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    I concur to a certain extent. I also scored very low on the writing section. Back then, GRE was required…

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    I’m a graduate student in philosophy at a well-known terminal MA program who is applying to PhDs this fall and…

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Classics or Philosophy for a Student Interested in Ancient Philosophy?

Brian Leiter

A prospective PhD student writes:

It is probably no surprise that the programs which are ranked most highly in the Leiter Report Ancient Philosophy sub-specialty are usually found at Universities with the most highly reputed Classics Departments as well.  These Universities have often harnessed the synergy latent in this situation by creating Shared or Joint Programs in Ancient Philosophy.  It is typical of these programs that they may be entered from either the Classics or Philosophy department, with the PhD ultimately conferred being from this department alone (instead of a double-PhD program).  It is possible for an applicant to face the prospect of applying to these programs with no clear preference of department, and even to ultimately be admitted to several of the top Leiter programs from different departments: the student would thus face a choice of departments right at the beginning of his or her career.

Since several of these Joint Programs (or similar arrangements) are relatively new (e.g. Chicago, Yale, Michigan), there isn't a clear job placement record.  What I am wondering is how possible it would be for a PhD student in one department to compete for a TT job in the other department, post-dissertation.  I assume that Philosophy PhD's will have extreme difficulty getting jobs in Classics departments.  But I'm curious about the reverse.  To those faculty that have experience doing TT job searches (especially those who are NOT ancient philosophers), how likely is it that a candidate with a Classics PhD could be competitive for a job in ancient philosophy in a Philosophy Department?  Would there be some prejudice against hiring an ancient philosopher from the Classics department?  If so, are there places where this prejudice could be overcome?  I've heard that hiring committees are often looking for an excuse to narrow the application pool, and that having "Classics" next to your degree would be a convenient excuse.

I would ask faculty to post signed comments; current students or job seekers may post anonymously, but with a valid e-mail address please.

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13 responses to “Classics or Philosophy for a Student Interested in Ancient Philosophy?”

  1. Carl

    While I can't speak to the views of search committees, I did spend four years in a top ancient philosophy program, so I know something about the candidate's side.

    There are two issues you need to consider concerning placement. One is how people will view an application from someone from the "other" department, and the other is how many (and what kind of) jobs are available in the first place. The Classics APA, unlike the Philosophy APA, doesn't require membership to access job listings, so you might want to look at a year's worth of listings to see what kind of options you would have had if you'd come out this year:

    http://apaclassics.org/index.php/placement_service/past_years/C56

    Fewer colleges have classics departments, but the jobs tend to be at "better" schools. A fair chunk are looking for Latinists, and a lot are looking for poetry or archaeology. So most ancient philosophy specialists would be looking only at schools that are recruiting general philologists, or Greek prose specialists. If you're willing to concentrate in Roman philosophy, you've got a much better shot at a classics job than if you do Greek. My impression is that ancient philosophy is only an area of recruitment at PhD programs, and for those jobs my guess is that having a PhD in either field would be OK so long as you have substantial coursework in the other department, or great letters of reference.

    An MA in the other field would also be a plus, probably, either picked up as a terminal degree or at your PhD institution, if you're looking for jobs in both fields.

    Overall, I'd say your decision should really hinge on what you love the most (philology or philosophy) because at most schools you'll be teaching a lot of courses outside of your AOS (e.g., Cicero or mythology, or ethics and logic).

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  2. Tad Brennan

    If you want to teach in a Philosophy Department, then there is a significant advantage to having a PhD in Philosophy, and a significant disadvantage to not having one. And the same applies for Classics departments, mutatis mutandis. You would be ill-advised to take a degree in one field while planning to spend your career in the other. It's not unheard of for PhDs in Philosophy to get jobs in Classics and vice versa, but it's rare. As a job-seeker, having the opposite degree is a significant handicap.

    Carl above adds one useful point: Classics departments are less likely to hire Ancient Philosophers to begin with. There are more people doing Ancient Philosophy in the U.S. in Philosophy Departments than in Classics departments. The lack of specialists on Ancient Philosophy within Classics programs is a lamentable fact, which misrepresents the centrality of Philosophy to the traditional Classical education. But it's a fact that job-seekers will have to deal with for the foreseeable future.

    Finally, remember that good hiring committees care about two things above all else: writing samples and rec letters. If your writing sample shows that you are doing good work in Philosophy, and your rec letters are from people well-known to philosophers who attest to your suitability for a position in Philosophy, then committees will care less about which department signed your degree.

