"As a profession, is philosophy in a better or worse state than it was in 1997?"

That was the question put to ten philosophers in the 10th anniversary issue of The Philosophers' Magazine (which, alas, is not on-line).  Here are some of the answers that struck me as most interesting.

Simon Blackburn (Cambridge University & University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill):

The return of a highly scholastic metaphysics means it's worse:  there is a return of "intuition" masquerading as the a priori and a highly suspect self-image that metaphysics is just like science, except without the need toleave the armchair, which is about parallel to entering Formula 1 races without an engine.  I suspect that political and moral philosophy are better.

While Professor Blackburn thinks the glass is half empty, Jerry Fodor (Rutgers University, New Brunswick) thinks it half full:

It's better in one respect:  Philosophical inquiry is increasingly informed by discussion with adjacent subjects (psychology, biology, cognitive science, physics, and so forth).  In consequence, a priorism is less widely prevalent than it was at the height of the "analytical" philosophy movement.  That's surely a good thing.

Jaakko Hintikka (Boston University), by contrast, seems to be looking at a wholly different glass:

Intellectually, philosophy is now in the same or worse state of stagnation as in 1997.  With a few exceptions, the paradigm of philosophical thinking and writing is no longer like that of a scientist inquiring into the deepest secrets of nature or of the human mind, but an interpreter of the great works of literature or perhaps of a religious teacher interpreting the sacred texts.  The truth of what is commented on is either irrelevant or taken for granted.  For instance, in the immense secondary literature on Wittgenstein, I have never found anything that would help me to understand better the subject matter Wittgenstein was inquiring into.  The main reason for the Byzantine state of affairs is the lack of fresh new ideas that would open up specific problems for philosophers--especially young philosophers--to tackle.

Alasdair MacIntyre (University of Notre Dame), meanwhile, presumably plans to stop writing:

If the philosophy published between 1907 and 1967 were to vanish without a trace, it would be an intellectual catastrophe.  If the philosophy published between 1967 and 1997 were to vanish without trace, it would be a very serious loss.  If the philosophy published between 1997 and 2007 were to vanish similarly, it would matter a little, but not that much.

Colin McGinn (University of Miami) is less gloomy than Professor MacIntyre, but still a bit nostalgic:

Better in some respects, worse in others.  It seems more democratic now, less centralised; but philosophy is not as exciting these days as it used to be.  I'd even say that a kind of graduate student mentality has taken over:  being an expert in "the literature" is too highly prized, while originality is looked on with suspicion.  Also, it's just got more nerdy.  The people are less amusing, shallower, more one-dimensional (I'm speaking generally).

Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago) starts by noting (she is alone among respondents to mention this) that "the job market for young philosophers is considerably worse," meaning that "talented young people are increasingly deterred from choosing philosophy as a career."  She continues:

As for the people who are still in the profession, I think that the basic quality of work in moral and political philosophy is pretty high, but I wonder where the people of large insight and imagination are in the younger generation, people with the sort of humanistic breadth exemplified by [Bernard] Williams.  I sometimes think that we are becoming smaller, and that it would be a good thing if people who wrote on moral and political philosophy read more novels and poems, and spent more time encountering real human beings in different parts of the world.

John Searle (University of California, Berkeley) sounds a note of optimism, pointing to "the increasing 'globalisation' of philosophy," noting that one can "go to just about any major university in the world and lecture in English to audiences who are sophisticated, informed, and enthusiastic about philosophy."  Peter Singer (Princeton University & University of Melbourne) is similarly upbeat (and even more succinct):

In better shape.  At least so it seems to me--there appear to be more philosophers being widely read, beyond the profession, and a broader public interest in philosophy than there was 10 years ago.

So what do philosophers think?  Do you share the diagnoses of the philosophers quoted above?  It would be especially interesting to know whether younger philosophers are as gloomy as many of those senior scholars quoted above (McGinn, at 57, and Nussbaum, at 60 are the youngest philosophers quoted).

