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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

The surprising positives/negatives of becoming a professional philosopher?

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT (originally posted April 21)–MANY INTERESTING COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME

This question, from the open thread, deserves separate notice and discussion:

Could we start a discussion on what philosophers have found to be the most surprising positives and surprising negatives of becoming a professional philosopher (or PhD grad)? It may help me, and perhaps others, with my decision to apply to PhD programs or not. If there is a similar thread with many comments, a link would suffice. (I'm aware of the poor job market, so hopefully there are other comments.)

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50 responses to “The surprising positives/negatives of becoming a professional philosopher?”

  1. Brad

    There are many great things about a career in philosophy. (i) Teaching philosophy is very rewarding. It is often very fun. And it is a great honor to be paid to do it. (ii) If you are an active researcher, you get the opportunity to be part of a network of people who care about the same issues, as esoteric as they may be. Provided intellectual work is to your taste, research in philosophy can also be great fun. I still get a thrill out of publishing by research, after many years and many publications. (iii) There are also opportunities to give direction to your College or University, and higher education in general. Philosophers are often capable administrators, and this work is extremely important.

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  2. Anon

    Travel. You can use your research as an opportunity to see some of the best cities in the world and go exploring in places that you would never think you'd visit. Probably this is a feature of academic life in general, not just philosophy, but it's one I never would have anticipated going in to grad school.

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  3. C

    Negatively, I didn't anticipate how much I would come to dislike the grading. I teach at a second-tier school, and few students are really capable of doing good work in philosophy (even our majors, alas). As a result, the grading is drudgery and has become something I dread. Fortunately, (for now at least) the positives about the job still outweigh this negative…

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  4. Fritz Allhoff

    I don't see any negatives at all; I think it's an absolutely amazing profession to be a part of. There's all the stuff we gripe about–e.g., administration, committee work–but any other job would be *way* worse. Maybe the only trade off is the salaries–I make (far) less money than most of my non-academic friends–but no way would I trade happiness for money. Of course, I wouldn't advise anyone thinking about a career in philosophy to actually try for it, though; the odds are just too long, the tenured faculty is of an increasingly bygone era, and all that. But if you have it, there's really nothing better, at least in my opinion.

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  5. Landon W Schurtz

    The difficulty I have in conducting conversations about many routine things with non-philosophers. Not all non-philosophers, mind you, but many of them, especially in my area (which is not a stand-out for intellectual achievement). Any time an acquaintance or semi-distant relative wants to chat about whether or not the government should be doing this or that, say, I have to demur, because "taking the bait" will inevitably result in my having to explain what I mean by most of the terms I am using. And, of course, listening to absurdly bad reasoning. This might be an "in the wild" example of the same phenomenon that makes grading so annoying for commentator "C," above. Small price to pay, though, I think – I don't like talking to most people, anyway. (Kidding! Sort of.)

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  6. Sara L. Uckelman

    Apart from the intrinsic joys of philosophy (esp. logic — and yes, I can still say this with a straight face), the two biggest unexpected perks for me have been (1) what anon said above — travel — and (2) the people I've met (usually as a result of (1).

    The year after my finished my PhD, I had a post-doc with a really generous travel budget. In a month and a half, I hit Lisbon, Moscow, Padua, and Yogyakarta, amongst all the other travel I did the rest of the year. I don't travel as now that I have a young child at home, but even so, next month I'll hit Germany, Scotland, and Prague. As someone who enjoys history, getting to travel all over Europe as part of my job has had wonderful extra bonuses.

    And the people that you meet at the conferences, many of whom have now become good friends that I keep in touch with independent of philosophical matters, and look forward to the regular conferences where I'll see them again in person. Many of them I've stayed with while traveling, and many of them have stayed with me while they've traveled. They know my family and I know theirs. People often talk about how difficult it can be to gain new friends as an adult, but I sometimes feel like academic philosophy at its best is a perfect way to bring together like-minded people.

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  7. dissertating

    Positives:
    Apart from those already mentioned:
    1) The opportunity to do much more of my work from home than would be the case at a standard 9-5 and the corresponding ability to spend more time with my family than away from them.
    2) As with most teaching careers, getting weekends away from the office and extended breaks.
    Both of these are, of course, not specific to philosophy, but I've found them to be some of the more rewarding extrinsic connections to being a philosopher.

    Negatives:
    1) Your work follows you home. This is obviously a tradeoff that goes with both of the above positives, but I've found it to be worth it. Others might not.
    2) The "bait and switch": I imagine that many of us were initially drawn to philosophy by reading big thinkers asking big questions, e.g. Leibniz, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, etc. In a sea of micro-problems, It can be very hard to find a niche where one can do work that is, to be frank, important. I think I've found that, but it took me a while.

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  8. Still in school

    Following #5 above. I hate it when I tell someone non-academic I study philosophy, and they go "wooo, you must be so smart!" Some of them just shut up and stop being interested in talking to me, which is fine. Some keep on chatting, but follow everything they say with "but of course you'd have a different perspective on this." The worst kind is those who enthusiastically want to share their "philosophy of life" with you…
    Oh well, I suppose this probably happens to most academics and many other professions as well. I take a similar attitude as #5 – these people are probably not ones I'd enjoy spending time with anyway 😛

    Positives: I love love the fact that almost everyone I meet doing philosophy do it because they like it. (It's hardly a choice for money or fame, after all.) There's something magical about being surrounded by people who love what they do.

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  9. Aaron S.

    I have lots of gripes (with the profession), but the biggest negative for me is clearly the salary. This would be one of the best jobs I could imagine, if I could simply afford to live on my income.

    I'm an officially-tenured-in-two-months professor at a small state college. The average salary for people in my position is around 50k. That's just not enough to live on, at least, not in the North East.

    I used to be in software. The last job I had before my first academic job paid over three times what I make now. If I had continued, I'd make four times my current salary. I wouldn't think about having children as an academic in my circumstances. I'd be obligated to return to the real world.

    I run into a lot of people who don't seem to care much about the low wages. Most of these have family money. Their parents, for instance, pay for their grandchildren's expensive private school tuition. Well, I didn't win that lottery. . . .