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  3. Phillip Horky

    It's worth considering how the situation might be different in the U.K. At Durham, the primary appointment for all of our ancient philosophers is in Classics, even though our sub-faculty's doctorates were obtained both in Philosophy and Classics. Our ancient philosophers pursue the problems of philosophy from a variety of methodological perspectives, including so-called 'analytic' and 'historical' approaches, and we expect our students to be broadly conversant in each in order to be employable. Language acquisition is also a pre-requisite for successful completion of both our MA and PhD degrees in Ancient Philosophy. My guess is that this situation – where candidates with doctorates in Classics might be employed in Philosophy Departments and vice versa – is more commonplace in the U.K. Prospective graduate students who would like to work in the U.S. would do well to heed the advice of Tad Brennan above, but those prospective students interested to work in the U.K. should understand that an integrated approach to ancient philosophy is more generally encouraged there.

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  4. Jozef Muller

    I agree that that it is a disadvantage having a PhD in Classics while competing for a TT job in a philosophy department. However, I do not think that at most places there would be a strong prejudice against Classics people. Presumably, the person in question would be applying for an Ancient philosophy position and in so far as the qualifications for that job are concerned he or she should be fine, in principle.

    I think it might become more problematic if the job has also some strong non-Ancient aspect, or if the position is advertised under more general description (e.g., history of philosophy, or even open with AOC in ancient). But that is just a guess.

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  5. Dhananjay Jagannathan

    Just to add to Tad Brennan's point, I struggle to think of ancient philosophy scholars who (1) have an classics PhD from the US and (2) have a primary appointment in a US philosophy department. Indeed, the only example I've come up with is Charles Kahn, who got a classics PhD from Columbia in 1957, but has been appointed in the philosophy department at Penn since 1965.

    With regard to scholars with non-US classics PhDs, there are a number of Cambridge Classics PhDs teaching in American philosophy departments (e.g., Dominic Bailey at Colorado-Boulder, Mary Louise Gill at Brown, Jim Hankinson at UT-Austin, Verity Harte at Yale), but this is due to the unusual structure of Cambridge, where the history of philosophy is largely practiced outside the Philosophy faculty. This is certainly not true at Oxford, where ancient philosophy has been almost entirely the preserve of the Philosophy faculty (formerly the sub-faculty). It's worth noting that the exceptions at Oxford (Tobias Reinhardt, Miriam Griffin, Jane Hood) are all in Latin philosophy, work on which tends to be more philologically oriented.

    Given that much the same kind of scholarship can be done from either side of the divide (you might need slightly different skills to communicate this work to colleagues in your own field, of course, but in the ideal case you'd be able to talk to everybody), the big question for most of us going into the field now, I think, is what kind of teaching we'd rather be doing day in and day out: Latin and Greek on the one hand or philosophy on the other. If you're lucky, you might be able to occasionally dabble in the other, but this seems to be possible only for established scholars.

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  6. Dhananjay Jagannathan

    A post-script: I suspect the reason that Classics programs are so loath to hire in ancient philosophy is that philosophy just isn't taught as part of the usual classics undergraduate major. Plato is read as part of the standard prose canon, but you'll very rarely find much Aristotle read before graduate school, and even then only in minimal quantities.* So why hire a philosopher to teach core courses like Greek and Latin language and literature when you could have a pure philologist do it?

    *So rare, in fact, that a passage from Politics I was chosen as the advanced Greek 'sight translation' exercise in the 2009 Eta Sigma Phi national translation exams for undergraduate classics students, no doubt on the grounds that virtually none of the competitors would be likely to have encountered it in the original language.

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  7. Tim O'Keefe

    My first TT job coming out of grad school was in a small liberal-arts college in which I was "the history guy" (along with my colleagues "the metaphysics and epistemology woman" and "the ethics guy"). I taught classes in the history sequence, but also introduction to philosophy, logic, philosophy of religion, and other topics. If I had had a classics PhD (even with the same dissertation topic and overall research profile) there is no way I would have been considered for the job.

    Jobs like that one (or at regional branch campuses of state universities with 3/3 or 4/4 teaching loads that include lots of "service" classes) are far, far more common than jobs at Cornell or the University of Florida. And people with no teaching background in philosophy will likely be ruled out at the first cut at such places.

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  8. Ben Saunders

    I can't speak directly to the prospective student's concern with ancient philosophy, but it's worth noting that similar problems occur in many areas (e.g. philosophy of language with a linguistics degree, philosophy of mind with a psychology/neuroscience background).