Post only once; signed comments are more likely to appear; as always, comments are reviewed for substance and relevance.

Comments

[Tony Lloyd]

Is Alasdair MacIntyre really surprised, shocked or dismayed that 60 years of philosophy is a more vital a body of work than 30 years which is, in turn, a more vital body of work than the product of just 10 years?

[George Wrisley]

Regarding McGinn's comment on the lack of originality of young philosophers, as someone who has just recently defended his dissertation (12-4-07), I wonder whether there is not a fear on the part of young(er) philosophers who may have the impression that one must publish, publish, publish, or else. That is, one may believe (hopefully falsely) that in order to publish, one needs to have read extensively AND not be too radical or original for fear of reviewers thinking one is crazy, stupid, etc. (If there is any truth to McGinn's complaint, I am not suggesting that the fear of going unpublished is the only factor.)

[Tomáš Sobek]

I think, the philosophy slowly retreats from two noxious extremes, analytic sterility (formal technicalities for little group of scholars) on one side and postmodern babble (fashionable nonsenses for everybody) on the other side.

[Jon Cogburn]

I think Blackburn is right on with respect to metaphysics. It absolutely boggles my mind that the field has not taken to heart Kripke's admonitions about Quine's criteria for ontological commitment from his substitutional quantification paper. If they did, then a great deal of the current stuff on presentism would begin to look pretty useless. In general, there is just too much uncritical reading metaphysics off of logical frameworks (which are multiply interpretable in any case) and too much logical semantics for natural languages done by philosophers that don't take into account any of the highly relevant work in the Montagovian tradition, and by this I include people more friendly to transformational syntax but who still pursue a rigorous compositional syntax-semantics interface Heim, Kratzer (whose work on modals in particular has been shamefully neglected), Chierchia, etc.

I think that Hintikka is partially right. History of Philosophy has rebelled way too much against the supposed excesses of Bennett (who sometimes reads as if he's berating Kant for not having read Quine). The nadir of this was the reception of Sorabchi's take-down of Nusbaum and Putnam for suggesting that Aristotle might be relevant to debates concerning contemporary functionalism. The end result of this is that it becomes much less clear why we're deeply studying history of philosophy at all. I like to think I can learn some truth from reading Schopenhauer, and the sort of logic games involved in coming up with the best reading (independent of relevance to the greater dialectic and plausibility for that matter) if done to the exclusion of everything else reduces history of philosophy to at best history of ideas. Much better to follow Habermas, who in the Philosophical Discourses of Modernity endeavors to engage in conversation with the great thinkers he assays. What makes a philosopher great is that their insights and frameworks are fruitful over and over again in different contexts. If we just study them with the idea of discerning what they really believed, then we thus rob them of their greatness.

My caveat to Hintikka's point is that there is some pretty amazing historically informed philosophy taking place now. In particular, Mark Wilson's magesterial "Wandering Significance" is immensely informed by the history of applied mathematics and how early twentieth century philosophers were reacting to this history. Likewise, Michael Friedman's fascinating ideas come out of a very deep lifelong engagement with the logical positivists, and their intellectual milieu (including Friedman's fascinating take on Heidegger and Cassirer).

Most academic philosophy published at any given time is going to be non-distinguished, and it would be immense vanity to think otherwise. It's just part of the human condition that it is very hard to discover something both non-trivial and plausible. As a result, it will always seem as if the field is getting worse. As long as we don't enter a new dark ages, then thirty years from now, people will focus on the the greats among us such as Wilson and Friedman, and think that this was a really good period.

[Justin Capes]

I agree with Fodor that the fact that philosophy is informed by adjacent subjects is a good thing. As a fan of scholastic metaphysics, I disagree with Blackburn. But both seem to think that appeals to (a priori?) intuition are, if not incompatible, at least incongruous with being informed by other disciplines. I don't see why that should be the case.

[Matt Weiner]

Martha Nussbaum says that "the job market for young philosophers is considerably worse." Is this really true of 2007 as opposed to 1997?