    As a positive: I wonder if most academics fully appreciate how good they have it otherwise. No boss. No cube. 4 months off. Hardly any time in the office. You can pursue your own projects. Or exercise 2 hours a day if you feel like it. Having worked lots of 60+ hour a week jobs, working as a professor feels like retirement.

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  10. Brian Leiter

    I'd like to follow up on #9, because I do think it's an increasingly serious issue. Every year, I talk to talented undergraduates who might get a PhD in Philosophy or might get a JD. If they get a JD (at least from Chicago) they will, if they want, earn six or seven figure salaries over the next ten years, and they will decide where they want to live in the United States, since they can earn those salaries in New York or DC or Los Angeles or Chicago or Houston. If they get a PhD, they will go where the jobs are, and the salaries…well, who knows. The attacks on the public education system mean the salaries are comparatively weak. Many prior posters have noted why this job is great: flexibility, autonomy, the challenge and interest of what we teach, the opportunity to write about whatever it is you want to write about depending on where your intellectual interests take you. The drawbacks, also well-describe above, are equally clear. It is somewhat worse in the US because the differences between academic institutions is so dramatic. (On the other hand, there are more academic positions.) Here's the hard issue: you love philosophy, but you also want to get married, have children, not be too far from family etc. The market for academic labor may not support you. But it may if you can navigate it carefully.

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  11. George Rainbolt

    This may sound nuts, but when I got my first TT job, I was surprised that I felt (and still feel) that I am (in my small way) making the world a better place. I am fortunate enough to have done some research that had some impact on legislation, but most of this feeling comes from my teaching and my administrative work. I can sometimes see the scales falling from my students’ eyes. I can sometimes fix some administrative problem and thus make thousands of students’ lives better. This is not unique to philosophy. I think it happens in most (all?) academic disciplines and many non-academic jobs.

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  12. Anita Superson

    Anita said…
    Brian hits the nail on the head in what he takes to be "the hard issue." I have been navigating this for about 25 years, and thanks to a wonderful relative who gave me a place to live in my home town, I did not have to (entirely) sacrifice family (and friends) to pursue my interests in philosophy. But it has been far from easy to live in two states to have the best of both worlds. Time that would go to research goes to taking care of two places and traveling, and money that can go towards retirement goes toward furnishing two places and the high airfares common in small town airports. Philosophy simply does not pay enough for most of us to do this. Nor does philosophy pay enough for most of us to retire to our hometowns, especially if these are big, expensive cities and our positions are in smaller cities where housing is much less expensive. Plan to save enough for retirement and for a very expensive housing trade-up. It doesn't help matters if you are unfortunate enough to have colleagues who don't favor your spending time with your family. When my sibling was dying, a former chair told me, "If this continues, you will have to find someone to teach your classes" (after I had missed just three days of classes). Nor does it help when the major conferences are held around holidays, the times most people like to spend with their families. I can't help but wonder if the expectation placed on academics that they uproot themselves from their families to pursue their profession elsewhere contributes to the problems in the profession that have been recently highlighted in this blog and elsewhere.

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  13. tenured faculty member

    A professional philosopher who works in an academic post is required to spend enormous amounts of time reading some of the worst writing the humans produce (undergraduate papers written by people who wish they didn't have to write them, really have nothing to say, and who might or might not be mimicking a style they wrongly think masks lack of content). Each year, reading this material and responsibly giving helpful feedback to the authors becomes more unpleasant. And it is very easy to fall into a rhythm in which turning to the wonderful things other have mentioned, like reading good writing, thinking about and writing about the things that interest you the most, traveling and interacting with like-minded folks, only comes after the bad-writing chores are behind you. And they are never behind you.

    More seriously, one is constantly being evaluated and asked to evaluate others, perhaps not more so than in management jobs and such, but quite a lot. And the grounds for evaluation often seem arbitrary.

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  14. Anon. Prof.

    In response to those concerned about their salaries, I have often thought that low salaries and the elimination of tenure would help to keep the riff-raff out of the academic world; not just in philosophy, but in every discipline. I know this opinion is heterodox in the highest degree, but it seems to me to have some merit. While it is true that most great philosophers have had family money, this is not true of all of them. Socrates and Spinoza are the most obvious examples. It seems to me that if the jobs were not so attractive (at least financially), few would want to pursue a career teaching philosophy unless they were truly serious about it — this to the extent that they would forgo family life, house, car, and mortgage, in order to do their philosophy. I see no reason why the proliferation of scholarly specialists should continue to be encouraged at the expense of serious thinkers. I make no claim to be such a thinker myself, but I *am* willing to do the work for shit pay, so long as it's enough to afford a bachelor apartment and the basic amenities of life.

    I read something by a contract prof. (not in philosophy, I don't think) at York University during their recent strike, who gets paid $80,000/year to teach five courses and is complaining. The degree of entitlement I see among academics is astounding. How many of us would be eager to sit down and explain to someone why our work is important? How many would be petrified, if it meant a decrease in salary/benefits? Yet to be frank, most of our work is not important, and on some level we know we're manipulating a system that will reward us for doing things that provide no benefit to anyone else. Providing benefit to others is certainly not the highest standard of value, but when others (i.e., the taxpayers, the university itself) are paying our way, it seems only natural that we should be giving back something equally valuable. For the most part, we aren't. There is some value in teaching philosophy, and we may judge that by what adjuncts make: perhaps $25,000/year. A person can live on that; I can and do live on less. Yet the best jobs hardly require one to teach. All of us want to be supported to basically sit on our asses and think, while sometimes publishing articles and books about what we think. This is a privilege that *very* few deserve, though there are some. I would question why so many of us think we deserve it, and that we shouldn't have to do honest work for honest pay like anyone else.

    If you're not willing to make sacrifices for your philosophy, perhaps it's not worth pursuing. Which brings me back to my original point: salaries should not be high, tenure should not be available. A family should be considered a luxury, not a right. Look to the tradition and see if you fit into it, or whether you are merely an immodest scholar.