    In my case, my graduate education was in Politics, though the two jobs I've had post-doctorate have both been in Philosophy. Personally, I didn't find that too big a problem, despite the common perception that Politics departments are more open to hiring political philosophers than Philosophy departments are to hiring political theorists. I should add, however, that my experience is in the UK, where a PhD is basically 'just' a dissertation, without extensive coursework requirements, so there's little difference between the same dissertation written in each of two different departments.

    One possible strategy would be to pick a journal you would like to publish in (say, Phronesis) and look through at the authors' affiliations and graduate degrees. (I'd assume they would be almost entirely, if not entirely, from philosophy but I could be wrong.)

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  9. David Ebrey

    David Wolfsdorf is a more recent example of someone with a Classics PhD who has a job in a philosophy department (in fact, I just saw he is the chair at Temple).

    Anecdotal evidence suggests to me that it is harder for classicists to get jobs than it is for philosophers to do so. But I think that should only be a consideration if you are truly on the fence.

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  10. Jozef Muller

    John Palmer at University of Florida is a Classics PhD. So is Nate Powers at SUNY, Albany.

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  11. Brad Inwood

    As an ancient philosopher with my degrees in Classics, hired into a tenure-stream job in Classics, and now teaching in both Classics and Philosophy, I've always had a powerful interest in this topic. The least bad generalization (at least for North American PhD's) is probably that you'll have your best chance at a tenure-track job in the discipline that nominally 'owns' your PhD, since the more extensive disciplinary training typical in North America contributes greatly to employability. (With a research-only doctorate from the UK or Europe or if the position is in a UK or European department things are obviously going to be different.) If part of your first job is going to be teaching bioethics on the side, the hiring department will probably look for a PhD from a Philosophy department; and if the non-ancient-philosophy teaching for a position is going to include Greek tragedy or Roman oratory, obviously the Classics PhD will look better prepared, ceteris paribus. The chance that any entry-level position will involve teaching only in one’s speciality is low. But maybe you have a strong Classics background from your undergrad training or a Masters degree, so that a Philosophy PhD would be an asset not a liability for a broad-minded Classics department; or vice versa. The majority of successful job candidates probably track the discipline of their PhD into the job market, but there are so many exceptions in a relatively small field that generalizations are misleading. For what it's worth, as the examples cited above suggest, I’d imagine that there are more cases of philosophically adept Classics graduates getting entry-level positions in Philosophy departments than the other way around; not only are there more jobs in Philosophy departments, but the demanding linguistic and literary training that strong Classics departments look for may be harder to acquire without the support of a formal doctoral program than the other way around. But clearly a great deal depends on how a given joint program is structured. A program that demands a lot of tough philosophy of its Classics students and a strong linguistic and literary training of its philosophers will tend to produce more flexible graduates. Doing ancient philosophy well obviously demands at least some aspects of two different kinds of intellectual training, and getting a good job requires being excellent in both respects. That is a tall order, and the way one gets there and what else one picks up along the way are bound to be idiosyncratic.

    The other complication to keep in mind is that there are sometimes 'split' appointments, with teaching duties in both departments. For such positions I suspect the playing field is level. It would be interesting to know how many such positions there are in North America these days.

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  12. Dirk t. D. Held, Classics Department, Connecticut College

    From the perspective of a liberal arts college, classics department in contrast to a doctoral research institution, an important consideration is the ability to teach a broad variety of courses. Certainly a classicist in a liberal arts college will have to be able to teach both Greek and Latin at all levels, as well as courses in his or her specialty. In this case, the specialty would be ancient philosophy. Similarly, someone hired in a philosophy department will teach say, an ancient philosophy course or courses, and will presumably have to teach introductory philosophy courses as well. By all means apply to both departments but be prepared for what you are asked to do outside you special area. Flexibility and breadth are important for liberal arts colleges, and I suspect this will intensify in the future.

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  13. David Wolfsdorf

    My recommendation to a beginning or potential graduate student interested in doing research and teaching in ancient philosophy in the United States is to get a PhD in Philosophy, not Classics,
    but in the process to do substantial work in Classics, ideally at one of the institutions that has strong programs in both areas. Both disciplines are, actually, important for doing ancient philosophy, but my sense is that professionally it is very hard to get an ancient philosophy job in the United States without a PhD in philosophy. Moreover, I can only recall one joint philosophy-classics job advertised in the last decade.

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