[harry b]

Ther emight be a connection between McGinn's speculation that the discipline is more democratic and Nussbaum's worry that there's a derath of young philosophers who are original and heterodox; simply that the more democratic and diffuse nature of the profession makes it harder for the latter to show up (even though they are there).

In general, the discipline is much more specialised than it was even 20 years ago; my guess is that very few people under 60 work in more than one area, whereas 30 years ago many would have done. I think this is a bad thing, but inevitable. In my own field (political philosophy) I am struck by how much better (more techincally proficient, less full of errors) the work of younger philosophers seems than it seemed when I was starting out (15-20 years ago). But that may be a combination of me being extremely good at not noticing the rubbish, and having graduate students who are better than I was as a grad student.

[Barry Loewer]

Philosophy of Science (I notice that none of the comments are by a philosopher of science) is in much better shape the last 15 or so years than it was the previous thirty when disputes over "realism", Kuhn vs Popper, and confusions about fundamental physics dominated. In the last decade there has been really significant work by philosophers on the foundations of quantum mechanics, relativity, statistical mechanics, philosophy of biology, the cognitive sciences and in those areas of philosophy (parts of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics) that have paid attention to this work. Fodor (who is usually as cynical and pessimistic as Eyeore-"the glass is broken") is right. Those parts of philosophy that have kept in touch with the sciences are doing fine.

[Kevin S.]

I have aspired to become a professional moral philosopher but postponed pursuit of a graduate degree in 2003 because the wider field then seemed dominated by approaches which didn't resonate with me and were insulating the field. The 'a priorism', which Blackburn says is on the decline, seemed to insulate philosophy from engaging insights in other fields. Also, while most in academia have seemed to value interdisciplinary work in their rhetoric, I am doubtful that the job prospects for young philosophers who do interdisciplinary work will be all that good for some time to come. It seems to me that the route to success requires making a name for oneself in a narrow subfield and, after achieving tenure, one can later engage in interdisciplinary work. Maybe this belief is outdated or has always been wrong. I'd like to know what others think.

I agree with McGinn that mastery of 'the literature' seems very highly prized. For the first few years after college, I repeatedly went back over texts which I thought were important but felt I hadn't sufficiently mastered as an undergrad. Today, I spend most of my free time reading philosophy texts which I was never assigned. I rarely read any novels, though I often attend gallery openings and partake in several forms of theatre (political as well as the properly dramatic).

I've spent my time since college gaining 'real world' experience (i.e. working for a wage) with the hope that these extra-philosophical experiences will inform my work if I join the profession later in life. I'm especially hopeful that this will help me to secure employment in the field since I've often seen postings for applied ethicists in the wanted section of the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

[Les Green]

It is interesting that so many choose to avoid the question that Phil Mag asked: "*As a profession,* is philosophy in a better or worse state..." Instead, they tell us their views on the question whether *philosophy itself* is in a better or worse state. Answers to the second question seem to reflect the extent to which a given period represents the sort of the philosophy that the respondent likes to do.

So, back to the other question. Are younger philosophers in any sense less professional than their elders? (It is sometimes said among lawyers that theirs used to be a profession but is now merely a business, and that that there is a related decline in professionalism amongst younger lawyers.)

Or perhaps philosophy isn't a profession at all: our relevant professions are teacher, writer, pundit...?

[Eric Schliesser]

