This past year, Princeton lost senior faculty members Beatrice Longuenesse (Kant, Continental Philosophy) and Scott Soames (philosophy of language, history of analytic philosophy) to New York University and the University of Southern California, respectively, and tenure-track faculty Mark Greenberg (philosophy of mind, philosophy of law) to UCLA and David Sussman (Kant, ethics) to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The distinguished moral philosopher Michael Smith from the ANU had, of course, accepted an offer early last fall (to start this fall), and during the course of this year Princeton has already hired two tenure-track faculty: Desmond Hogan (Kant, early modern) out of Yale, and Thomas Kelly (epistemology, ethics) out of Harvard, who is on tenure-track at Notre Dame.
The last half-dozen years, however, have been generally rough ones for the Princeton department, which for most of the two decades prior to that was clearly the dominant department in the field. Harry Frankfurt, Richard Jeffrey and Saul Kripke retired (Jeffrey has since died); David Lewis and Margaret Wilson passed away. To be sure, there were other notable appointments during this time in philosophy or cognate units at Princeton, including Daniel Garber, Philip Pettit, and Jim Pryor. But as recent PGR survey results have shown, Princeton now shares the "top" with NYU and Rutgers, with anecdotal evidence suggesting a generation gap in how Princeton is viewed vis-a-vis the newer competition.
But now the Princeton Department is making an aggressive move, having voted out tenured offers to three highly regarded younger philosophers--Delia Graff (philosophy of language, philosophical logic) at Cornell University; John Hawthorne (philosophy of language, epistemology, early modern philosophy) at Rutgers University, New Brunswick; and Tim Maudlin (philosophy of science and physics, metaphysics), also at Rutgers--as well as a tenure-track offer to Michael Fara (philosophy of language), a recent Princeton graduate who is now on tenure-track at Cornell. Maudlin, the most senior of this group, is only in his 40s, so these recruitments, if successful, would give Princeton a powerful cluster of some of the best philosophers in their generation. These appointments would also, in all likelihood, push Princeton ahead of Rutgers and perhaps NYU as well (though not, in my judgment, in a way comparable to Princeton's dominance in, say, the 1980s--but I imagine reasonable opinion will vary on that score--and certainly not like Harvard's dominance in the 1960s).
Of course, it is harder now for any department to "dominate" the field, since there don't appear to be any longer philosophers who clearly set the research agendas for almost everyone else, in the way, say, that David Lewis or W.V.O. Quine or Donald Davidson or John Rawls did--perhaps Jerry Fodor at Rutgers University comes closest. John McDowell at the University of Pittsburgh is regarded by some as occupying such a role, but is viewed by many others as a collection of philosophical muddles wrapped in obscurity. (By contrast, no one disputed the central importance of, e.g., Quine or Rawls.) The professionalization of philosophy has resulted in a proliferation of competing research programs, none of which, at present, dominates the others. Will this change over the next decade? I'm doubtful, but we'll see...
Hopefully, we'll know about the outcome of the ambitious Princeton recruitments before the next set of PGR surveys in the early fall.
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