    I acknowledge the polemical tone of this post, and hope that it will not be deleted on that account. I am very open to discussion and criticism on this topic, about which I feel quite strongly.

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  15. V. Alan White

    My advice is to be mindful of two major factors at work here: (1) the degree of one's commitment to doing philosophy, especially in the role as a teaching professor, and (2) the factor of luck in making one's career in philosophy happen.

    There are many, many more teaching positions in philosophy than R1 research positions, and people targeting the R1s know from this blog and the APA what's up with that in terms of employment opportunities and requirements. I'm talking to the rest of us who do not just accept a 3/3 or (as I teach) a 4/4, but relish the challenge of the classroom. There is no feeling quite like leaving a class, exhausted, having given it your all and hearing the chatter of students about free will, or the ontological argument, or necessary and sufficient conditions (yes, just last week), as they leave your charge. Are you good at teaching at the TA level and excited about it? Then you may have a future–though please be mindful about increasing levels of adjuncts at many institutions too that made lead to your being exploited by your excitement. It's a delicate balance given the political realities of active attacks on public higher education.

    And don't forget about luck. I'm in philosophy because years ago 1 out of 70+ apps got a bite, and I happened to beat out an internal candidate. Things could easily have swung a different way, and I'd probably have gone on to be a nurse otherwise. And I might have made more money! But as it is I am grateful to be a philosophy prof, with some real control of my time, enjoying the occasional solid publication, emailing with/meeting terrific people who also are great philosophers, and living something of a reflective life and challenging myself to make the world a little better. My parents never went to high school, but because of dumb luck and some ambition, I teach something I'm excited about, and can face every day with less dread than my Mom and Dad ever did. I just want others to know the possibility here–though again, gauge it against your own philosophical passions and appreciation of what luck, good and bad, brings.

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  16. micky

    There are many positives indeed, which others have noted, but it has played havoc with my personal life because in order to get a job I have had to take jobs in places I would never otherwise live. I have struggled through long-distance relationships. I envy those (usually well-connected entitled folk) who get the plum jobs in good places, but many of us don't and it can affect one's personal life in a serious way. In most other jobs one can decide where one wants to live. That simplifies one's personal life.
    M

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  17. Anon Junior Scholar

    I agree with all of the positives listed above. However this negative has yet to be mentioned, and it's been a big one for me as I decide whether to continue in the profession: Loneliness.

    As a graduate student you are (hopefully) part of a fairly large community of scholars who work on similar or overlapping issues/areas as you. The community aspect of graduate school is great, if you take advantage. But this is lost (for most) once you enter the profession. You may well be the only Kant scholar or HPS person or metaphysician, etc. at your college. You may even be in a faculty with half a dozen or fewer scholars, and if you're really unlucky many of your colleagues will be fairly absent. You may find yourself in a work environment where you go entire days without a real conversation or meaningful connection (lecturing doesn't quite cut it).

    Having worked outside of academia, where work friends were common, I now miss having a community. Meeting people at conferences helps, of course. I have made many friends that I see a couple of times per year, all over the world. But that's no substitute for the close on-going personal relationships that develop in a standard working environment.

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  18. A phil grad student

    I want to echo something in comment #17. There are a lot of good things about being around philosophers all the time, and it's fun to be able to talk about things you're interested in regularly. But even before you enter the profession with your degree, there can be a lot of loneliness. Although there's a lot of variation in research areas of interest, depending on where you're doing philosophy there can be much less variation in other aspects of philosophers' lives. Outside of philosophy I actually have very little in common with the philosophers I associate with, in terms of hobbies, political leanings, family situation, and other things.

    It's not like I'm angry or frustrated when people trot out the points of view they all share to rehash them again. I'm not resentful when they all pull out pictures of their dogs and cats to show everyone but me, who alas am pet-less and do not care. All I feel is boredom. And that can make after-hours socializing with philosophers pretty tedious.

    This is why I can't understand a view like what's given in comment #14: "A family should be considered a luxury, not a right. Look to the tradition and see if you fit into it." I think I have a contribution to make to philosophy, but if I had followed the advice in this post, I would have been gone a long time ago (and I'm glad I didn't go). My family is the only protection I have against a lifestyle which is closely connected to the profession but which I do not want.

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  19. EB

    Some great comments. I still consider myself very lucky to have the greatest job on the planet. I enjoy teaching and have started adding thought experiments and even jokes to my final exams when I am having fun (to the dread of my hapless state school students). I just want to raise the Rodney Dangerfield issue: I wish the profession got more respect. You crack a tough problem and people ask what you did, but no sooner do you explain than they say "I didn't know that was what philosophers do. Isn't that for scientists or something?" I wish philosophers of science with the street cred would take on the frequent attacks on our profession by pop science commentators and so-called physicist-philosophers. I still get the feeling that when people say "philosopher" they still mean someone smoking Gitane cigarettes and scribbling nonsense in a Parisian cafe, or someone in the armchair looking out the window rather than a trained logician or naturalistic thinker or expert on ethical reasoning who works on foundational problems.

    BL COMMENT: Sartre did not scribble nonsense! And Derrida didn't write in cafes!

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  20. Christopher Hitchcock

    Many previous posters have hit on similar themes, but here is my list:

    Positives:
    1. You get to read, write, and teach philosophy.
    2. Your time is not micro-managed. You may have to work hard, but no one is putting a file on your desk Tuesday afternoon and telling you to have it done by Thursday. (Grading can be a bit like this, but you know well in advance that it is coming.) When comparing being an academic to a corporate job, don't just think about the total number of hours worked, but also about your control over your time and flexibility.
    3. The people. Yes, there are some jerks, but at least your colleagues will be smart, and will share interests with you. Moreover, you will eventually get to know people from all over the world. You will have friends and acquaintances everywhere you go.
    4. Travel — if you are successful, you will get to travel all over the world (where you will have plenty of friends; see #3).