I just taught a historically rich survey course about philosophy of mind (not my AOS). Between 1960 and 1980 (say from early Putnam and Smart through, say, Dennett, Nagel, the Churchlands, Fodor, Burge, to Searle's chinese room) a lot of classic papers are incredibly rich and despite the Positivist strictures that are in the air, struggle impressively with holding a grip on lots of tacit and not so tacit issues in proper method, philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaphysics. (While the computer metaphor is very dominant, there is also a surprising amount of borrowing from economics and rational choice theory.) By the mid 80s the field gets very boring because all the --isms start to get introduced in order to straighten things out (let's call this the era in which Kim rules). When I was a graduate student in 1997 lots of papers in philosophy of mind were derivative--I wish I could forget how I yawned my way through presentations about yet another epicycle put on XYZ or Swampman! Yet, in last few years, philosophy of mind seems very exciting again with folks (the late Susan Hurley, Jesse Prinz, Alva Noe, Shaun Gallagher, Marc Slors, etc) drawing on various sciences (linguistics, neuro-science, visual science, social cognition, etc) and even borrowings from Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, etc. To an outsider, debates are very stimulating again.
About contemporary history of philosophy. I don't think the incomparable Michael Friedman is entirely alone in making well researched history matter today; one can also look at the work done by Paul Franks (Toronto), Abe Stone (Santa Cruz), Vasillis Politis (Dublin), Gary Hatfield (Penn), or any of the debates among Humeans and Kantians in contemporary moral philosophy.

[Historian on the job market]

From the perspective of a (very) young historian of philosophy, if I understand Prof. Hintikka's comments, they seem to be exactly backwards. Many of us who do deeply contextual histories of philosophy, histories that ignore the question of whether the views under consideration are true, are motivated precisely by the fact that we can't quite make out why much philosophy now, which as Prof. Blackburn says, can be very scholastic, is supposed to be interesting. We turn to history as a means of trying to understand why anybody ever has thought philosophy was interesting, with the hopes that we might one day be able to bring some lessons learned from the past into the present.

(Sorry for the anonymity, but these aren't views of philosophy I'm comfortable expressing while I'm on the market.)

[John Protevi]

Both Les Green and Eric Schliesser make good points. Regarding Green's point, it would seem some empirical measures would help us judge the state of philosophy as a profession: how many TT jobs are there now vs 1997, both absolutely, and relative to the total number of philosophers employed? how many philosophy departments have been merged with religious studies departments? how many philosophers are faculty members, but outside philosophy departments? the 2003 report by the APA committee on the status and future of the profession http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/governance/committees/status/report2003.html wasn't very helpful regarding those questions. maybe someone else can point us to better data?

Regarding Schliesser's comment, one of the areas I'm most interested in, 4EA cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, affective), was hardly noticeable in 1997, but is very lively today. Besides the people Schliesser mentions, there's also Andy Clark, Mike Wheeler, Evan Thompson, Sean Kelly, Mark Rowlands, Paul Griffiths and many others making excellent contributions.

[Kris]

I don't understand why people use "scholastic" as an insult. I'm a scholastic, and proud of it.

Scholastics care about carefully formulating philosophical questions, carefully distinguishing
different answers to a given question, carefully distinguishing different reasons one might have for accepting a given answer to a given question, and carefully defending some of those reasons for accepting a given answer to a given question. The best scholastic philosophers stated the view they wanted to defend, articulated a prima facie case for the view, articulated a prima facie case against the view, and then presented an explanation for why the view is right (or wrong) and an explanation for why one might have thought otherwise. That's what Aquinas did, that's what most philosophers do, and it seems to be working pretty good so far.

One does (scholastic?) philosophy well only if one cares about attention to detail, getting the facts right, and arguing rigorously. That philosophy has become more scholastic is a good thing, not something to be embarrassed about. That views undergo epicycles, minor tweaks in light of new arguments, etc., is not to be condemned but rather to be hoped for and welcomed. Sometimes a cost is that the field becomes a little bit boring. But tough noogies. If we care about truth, we will learn to live (sometimes) with less excitement.

One of the reasons why the advances made by early 20th century philosophers are so important is that they make possible a higher degree of scholasticism than otherwise achievable. Perhaps I feel this way because I am young, but far from being gloomy, I feel that we are on the cusp of a golden age for philosophy. We have inherited from our postivistic ancestors a healthy respect for logic, language, and the sciences, while discarding their dogmas about which questions can be fruitfully pursued; advances in transportation and communication technology have had a humongous impact on the speed in which arguments can be discussed and refined, and in which results can be disseminated; social advances have opened up the field to those traditionally excluded from it (although much work remains to be done on this front); and I would bet that the sheer number of working philosophers now is higher than at any point in the past. Many of us will be "under-laborers", helping to refine or develop various research programs. It is wonderful that there is a place for us, that there is work for us, that we can help advance systematic philosophical research.

