (in that case, to rock heaver than the Who).

    • Job Placement 2011-2014: Overall Placement Rate

      In two previous posts I have provided data on gender and AOS for placements reported at ProPhilosophy  (2011-2012 and 2012-2013) and PhilAppointments (2013-2014). As of today, I have data on 729 placed candidates. In this post I aim to use this and other data to estimate the total number of candidates seeking employment and to calculate an approximate overall placement rate. 

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    • Badiou against the Angles, the Saxons, and the Vikings too

      Wow Badiou says some weird things about analytic philosophy in the Introduction to Being and Event.

      The 'analytic' current of English-language philosophy discounts most of classical philosophy's propositions as senseless, or as limited to the exercise of a language game (1).

      . . .for Kant, the transcendental subject, after which the question [of the utility of mathematics] was no longer seriously practised, save by Bachelard in a vision which remained constitutive, and by the American partisans of the stratification of languages) (7). . .

      From that point onwards, with the exception of Husserl-who is a great classic, if a little late-modern (let's say post-Kantian) philosophy was no longer haunted by a paradigm, except that of history, and, apart form some heralded but repressed exceptions, Cavailles and Lautman, it abandoned mathematics to Anglo-Saxon linguistic sophistry (7).

      Poor Saxons! As if it isn't bad enough that they got destroyed by the Normans mere days after finally winning a hundreds years struggle against the Vikings. As if it isn't bad enough that the 80s metal band of the same name was so indifferently talented. No. Badiou must compound the injuries with insult. In addition to military annihilation and no copy-write recourse with respect to crap bands, all Saxon philosophers are sophists, just sitting around stratifying languages, declaring all philosophy senseless and language games and whatnot.

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    • Preferential logics, supraclassicality, and human reasoning

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)
       
      Some time ago, I wrote a blog post defending the idea that a particular family of non-monotonic logics, called preferential logics, offered the resources to explain a number of empirical findings about human reasoning, as experimentally established. (To be clear: I am here adopting a purely descriptive perspective and leaving thorny normative questions aside. Naturally, formal models of rationality also typically include normative claims about human cognition.)  
       
      In particular, I claimed that preferential logics could explain what is known as the modus ponens-modus tollens asymmetry, i.e. the fact that in experiments, participants will readily reason following the modus ponens principle, but tend to ‘fail’ quite miserably with modus tollens reasoning – even though these are equivalent according to classical as well as many non-classical logics. I also defended (e.g. at a number of talks, including one at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy which is immortalized in video here and here) that preferential logics could be applied to another well-known, robust psychological phenomenon, namely what is known as belief bias. Belief bias is the tendency that human reasoners seem to have to let the believability of a conclusion guide both their evaluation and production of arguments, rather than the validity of the argument as such.
       
      Well, I am now officially taking most of it back (and mostly thanks to working on these issues with my student Herman Veluwenkamp).

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: happy birthday, Chico Buarque!

      The great Chico Buarque joined the club of the ‘over-70’ yesterday (recall Caetano Veloso joining the club last year). Now, while one may speak of a constant stream of talented musicians in Brazilian music, we still haven’t come across anything like the brilliant generation of singers/composers emerging in the later 1960s, including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento and of course, Chico Buarque. They are now all in their early 70s, and alive and kicking. Chico Buarque in particular released an acclaimed new album in 2011 (Chico), and a DVD surveying his whole musical career in 2012. He also continues to pursue a celebrated literary career; in particular, his 2009 novel Spilt Milk has been translated into a number of languages (I very much enjoyed the novel myself). 

      To celebrate Chico’s birthday, here is ‘Essa pequena’ from his 2011 album (about his relationship with singer Thais Gulin – here is the two of them in the duo ‘Se eu soubesse’), and a classic, ‘O que será’ (1976), a duo with Milton Nascimento. So here’s to many more productive years for him, from which we all benefit…

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