    Negatives:
    1. The job market.
    2. Even if you are successful — say you finish your Ph.D. in six years, get a two-year postdoc the first time on the market, then land a decent t-t job — you are getting settled down fairly late in life. (c. 30 in my example, 36 if 'settled' means tenure). This can be especially hard if you want to start a family.
    3. You need to be geographically flexible. Even if you do well on the job market, you might get two job offers, one in Milwaukee and one in Atlanta. I have nothing against those places, but if it is important to you to leave near family, or to live in particular kind of places (e.g. a city with lots of cultural offerings, or a small town with good schools), you have little control over this.
    4. You will be subject to constant criticism. Some of it will be constructive and most of it won't be malicious, but you will get it (and get it, and get it). You will also get praise, but not as much as you deserve. (This is likely true for most professions.)
    5. It can take a long time to see results. E.g.: You finish a paper, send it to a journal. Four months later, you get a request to revise and resubmit. Two months later, you re-submit. Four months later it is accepted. Eighteen months after that, it is published. Three years later, people actually start to talk about it. If you need to see the reward for your work right away, this can be difficult.
    6. The flip side of positive #2 is that you need to be self-disciplined and motivated. Nobody is telling you to write a paper on topic X by such-and-such date. You need to set your own agenda make yourself complete the work. If you work better under deadlines, or when given specific tasks, you may find this difficult.

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  21. Derek Bowman

    In reply to "Anon Prof": Socrates had both a family and his own home. But what I really find astonishing in your comment is that, despite your self-proclaimed heterodoxy about the scholarly life, you so readily identify that life with university employment. Given your account of what makes for a "serious scholar" what need do such independent and committed souls have for the confines of the academy? In fact your position is deeply conventional – it simply accepts the conventions that are most convenient for your own lifestyle preferences, while rejecting those conventions you personally find less important.

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  22. Still philosophizing after all these years

    If you are of a philosophical cast of mind and become a professional philosopher, then you will probably often find yourself wondering "does this really matter?" and you will have a harder time saying "yes" than people do in certain other professions. The certitude of your sister the doctor or your brother the whatever will be enviable. Yes, you'll be able to make a case that philosophy is very important, but in the back of your mind you'll occasionally have doubts–maybe more often than folks in other professions. I discussed this with a therapist when I was a graduate student and he summed up my doubts about philosophy very nicely: "It bakes no bread." You have to come to terms with that before deciding to make it your career.

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  23. Michael B

    +1

    Also, Socrates had, it is plausible to suggest, plenty of money coming in from Plato and other friends.

    Perhaps the 'anon prof' is a descendant of Diogenes the Cynic.

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  24. Mark Silcox

    Turns out I really enjoy teaching! And prepping lectures and designing new courses, and even some grading – up to, y'know, a point. As a grad student I was pretty firmly indoctrinated with the idea that teaching (undergrads, at any rate) was a sort of embarrassing necessity on a par with having to floss after dinner.

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  25. HappilyAnon

    A negative aspect to the field that surprised me was the very real possibility (and in my case, actuality) of having to deal with abusive students. Getting criticized for being too hard a prof is one thing (and we’re all used to it) but I was surprised to deal with several students whose behaviour was physically aggressive and verbally abusive toward me. Another surprise is that there is virtually no institutional recourse professors can access to deal with such behaviour (the customer, of course, always being right).

    I’m currently a bit cynical about the whole thing, so take plenty of grains of salt with my words. But it is worth remembering that in most corporate and governmental jobs, being physically intimidated and insulted by coworkers would be grounds for dismissal. As a professor, you might just have to suck it up. (I don’t buy the excuse that “they’re young”. Young people work in all sorts of fields by the time they’re in their early 20s and they’re not permitted to abuse coworkers.)

    That being said, as above, there are few better feelings out there than having a truly wonderful class with great discussion, engaged students, and instilling an enthusiasm for philosophy (or even learning in general) in undergrads. It is phenomenally rewarding, bad eggs notwithstanding.

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  26. just another ABD

    I worked in the professional world before coming back for my PhD (I am an ABD), so here are two thoughts for those debating between the two:

    (1) Re family and flexibility: There is no question that academia is more "flexible" than the vast majority of professional work (law, medicine, business, etc.). I get to spend substantially more time with my kids than I did as a professional–so in this respect philosophy has (so far) been family-friendly. On the other hand, the flexibility comes with a price: always feeling like I ought to be doing more for my class/dissertation/career. As a professional, I could get home by 6:00 PM (most days) and not think about my job, always had weekends off, and I could take a day off and really "get away from it all" when I needed to. I find that much more difficult to do as a grad student: there are literally thousands of books and articles that I "should" read in order to become a better philosopher, and I find it in some ways more challenging to focus on my family when I have the constant nagging feeling that I should really be spending my time reading more, or rewriting that chapter of my dissertation for the nth time, or whatever. I'm sure people react in different ways to this, but it's worth thinking about how *you* will respond to the demands of the profession if you choose to go that route.

    I also think it's worth noting that my experience as a professional was in an office environment where people were very accepting of my family commitments and, to the extent practical, accommodated them. For example, it was no problem to take time off when my wife had a baby, I routinely had to leave for the odd child-related emergency and never got any flak (as long as I got somebody else to cover my duties, which was never a problem because everyone was so nice). In academia, by contrast (at least in my department), you get some of the anti-family, anti-children types who roll their eyes at the very notion that you might have incurred some duties to particular human beings by having the temerity to marry or conceive them. Hopefully I will ultimately find a job in a department that is "family-friendly" in this respect, but it's something to watch out for if you have a family or desire to have a family in the academic- philosophy world.

    (2) In many professions, there is an emphasis on training and "development" of employees that I find strangely lacking in academia (at least grad school). For example, your boss (if a good one) might tell you that you are particularly skilled at x, and suggest ways of doing more x in your work. Or you might tell your boss that you like x, and your boss will help you find opportunities for x. The converse is also true: maybe you need a lot of work on y, and so you get trained in y and experience with y. In academia, this doesn't happen, at least not in the same way. It's true that you get feedback via, e.g., student comments and refereed papers. But even as a grad student I have never had a professor actually offer to help me figure out how to teach better–and while I have had some help with my dissertation, it's just not the same. It is also largely negative: every paper I've had rejected from a journal (which is all of them, so far!) has come complete with pages of things I did *wrong* in the paper, and not a single comment about things I did *right*. I find this demotivating but, significantly, not particularly helpful in the long run. I therefore largely feel like I am still trying to figure things out: what way of teaching works best, what kind of problems or papers I am actually decent at tackling, etc. This is not necessarily a negative thing: maybe some people thrive in this kind of ultra-independent, ultra-critical environment. Personally, however, I do miss some of the positive aspects of life in a management culture: e.g. actually being helped to find and develop my skills etc. Again, it's worth thinking about which kind of environment you would prefer to be in.