[Stephan Johnson]

Could it be that this question should be asked of those not in the field of philosophy? It seems to me that the health of the field is best judged by those not actually in it. Philosophers who have contact with researchers outside philosophy are probably best in a position to judge that, but even that is indirect at best. In my conversations with post-modernists, one gets the impression that they've never been more relevant, but that certainly isn't obvious. So maybe The Philosophers Magazine should ask this question of a sampling of writers, scientists, artists, politicians, etc. It would be interesting to contrast their answers with those well known philosophers mentioned above.

[Reid Fontaine]

My immediate thought at reading MacIntyre's response was captured in the first comment by Lloyd. I think MacIntyre was trying to make a statement about the decline of philosophical importance, but the length-of-period confound makes it difficult to take clear meaning from it. Also, I wonder if there may be a second confound - that is, how much time has expired since the end of each period. What effect might this have on how importance of a period or body of work is perceived/discerned?

[Eric Schliesser]

The epicycles become possible when our assumptions about which topics are relevant and which starting points are unproblematic are not questioned; one lives in dogmatic philosophical times when discussion of epicycles predominate. One can be a scholastic in Kris' sense without being dogmatic (or living in dogmatic times). So his pride in his scholasticism is not to be belittled. Nevertheless, the scholastic mindset does not have a monopoly on attention to detail, getting the facts right, and arguing rigorously.
Finally, whatever all the things Locke meant by being an "under-laborer," he was not meant to refine or develop various research programs; the rubbish he is trying to clear away is the left-over jargon from discarded Scholastic epicycles whose unquestioned dogmas have been swept away by developments in the medical and 'scientific' branches of learning, which draw on and ought to inspire what kris calls "systematic philosophical research."

[Iain]

There's an old Larson cartoon of the four basic personality types: half-full, half-empty, indecisive, and "Hey! I ordered a cheeseburger!"... taking that on board, read into the survey what you will.

Nevertheless, without wanting to get too embroiled in debates about which account is correct, one very obvious point strikes me about MacIntyre's point, which is that to say that the loss of the work of 60 years would be worse than the loss of that of 10 is hardly Earth-shattering: one would expect more important work to emerge from a 6 decade period than from a one-decade period simply because there's six times as many decades for it to emerge. Moreover, if philosophy today is in less good shape than it was in the first half of the last century, that doesn't necessarily tell us that it's in too bad a shape today: it's possible that the first half of the last century simply happened to be unusually fertile in certain fields.

(For what it's worth, BTW, and whatever the state of metaphysics or epistemology (I'm out of the loop on them), ethics and political philosophy today are much more vibrant than they were a century ago...)

[Christian Perring]

One of the main ways that philosophy has become more socially relevant since the first half of the twentieth century is in the growth of social philosophy and applied ethics. One of the main complaints that mainstream philosophers (and Brian Leiter has been vocal in this) is that areas like medical ethics are philosophically unsophisticated. I tend to defend applied ethics as a form of interdisciplinary study, and that kind of dialog between people from different disciplines does tend to mean that some subtleties get lost, at least at the start of the dialog. But picking up on Fodor's point, I like to think that applied/interdisciplinary philosophy is gradually becoming more sophisticated, and that the areas of "applied ethics" and "medical ethics" are becoming philosophically richer.

[John A.]

I find these comments very interesting. Drawing from my manufacturing background it seems to me that if there is a problem with the quality of the present generation of people doing philsophy then the root cause of the problem is with those who trained them. If you want to improve the quality of the product you must improve the means by which the product is developed. What is the old saying, "physician heal thyself?"

