I confess I've never seen anything like it in 25+ years of watching these things. There are jobs expressing serious interest in post-Kantian Continental philosophy at Berkeley, Notre Dame, Rice, Boston College, Harvard, Durham, William & Mary, Haverford, among other places! The old "core analytic" is dying, but the much-neglected post-Kantian Continental seems to be enjoying a new "market demand."
Perhaps Anglophone departments have figured out that (1) post-Kantian Continental philosophy is a magnet for enrollments, given how interesting and influential across disciplines figures like Marx and Nietzsche and Foucault are, and (2) the quality of the candidates teaching in this area is now as high as in any other specialty?
One big advantage of having turned over the PGR burden to others is that I can now speak much more freely about what I think about trends in academic philosophy. My prediction is that the most successful departments going forward will be those that offer serious coverage of post-Kantian philosophers on the European Continent.
Bias and neglect of non-Western philosophy in Anglphone departments is very real, but hardly surprising, given the remoteness of language and culture; much more surprising has always been the neglect of European philosophy of the last two centuries: translations of these figures are widely available; the ideas of the great 19th-century thinkers in particular permeate the entire curriculum in Western universities; and, perhaps most importantly, there are now a large number of serious young scholars--in terms of basic scholarly discipline and philosophical competence--working on these issues. For a long time, there was clearly an issue about finding young philosophers interested in the post-Kantian traditions who were not muddleheads. That time is now past. The best young scholars working on the post-Kantian Continental traditions are as good as the best scholars of early modern or ancient philosophy, not to mention the latest expert on the metaphysics of grounding!
The idea that any good department, whether at the PhD level or the undergraduate level, would not have a specialist in the rich European traditions post-Kant will soon, I am hopeful, become a relic of the past.
ADDENDUM: When I talk about post-Kantian Continental philosophy, I mean the German Idealists (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Foucault--I do not mean charlatans like Zizek or the latest silliness out of Paris. It's the former figures who now regularly attract excellent and philosophically informed scholarship, and it is these figures that the recent job ads are targetting.
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