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  27. Worried about minutiae

    I love the teaching aspect of the job, and I think I sometimes make a difference in students' general lives with regard to it (teaching them to ask new questions, think critically, quit acting like 'sheep'). But often this positive is greatly overshadowed by what is for me the biggest disappointment. As others mentioned above, we got into philosophy because we found the 'big questions' interesting. But once you enter "professional" philosophy, the research is all concerned with minutiae. And I know that theoretically the minutiae are supposed to be important building blocks of some big picture or other. But sometimes I honestly don't see how. And when I do see how, the 'big picture' ultimately isn't that important (in my opinion). In other words, I somehow struggle to see how my research really makes a true difference even if it is successful. As another commentator put it, it often doesn't seem like research is baking break (though I feel teaching sometimes is). AND even if I do come up with a great argument in my research, it probably won't change any minds of that mere handful of philosophers who might have happened to read my paper (how many philosophers at this stage are legitimately open to changing opinions); instead, it would just serve as a springboard for them to write an objection. And all for what? This makes me almost feel guilty spending time away from my family and hobbies in an office writing on minutiae that don't really matter and which will probably only be read by a handful of people anyway and which has almost no chance of changing their mind on a topic which ultimately doesn't matter. (BTW – I have tenure, so my motivation need no longer be dominated by a simple desire to stay employed.) And the frustrating part is that our prestige and professional accomplishment is judged mostly by how successful we are at this research and not by our teaching. It's a bit of a catch-22 for me. I want to be successful and prestigious; I don't want to be one of those who gets tenure and then checks out research-wise (and I haven't). But I feel guilty putting in the time for such research and prestige because of the considerations above. Despite what others say, I just can't convince myself deep down that the 'minutiae research' intended for a handful of readers (if you're lucky) is really as important as many of my colleagues claim it is. I realize that many will disagree (my colleagues do) and persist what they do is important. Perhaps, but I don't always see it. And many will say they do it simply because they enjoy it and that my problem is that I don't enjoy it enough. Fair enough. These are just the honest, inquiring reflections of someone who, despite a decent amount of professional success, struggles with these questions daily.

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  28. CK

    As others have mentioned, this profession can be one hell of a challenge to your personal life. Most of us have to go where the job takes us, often to far-flung places where if you are not already coupled up, the dating pool can be quite miserable. Factor in being away from family and long-term friends, and it can be especially lonely. Now imagine that this is your life for 30-plus years. Not so glamorous, I suppose. And as has been said, the salaries generally suck now, travel money is dwindling, expectations even at mid-tier state schools have ramped up–it's enough to make a person reconsider one's profession. Still, as V. Alan White notes, if you like teaching–which I do–it is an exhilarating, rewarding career in that aspect. I adore the interaction I have with students; they are the only reason I'm still doing this. Finally, be prepared for plenty of narcissistic colleagues–I mean, lots of them. There is a reason I rarely hang out with philosophers; they can be a pretty insufferable bunch. Maybe that includes me at times, too.

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  29. Anonymous Grad Student

    Reading the comments here, it seems that a number of us are quite worried about how unimportant our jobs are, or about how little we contribute to society. I agree that, if we lived in an economically just society, we probably wouldn't be paid much more than we currently are. We'd probably be paid less. But it's important to keep some perspective. Lots of us got into philosophy because it seemed to matter more than the humdrum accomplishments of middle management. Sure, there might be few people that read your papers. Maybe most of the comments are negative. Maybe you spend most of your job bogged down in minutiae, and can't see the big picture. Let's remember, though, that we're literally being paid to sit down and try to answer some of the most important questions human beings have ever thought about. Just about anybody can bake bread, plug numbers into a spreadsheet, or lead a sales seminar. Not everybody can (or gets the opportunity to) contribute to the project of explaining consciousness, or determining the best system of ethics. Are we so jaded that we think those projects are somehow LESS valuable than the mundane crap we've worked so hard to escape?

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  30. Brian Leiter

    I am disinclined to denigrate other kinds of work which, like philosophy, can be done very well or very poorly. Perhaps we might recall Tolstoy, who late in life declared the work he was most proud of was the pair of shoes he had made himself.

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  31. Anonymous Grad Student

    Denigrate the job, exalt the worker, I say. Anyone who has worked retail or food service should know how absolutely terrible so many jobs can be. If only fewer people were forced by economic necessity to do them. Pretending as though our jobs are not better, more creative, more free, and more open to self-expression than most others doesn't do anyone any favors. No human deserves drudgery, and we should be honest: most work is drudgery, but most of the time, ours isn't.

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  32. Steven Hales

    A lot of the correspondents are worried about their work being "important"—that importance is the important thing. Personally, I like figuring out philosophical puzzles, and I like contributing to the broader conversation on the topics that interest me. Are those things "important"? I don't care, and really don't even know what that means. I think it is wonderful that I get paid to think, read, and write about literally anything that fascinates me. That's pretty damn excellent. Teaching is also very rewarding when the students are intellectually curious and engaged. Yeah, grading is misery, there's students who don't belong in college, incompetent administrators to navigate, ever-mounting busywork paperwork, and diminishing research funds. Are there better jobs than my 4-4 second tier state school in flyover country? Of course. But being a professional philosopher is pretty great.

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  33. A phil grad student

    I think the concern is that "explaining consciousness" or "determining the best system of ethics" isn't actually what philosophers do in the day-to-day. They tend to focus on tiny details or obscure implications of arguments in order to undermine them and promote some other distinction X which shows us how a particular other problem with tiny detail Z in theory Y can be fixed and…

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  34. Anon. Prof.