[Kris]

Eric wrote:

'The epicycles become possible when our assumptions about which topics are relevant and which starting points are unproblematic are not questioned; one lives in dogmatic philosophical times when discussion of epicycles predominate.'

If 'when' here means 'when and only when', then I don't think this statement is true. Although epicycles could become possible in a situation in which assumptions about problematicity and relevance aren't criticized, that sort of situation needn't obtain in order to generate epicycles. Nor is it the situation that I believe in fact obtains.

Rather, epicycles have become possible because a sufficient number of philosophers believe that a research program is *worth pursuing*, that certain argumentative strategies would *benefit from greater attention to detail*, and that they have the ability to communicate results in a timely fashion.

One could have these beliefs without being narrow-minded, dogmatic, or uncritical about one's assumptions. I bet most active participants in these epicycles in fact lack these traits. That epicycles dominate discussion does not mean that one lives in dogmatic times.

[Christopher Gauker]

Ten years ago we were still playing out the debate between different theories of reference and representation (covariationist, teleosemantical, mapping, etc.). The debate between robust and deflationary theories of truth was picking up. "Connectionism versus the language of thought" was still a live issue. We were in the midst of a lively debate over theories of interpretation -- theory-theory versus simulation theory. The externalism/internalism debate, already twenty years old, was still going strong. All of those issues, it appears to me, have fizzled or stalled. (Consciousness was just coming over the horizon at the time.) Now we have other hot topics. Some of these are very interesting and worth thinking about, I'm sure (e.g., the place of context in semantics). But it seems that the profession is taking a breather from the central problems of mind-meets-world. I hope we can get back to those soon.

I have the impression that the APA meetings are less important than they used to be. That could be checked by looking at attendance. Probably the slack is taken up by other conferences. I'm not sure the situation with respect to publishing in philosophy is altogether satisfactory. Oxford UP is doing a great job, publishing a lot of useful collections as well as monographs. But it's not a good thing that one press is so dominant. We have some very strong, actively edited journals, but some other important journals have gone to a kind of robotic editing, which is not a good thing. I wonder whether journals are as important as they used to be for bringing out new ideas. It seems that a lot of the most original work comes out in these edited collections. If so, that's a mark against inclusiveness, since those require an invitation.

[Eric Schliesser]

While Kris may be more informed on this, I don't think in 'our' time epicycles *dominate* discussion. (The implied contrast is the brief dark age in philosophy of mind in which -- with the distorting effects of hindsight -- papers had to confront a limited number of thought experiments, XYZ, Zombies, Inverted Spectrum, Swampman, etc.) While I am not a contributor to contemporary analytic metaphysics (although I like to think that some of my papers on, say, the history of thinking about causation in Newton or Hume could be informative to those that are), it appears in very vibrant state for the kind of reasons that Kris advocates. The discussions can get very technical, of course, and may sometimes only appear motivated as a response to recent literature (rather than -- ahum -- the vision thing). A lot of (formerly sacred) principles appear regularly up for grabs in the papers I have read and heard. While some might bemoan the lack of a dominating philosopher -- perhaps it is fair to say that the *spirit* of David Lewis predominant? --, we seem to be living in an age where lots of research programs are pursued simultaneously by partially overlapping groups of participants.

[Robert Gressis]

I don't find MacIntyre's remark puzzling. Sure, sixty years is more time for philosophy to develop than thirty or ten years, but there are surely many more philosophers today than there were in 1907 or 1967. Moreover, it wouldn't surprise me if the typical contemporary philosopher was more productive than the typical 1907 or 1967 philosopher. Admittedly, sixty years allows a lot more time for ideas to ferment than thirty or ten years, but similarly a lot more philosophers working on a lot more problems should also have its advantages about the kind of progress that can be made, should it not? Add to this the speed of information transfer now available to us moderns, and MacIntyre's comparison seems to me to be pretty apt.

[Tad Brennan]

Perhaps MacIntyre's statement can be seen to have more point if we reflect that the sixty years that he prefers to the most recent decade may have produced far fewer published words--fewer monographs, dissertations, journal articles, and so on.

