Another udpate has been made to the original post--a posting which I've also learned (upon my return to Austin) has called forth a torrent of personal abuse on some philosophy blogs from anonymous, and largely self-deluded, individuals. A few observations about the list of young philosophers who garnered the most job offers:
1. I posted this information because readers asked for it, indeed, had been asking for it since last year, when Sam Cumming (PhD, Rutgers; AOS: Philosophy of Language; now at UCLA) got more offers from top departments than anyone I can recall since Gideon Rosen. Moreover, various folks posting in the comments on the hiring thread had already been noting multiple offers, and the information presented is well-known to many folks participating in the hiring process at top schools. I have always operated on the premise that more information, widely disseminated, is a good thing, especially for students. The list of the most successful job seekers does indeed track both the overall and especially the specialty rankings from prior years in the PGR, and the spectacular success of graduates of some programs is surely pertinent professional information for prospective students to be aware of. (Remember: job placement is a backward-looking measure of program quality, tracking past faculty quality, not present.) If large numbers of faculty at NYU, MIT, Michigan, and Pittsburgh know about these young philosophers, I am, in any case, hard-pressed to see why others already in or entering the profession should not know about them as well.
2. My criterion for listing was at least two tenure-track offers from top ten departments plus other tenure-track offers from top twenty departments. There were, of course, other excellent candidates who garnered multiple offers, but this benchmark seemed to do reasonably well.
3. I was simply amazed to discover that some anonymous individuals in Cyberspace did not think that multiple offers from top departments were a good indicator of philosophical talent. How do these folks think hiring decisions are made? The work of these young philosophers was scrutinized in excruciating detail by dozens and dozens of established philosophers, who appraised it favorably. Philosophical excellence is not a natural kind; to the extent it exists, it emerges from the consensus of philosophers. In the case of these young philosophers, the consensus is clear.
I realize that information about the successful can provoke resentment and envy among some, but those in the grips of such emotions ought to be a bit more self-conscious about how transparent their motivations are when they "shoot the messenger"!
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