    In reply to Derek Bowman: I can see how my comment may have come off that way. In fact, I do not think a serious philosopher must be an academic at all. Most of the greats weren't. But if the comments in this thread are any indication (and they certainly agree with my own experience), an academic job is one of the best ways for a philosopher to pay the bills. It's a great job, much better than any other I can imagine having. It allows a lot of free time and flexibility for thinking and writing, not to mention that it allows you to stay focused on philosophy all the time rather than having to separate your work from your true interests.

    That's why I'm surprised at all the whining. You make a decision whether you want to be a doctor, lawyer, etc. or pursue something more serious at the cost of less money and less opportunity to have a family, live exactly where you'd like, etc. If people think they deserve to be paid like the former and receive the same benefits while doing the latter, what can I say? I disagree. I don't think of philosophy as a career choice, but as a choice of how one wants to live one's life, and I don't think we should be expecting public institutions to pick up the slack so that we can live like the aristocrats who philosophized for most of history. We should accept that the philosophical life demands a certain asceticism, and those of us who are committed to it will do so. The idea of receiving health benefits and a cushy salary for being a philosopher seems like some kind of strange joke.

    That being said, so long as philosophy is taught in universities there is no reason not to accept modest compensation for teaching it. With a few exceptions, however, tenured professors at research institutions are just parasites taking advantage of the system, since the work they produce isn't important. We probably don't need another book on Kant — and if it turns out that we do, i.e., that someone has something really new to say on the subject, I suspect they would write it anyway. How can we justify giving generous public funds to new TT professors who haven't demonstrated their ability to produce important work? To grad. students who don't even know what they want to work on yet? How many would pursue this line of work if it meant sacrificing a comfortable middle class existence? But if one wouldn't sacrifice that, I question their commitment to philosophy, and would suggest medicine or law as a better alternative.

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  35. Bryan Frances

    One negative that has not been mentioned is that eventually one realizes that one is not going to know the answers to the philosophical questions one finds most interesting. I know many philosophers are happy to merely "contribute to the ongoing conversation", but I want the damn answers. I couldn't care less, really, about publishing a lot or acquiring respect. I want to know the solution to the sorites paradox. And I'm never going to get it: even if it passes right before my eyes, and it looks right to me, I've been around long enough to realize that I'm unreliable in finding solutions to anything interesting in philosophy.

    I'm not saying that that means research is a waste of time or anything similarly dire. I'm just saying that I wanted to come to know the answers, and I realize that that goal won't be met no matter how good I get at philosophy.

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  36. Michael B

    Well said.

    Especially given that "we're literally being paid to sit down and try to answer some of the most important questions human beings have ever thought about" and yet, 2.5k years after Socrates tried and failed to define, well, any of the terms he tried to define, e.g. epistemologists still have yet to come to a consensus on a definition of knowledge.

    Luckily – at least for philosophers who eat bread – people seemed unwilling to wait millenia to be told whether they truly *know* how to bake bread, before getting on and baking bread.

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  37. David Wallace

    "Just about anybody can … plug numbers into a spreadsheet"

    Remind me not to put you on the panel when we appoint a financial analyst 🙂

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  38. physics student

    As a young idealistic student, I'd like to echo Anon. Prof.'s sentiments, while taking issues with some of the statements.

    I'm in physics rather than philosophy, but I think the two fields share certain crucial charactersitics relevant to the discussion: both address questions of fundamental importance (at least in my view); the job market situation is rather dismal; they contribute almost nothing of practical benefit to society (at least a certain type of theoretical physics, which you may broadly think of as "string theory").

    I agree with Anon. Prof.'s sentiment that the truly deserving will pursue philosophy/physics no matter what, making the necessary sacrifices. If I were convinced that I had enough talent to make a real contribution, I would indeed sacrifice almost everything else, indeed my life if it need be, for the advancement of knowledge. Or if I couldn't, I would consider myself unworthy of the discipline.

    On the other hand, this does not mean that I think reducing pays will benefit the disciplines (philosophy, physics, or math, or most academic disciplines for that matter). Great thinkers are humans, too, and the level of salary or other forms of compensation that works best for the production of knowledge is an empirical question. Even Beethoven was not free of monetary constraints, and Schopenhauer explicitly said something like "I could donate all my wealth to charity if I willed it; but I cannot will it." It is a sad fact about the human condition, but a fact nonetheless.

    Also, while I do not believe that a scholar needs to be compensated for his work, I don't believe anyone does either. Doing something important is more than enough reward in itself; whether you cure cancer, end world poverty, or discover the fundamental nature of reality, you don't deserve any more money than anyone else.

    But even leaving aside my possibly peculiar views about compensation, consider this: Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and one of the most important theoretical physicists alive, earns $500k a year (from Austin). That may seem extravagant, and arguably is. But the football coach at Austin earns more than ten times the amount.

    Anon. Prof. says that many academic philosophers are parasites who get compensated for unimportant work, but the point is that in our society, compensation and the importance of work one does is largely decoupled (unless one holds some extreme ideological capitalist views). Of course, Anon. Prof. might consider the work of most academic philosophers to be absolutely unimportant (unimportant even by the internal evaluation of philosophers), not just unimportant for practical social benefits, and this would casue some disanalogy with physics, where people in the field think that most of the work is actually important; at least there is far less self-doubt about the importance of the field itself. But even given that, I don't think that the unimportant academic philosophers get an unfairly high payment. Is a new book on Kant, however trivial it may be, a lesser contribution than Wall Street trading – indeed, more than a hundred times lesser?

    So while I agree with Anon. Prof. that, on the individual level, one who enters the discipline should be ready to make sacrifices, on a societal level I believe no injustice is being done when funds are being allocated to philosophy or other pure academic disciplines, even if some (or most) of the work is rather unimportant. Of course, this kind of argument is meant to be read by philosophers/physicists/etc. It's not going to work on the general public/government/businesses.