It may be that his point is not "I think more of value was done in sixty years than in ten"--an unsurprising claim--but rather "I think more of value was said in that earlier, smaller corpus than in the much larger, more recent corpus."

How much more is published now per year? I don't know, but the numbers are available.
How much more of philosophical value is published now per year? Ah. That would be a tougher algorithm.

But in any case, I don't think MacIntyre's claim is empty, or a trivial consequence of his having chosen unequal time-intervals.

[Charlie Huenemann]

I think it's fairly uncontroversial that the pressure to publish has grown significantly over the last ten years, simply because of the economics and machinery of higher ed. This probably has forced many scholars, both junior and senior, to get things into print which perhaps didn't really need to be said, or are only of tangential interest. So even if there still is a lot of interesting work being done, the percentage of high-quality books and articles has dropped, and there is a lot of pressure to carve out a little area of expertise in which you can publish regularly. Philosophers also have to pay more and more attention these days to 'networking' and linking up to successful publishing programs (getting on the moving bus, so to speak, no matter where it's headed). Upshot: lots more chaff to sort through!

[Mark Silcox]

Nobody has rung the gong of economic determinism here yet, so I guess I will. I agree with McGinn - philosophy has gotten less centralized and consequently nerdier. This is because the brightest people with fresh doctorates now believe that the next step in their careers is to get a job somewhere - please God, anywhere! - rather than to find a niche in some department where they've got a real chance of finding intellectual companionship.

[Almost ABD]

I think Nussbaum is right about philosophy's troubles as a humanistic discipline. I think that it has a lot to do with declining litercay. Williams, to take Nussbaum's example, had (usually very profound) things to say about Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Goethe, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Sidgwick, but also on Hare, Rawls, Scanlon, McDowell and many others. And also on Opera.
How many people can pull that off any more? Perhaps MacIntyre, Taylor and Nussbaum (and maybe 2 or 3 others), and they are all in fairly advanced stages of their carrers. I doubt that many young philosophers are reading their way in that direction. I can personally testify that reading blogs does not improve one's ability to sit down and read 600-pages tomes, and (AFAICT) I seriously doubt that 4 hours of Facebook a day are helping college students become serious readers either. Well, W/E.

[(hopefully a) future grad student]

Related to the thread on the inclusiveness of philosophy:

I am currently applying to graduate programs, but decided to only apply to one Philosophy program despite philosophy being what I am primarily interested in reading, writing, and teaching. The reason is simply that I don't feel that most Philosophy programs would encourage the kind of interdisciplinary work I'm interested in doing (-contextually sensitive- study of how/why we ask the questions we ask and know what it is we know...Mark Wilson's book is a wonderful example as is some of Foucault). I'm tending more towards History and History of Science programs despite what I really want to do being "properly" philosophical and not "merely" history of ideas or study of the past. I'm interested in the present context more than any particular past era, and that, it seems to me, should be perfectly acceptable in a Philosophy department. Applied ethics and some political philosophy is all I'm familiar with that might encourage this, but I'm not particularly interested in limited myself to either, having more concern for the mind, metaphysics, language, etc.

Also, despite the analytic/Continental debate having become passe in casual discussion, it still seems that I am at a reasonable disadvantage as a student equally interested in Parfit and Heidegger. I get the sense that if in my statement of purpose for most Phil PhD programs I would be honest regarding my deep interest in seriously studying Heidegger, even though I am also interested in many "analytic thinkers" as well, I simply wouldn't be seen as a "fit". I know this is a generational thing that is gradually going away, and most people my age that I know couldn't care less about analytic/Continental if they are even aware of the distinction at all. But still, it makes things a little more difficult now for me to do the kind of Philosophy I want to do.

On a related note, I know that I reduced my inclusive but precise ideas and passions to institutionalized fields and lightly shaped my applications for the specific programs I was applying to so that I might have a chance at getting in. I wonder how much this phenomenon...at the level of grad school, publishing, and getting tenure...contributes to the cited (and supposed) lack of originality among younger scholars.

