A graduate student at a German university writes:
I am a philosophy student at [a university in Germany] and will start with my PhD thesis soon. Because I am contemplating heavily whether I should write it in English or not, I have the following question for the philosophical community - and I guess/hope that it will be of great interest for many of the Leiter Reports' readers outside the English-speaking world:
"Imagine your philosophy department - in the English-speaking world - has a free postdoctoral position and it is up to you to decide who will get the job. Do you take into account a candidate who has published in, say, German, French or Spanish? Do you hold in esteem a paper in the, e.g., "Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung" at all? Has a candidate who has written (and published) his PhD thesis in a foreign language any real chance to get the job? Thanks a lot for your comments!"
My guess is that a lot depends on the area of philosophy in which the student is writing. While historians of philosophy are often actively engaged with scholarship in languages other than English, this seems to me, at least anecdotally, to be much more rare among those working in various contemporary fields, from philosophy of language to ethics to epistemology. In consequence, a German student working in, say, philosophy of mind would probably encounter a very basic obstacle to being taken seriously in Anglophone departments, namely, the inability of most philosophers to read the work. What do others think? Usual rules on comments apply.