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  39. Robert Yost

    While I'm not a professional philosopher (I currently work in the finance industry) I have often though about going back to graduate school to get a PhD in philosophy. The time and effort that would go into a PhD don't frighten me, and I would love to get out of my cubicle and have some time to think, read, research, and teach philosophy. The thing that keeps me from jumping into a PhD program is the job prospects and the salary. I currently make around $60k per year at the beginning of my career but could easily make over $100k at the midpoint of my career. When I think about my lifestyle up to now and the fact that I am completely supporting my wife and child, I find it difficult to give all that up.

    I have almost settled on just going to get a MA in philosophy, just so I can have more extensive training in the field and "do philosophy" outside the academic world so I can (partially) enjoy the best of both worlds, the intellectual stimulation of philosophy with the money and benefits of a financial career, but I'm not sure if the is really the best path for me.

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  40. Michael Rosen

    Surprising positive (comes after a long time teaching): to see where students are twenty or thirty years later. Not only young people bitten by the philosophy bug who have developed into mature philosophers with an individual voice, but, perhaps more so, those who did not remain in academic life but for whom their time doing philosophy was important and productive. Not everyone, of course, but enough to be very gratifying.

    Surprising negative: how narrow and incurious many philosophers are (and how conventional and unimaginative much work in philosophy is). Philosophy would be (I thought) the place that people went because they wouldn’t drop awkward and insistent questions that didn’t fit into disciplinary constraints. I expected philosophers to be open-minded explorers of ideas.

    I think I can explain the phenomenon. Philosophy is immensely challenging. All of its parts relate to one another and, of course, to all of the different disciplines to which philosophy responds. Yet no one can expect to master them fully, so a defensive reaction is natural. When people meet something outside their background that is potentially challenging the reaction too often is: “If it doesn’t fit in with what I know and work on it, can’t be significant.” Still, it continues to be extremely disappointing.

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  41. Sam Rickless

    That's very humble and honest of you, Bryan, but honestly, if I didn't think I had the "damn answers" I would find a different job…Oh, and just by the way, I still think that your paper in Ancient Philosophy (1996) on Constance Meinwald's interpretation of the Third Man Argument in Plato's Parmenides is the cat's meow. Sorites, schmorites….

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  42. Steven Hales

    It's interesting that you see your negative as so pervasive. It seems to me that the discipline has become more inclusive in the last 20 years—the rise of X-phi, Bayesian approaches in epistemology, evolutionary explanations in ethics, etc. For my part, I've co-authored with both a physicist and an experimental psychologist, which I found incredibly fruitful. I believe it was Searle who remarked that philosophy is so hard because you have to know everything about everything else first. Maybe you know more hedgehogs than foxes.

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  43. PhDStudent

    Surprising negative – not feeling valued. Like many others, I sometimes compare my earnings to those of friends who are not in academia and despair.

    However,

    what's much worse is to hear how my friends are treated at work (by their employers and supervisors) compared to me. I hear about how they are told they are doing a good job, that they are needed/wanted/appreciated, that what they are contributing is important, and the like.

    I worked for a few years (in finance) between my undergrad and starting my PhD program, and during that time I did not experience what I experience pretty much everyday as a PhD student (at a well-ranked department). I did not anticipate feeling as though no faculty in my program, and especially no administrator at the university, would care all that much if I up and disappeared one day. There are, after all, hundreds of people who want my spot. It is hard to work so hard for so little pay, and with such uncertain prospects of employment. But what has been even more difficult is to work so hard for so little and feel, acutely, that no one really cares about you. I received more encouragement delivering pizzas in high school than I do now.

    For a time I just assumed that I was terrible at philosophy, or that I clearly was not a student worth investing in. However, I did graduate from a Ivy league university with a top 10 philosophy department, and also I know most of the other graduate students in my program feel the same. So I doubt my experience is wholly attributable to a lack of talent.

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  44. Anon

    It’s a bit depressing that many of these comments read as if philosophy is under attack by its own people. I’m stumped at how some people here have classified the work of philosophy as unimportant.
    Isn’t the work of philosophy to help clarify thinking about all kinds of issues that have larger implications? Aren’t there important questions to be answered, or at least talked about, relating to things like moral status, justice, etc? Isn’t your work in the classroom teaching students how to become better, more critical thinkers important? Don’t you think your work in the classroom makes your students better people, and thus makes the world a better place—if only in small increments?
    It is true that many of the perks people have mentioned don’t apply to many, many jobs in philosophy. My partner is a philosopher who works at a small regional university. He is tenured and teaches 3/3, which sounds great. BUT his department’s annual budget for 8 people (4 philosophers) is under 12k. There is no travel money. The students are marginal and 2 of his colleagues haven’t presented a paper in the decade he’s been here.

    It’s true, too, that a job in philosophy will most likely require sacrifices of a kind you may not anticipate. A trip to Starbucks is a 2 hour round trip. The nearest escalator is over 2 hours away (there will be children in town who have never ridden one). There are no medical specialists—no dermatologists, ENTs, or child psychologists. You will drive 3 hrs round-trip if you need one. There is no gynecologist. There are very few cultural events (nearly none). There is one place to shop–other than a grocery store and farm supply store—Walmart. The restaurants consist of KFC, McDonalds, Burger King, Hardees, and a few mom and pop places that are still serving fare straight out of the 1970s. The nearest airport is 1.5 hours away, but as it’s a small town airport fares are outrageously expensive.

    And all that is if you’re lucky enough to land a T-T job.
    But, then there are days when you receive emails from students, long since graduated, who thank you and tell you what a difference you’ve made in their life. Or when a student asks you to be present the day she officially becomes an officer in the military because “she couldn’t have done it without you.” Or the days students seek your counsel for things other than philosophy because they respect your opinion and value your counsel.

    And,in between all that, you find time to actually do philosophy. You go to conferences on your own dime. You work on ideas and papers; you submit them. Sometimes they get published. Sometimes they get rejected, but you keep working because you love the discipline.

    All this was really just to say I'm not a philosopher, but I think what philosophers do is almost like a public service for the rest of us. I hope you can see your work and your discipline as I do.