[Wes Anderson]

The general attitude I sense from the quotes (more particularly however, Fodor's and Nussbaum's remarks) makes me feel that my decision to go into philosophy AND cognitive science in grad school is well-reasoned.

[Michael Huemer]

As far as I can tell, philosophy is in pretty much the same state now as it was in 1997. But blogs have become more prominent.

[L. A. Paul]

Things were so much better when I was young. These kids today--they just don't do philosophy like we used to...

[Alex]

And you - and all the philosophers interviewed - live in the USA, that's a better place for philosohers, in particular for the job market. You should try Europe or, even worse, Italy. I'm taking a PhD in moral philosophy, researching in the field of sport ethics: I find very little literature in italian, and less people who knows what I'm talking about when I say "sport ethics"...

[Aaron Garrett]

"Things were so much better when I was young. These kids today--they just don't do philosophy like we used to..."

True dat. I remember when I was young and philosophers could explain forcing arguments while juggling and writing learned essays on Nicole D'Oresme with their feet. Now the kids can hardly eat without a bib.

[Tomáš Sobek]

Dear Alex. I live and work in the Czech Republic. My topic is the free will problem. No literature in czech (realy nothing) and everybody laugh at the term "illusionism". Sorry Saul Smilansky. ;)

[Mike Austin]

Kevin S. says that “The 'a priorism', which Blackburn says is on the decline, seemed to insulate philosophy from engaging insights in other fields.”
This may be true in fact--I have no idea--but it surely need not be true in principle. If I am a fallibilist with respect to a priori insights, but still think they are crucial to philosophy as well as reasoning in general [see Laurence BonJour’s In Defense of Pure Reason (Cambridge, 1997)] then I might have a belief which I take to be justified a priori that I then give up in light of new evidence from another field.

[Brian Weatherson]

I was a little shocked by Charlie Huenemann's claim that the pressure to publish had grown over the last ten years. (And this is apparently uncontroversial.) I can't remember quite when the RAE kicked in, so maybe this is true in the UK over this time period. But I'd doubt very much it is true in America, or Australia. The external pressures to publish (from Deans, research councils etc) seems pretty similar to what it was in 1997. And the internal to the profession pressure to publish is I think on the decline. It's much easier to develop a philosophical reputation through blogs, conference participation etc now than it was 10 years ago I think. So I'd say all things considered that the pressure in question is slightly lower.

That's to say (and I think I'm agreeing with Michael Huemer here) a lot of the big-picture trends in the profession were well entrenched by 1997 - it's not like it was a totally different time to the present.

[John Turri]

Brian (Weatherson),

The pressure on graduate students to publish has certainly increased over the last ten years.

It is much easier now than ten years ago to develop a philosophical reputation through blogging. I'd wager that this is because blogs did not exist ten years ago. ;)

[George Wrisley]

Following up on John Turri's reply to Brian Weatherson, the impression that I and (at least the majority of) my colleagues have had as grad students (I feel safe to speak for them on this matter), is that since we are not coming from a top ranked university, and since there are so many people on the job market who are or who have already had tt jobs and publications, etc., then we better publish, and do it often and quickly. We could, of course, be operating under a false impression. And it is not really clear how much "status" non-peer-reviewed blogging will achieve, nor will it land you a much coveted line on your CV. I would agree that conference presentations are a good way to get to know people, and that is certainly as important, if not more so, than it ever was.

[Brian Weatherson]

I don't doubt that there's a lot of pressure to publish now. But 10 years ago wasn't so different. Indeed, the ratio of new PhDs to available entry-level jobs was, I believe, significantly higher 10 years ago than it is now. Hence there was more pressure on every front, including more pressure to publish. And there were fewer outlets (conferences, blogs etc) to relieve that pressure.

I just don't see any reason to believe some of these comparative claims when the only evidence cited is how tough things are now. They are difficult for new grad students now; that's consistent with it being even more difficult 10 years ago.