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  45. Bryan Frances

    Obviously, that article of mine is one of the greatest articles ever. But really: who cares about it other than me, you, Meinwald, and maybe a half dozen other people?

    And why do you think you know the answers to the big questions when you also know that a large percentage and number of your approximate peers and superiors disagree with your answers? Do you think you have some magical ace in the hole they have missed out on? Some key epistemic advantage?

    Philosophy is wonderful but epistemically disappointing in certain respects.

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  46. Anonymous

    I am disheartened and deeply, deeply confused by people who say what they are doing is unimportant. I teach undergraduates only and what I do is completely *&%$ing important. And I have no difficulty getting others to recognize this. People from many walks of life are curious about what I do, think it sounds cool, we have great discussions, and so forth.

    Do you want to live in a world without universities? What is your idea of 'importance' anyway? Passing on thousands of years of accumulated knowledge-seeking practice to a new generation is a worthless enterprise? Do you not value your students, and the way you can impact their lives?

    You think being a lawyer is 'more serious'? Than philosophy? It can be–it can be a life or death matter. But do you know what most lawyers actually do?

    Is everyone on this thread watching Fox News all day?

    I do not understand where your heads are at–we are preserving and passing on something of enormous value to the young generation. We are shaping their lives.

    This is only parasitic if you view the practice of acquiring knowledge and the value of the students in college as worthless. This is necessary work. I feel sorry for anyone who thinks this who is a college professor but I cannot even comprehend why you chose this line of work.

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  47. poor

    Here's a second negative, although I recognize that my complaint is probably fueled by self-pity and resentment. The referee process often appears to be random, corrupt, silly, prestige biased, and malicious.

    There are some great referees out there. I don't think my own refereeing has ever been great. But I've received some excellent feedback from others. I sincerely thank you, whoever you might be.

    That said, the process seems random at times. There are some simply terrible referees out there. Many referees are lazy, some are just stupid, and others are mean, but we'll come back to that. Too often my papers are rejected for weird reasons. I've written a lot of not so great stuff, but I've submitted very good papers that get rejected for no sane reason. And it's not just me. I've seen this happen to others as well.

    The process also appears to be corrupt. Networking wouldn't be nearly as important as it is if it weren't for this fact. I suspect that only a very small percentage of papers are truly blind. Philosophy is a small world. . . . I've seen papers published in top places that can't be explained by anything but nepotism and cronyism. There's just no other good explanation. I recognize that I've probably benefited some from this as well.

    The process is often silly. Its' silly in a variety of ways, but I mainly have in mind the tendency of referees to mistake extremely tangled, complicated prose with sophisticated arguments. I'm nearly convinced that the clearer the writing the smaller the chance that a paper will be accepted. Of course, there are exceptions. But this is not an issue confined to SPEP circles. Not even close.

    The process is clearly prestige biased. The lack of genuine anonymity makes this possible. Sometimes I worry that my work doesn't get taken as seriously as it should because of my address. Again, I'm not alone here. This effectively traps those who take positions are no-name schools. I've had irritating comments to the effect of 'This is very good, but I'm not sure it's up to the quality of X." How the hell am I supposed to respond to that?

    And the referee process is too often malicious. Some referees hide behind their anonymity to lash out. It's roughly the same phenomenon that we find all across the internet. But it's also fanned by resentment.

    I might be in a mood today, but the referee process has left me deeply unhappy with the profession. There's nothing quite like spending a year or two on a paper to have it rejected for apparently stupid reasons. This can become maddening. I don't know of many other professions that promise year upon year of frustration.

    I know, I know, we are poor judges of our own work. Perhaps this is all self pity. Perhaps I have a deluded sense of the quality of my own work. But I don't think this is the case, at least it isn't the entire story. I think much of what I've done should be much better than it is. That's clear. Depressive realism. . . . However, I have some things that I am proud, that are cited in draft form several times, that I've had trouble placing. For years.

    The negative comes down to this: I fear that I'm becoming angry and resentful. Combine this with feeling poor, and I have trouble seeing the positives. Last night, as I lay awake, I wondered what I would do if I knew then what I know now. For a few minutes I was certain that I would not have gone to graduate school in philosophy. I would have become and MD as I originally planned before I was bitten by the philosophy bug. But then I had a good class or two today and my opinion changed. I'm not sure what I'll think tomorrow.

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  48. Anonymous

    "Like many others, I sometimes compare my earnings to those of friends who are not in academia and despair."

    It is true that most philosophers don't make a lot of money. My wife is in business and I spend a lot of time with her social group and they all make good incomes as professionals. But just wait until you explain to them that you are going on sabbatical and getting paid to do research for a term off. When I told them this recently, they were completely envious and couldn't imagine getting paid for this. "Wait? You're getting paid to go to Paris and write a book! Seriously?!" There are many perks that come with being a professor and we shouldn't overlook this. You may not always consider some of these aspects of our jobs, but nonacademics will take note of them.

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  49. State Employee

    Along the lines of the relative impotence of philosophy, I have two anecdotes.

    A late summer evening many years ago now, my older brother and I discussed the relative merits of a career in philosophy (me) and a career in law (him). He argued, and I'm paraphrasing, that I may have the most awesome argument in the world for p, but in the end, no *has* to believe me. He, as a lawyer, has at least the force of law: while no one necessarily has to believe him, they have to do what he says if he's right about p.

    I had occasion just this week to reflect on this as I was addressing the University Provost at a recent budget forum (tl;dr: Tea Party budget cuts). I pointed out (politely, but decisively) that he had massively contradicted himself. He agreed, but shrugged his shoulders.

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  50. Anonymous

    "Last night, as I lay awake, I wondered what I would do if I knew then what I know now. For a few minutes I was certain that I would not have gone to graduate school in philosophy. I would have become and MD…"

    How many MD's do you know? I've known a few, and their lives ain't pretty. Yes, there's money, but it's a *brutal* career, leaving little to no time for family, enjoyment of life, etc. Same with law. We get four months a year off. In my experience, this blows just about everyone's mind. My MD friends are jealous of *us*.

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