SOME PHILOSOPHY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
How Long Does a Ph.D. in Philosophy Take?
A Ph.D. can take anywhere from four years beyond a bachelor's
degree to as many as ten years. (The average is about six.)
The key determining factors include:
-- your need for cash (if you have to work while studying,
the degree naturally takes longer),
-- how focused your study is (if you know what you want
to specialize in on, it becomes easier to take courses
and write a dissertation which are mutually reinforcing),
-- how well you pace yourself (graduate school, especially
in the humanities, gets harder as you go, so the end stages
tend to take longer).
Here comes the bitter part. It follows from this that
the natural enemies to a quick degree include whatever
tends to diminish focus and encourage untethered intellectual
curiosity--the very things that made you love philosophy
in the first place!
By the way, your need for cash will probably not be as
great as you may anticipate, since nearly every program
offers support to nearly all of their students. And support
often means full tuition waived plus a yearly stipend which
typically ranges from eight to sixteen thousand.
How Do Graduate School and Law School Differ?
One difference has already been implied. Law school tends
to get easier as you go. The first year is packed with
exams and crunch courses, intended to weed students out;
if you make it through that, your chances of successfully
graduating are greatly increased. Graduate school in philosophy,
on the other hand, tends to get harder.
The first graduate year or two consist of field courses,
usually culminating in a wider exam in logic and some core
areas. These are followed in year three by an oral exam
in a more focused area, often the area you expect to eventually
specialize in for your dissertation. (Sometimes the exams
are collectively referred to as the "qualifying exam.")
Once you've cleared these hurdles, you write a proposal
or prospectus (20 pages or so) of your dissertation, indicating
the problem you will tackle, along with an appropriate
literature review of current philosophical writing on your
problem, and finally a sketch of your strategy for resolving
(or at least illuminating) the problem. Both the prospectus
and the dissertation itself are defended orally before
a committee of philosophers. The climb is definitely upward,
and a lot of people get stalled at these late stages.
Another big difference between law and graduate schools
has to do with cash. It's typical to get support for graduate
school --anything from stipends to teaching and research
assistantships to dissertation fellowships to full tuition
waivers, and in any number of combinations--whereas law
school is typically financed through loans, leading to
six-figure debt on graduation. (U.S. News and World Report
said that average law school debt for 1995 graduates exceeded
$100,000.)
What Do Philosophers Do Besides Teach?
First of all, professors do much besides teaching students.
Research, including both writing books and scholarly articles
and speaking at academic conferences, can take up as much
of a professor's energies and time as teaching does. Besides
academic research, wider public intellectual life consists
largely of professors and their commentaries on the issues
of the day. (Check the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times
over the course of any week; easily two-thirds of the authors
are professors.)
Consulting with government and industry is both financially
rewarding and a welcome change of focus from purely academic
concerns. Philosophy professors consult routinely with
politicians and policy-makers, health-care institutions,
educators, cognitive scientists, and computer designers
and programmers. Think about what it means to be an expert
analyst of ideas and knowledge in an age no one can resist
calling the information age, and you'll run into a consulting
philosopher.
Besides full-time consulting, non-academic philosophers
serve in hospital administration, politics, education and
educational administration, journalism, programming, work
in any of the arts and cultural institutions, the ministry,
administration in the non-profit sector, and so on.
If the pattern isn't already obvious, philosophers outside
the academy do exactly what you might expect--anything
and everything. More specifically, they fill roles that
require clarity of thought, analytical rigor, creative
intelligence.
One area that rarely occurs to students to pursue in thinking
about careers is the non-profit and service sector. A substantial
part of society turns on the delivery of services outside
of government proper (the public) and corporate life (the
private). Think about foundations, for example. They are
multi-million dollar enterprises designed to fund worthy
projects. Who runs them? People who can evaluate quality
in sometimes abstract research proposals, the value of
which may be difficult to quantify. People who can get
to speed quickly on projects and disciplines, learning
as they go, flexible and analytic in their thought. Who
runs public libraries? Who manages public-interest organizations?
Clearly, these are perfect niches for philosophers to fill,
and they do.
Is the Job Market for Professional Philosophers
as Bleak as They Say?
Yes and no.
Yes, there are as many as 700 applicants for beginning
jobs at the most prestigious universities (say, at MIT
or Princeton). But this statistic can be misleading, since
typically job seekers apply for many jobs nation- and even
world-wide. According to the American Philosophical Association,
the ratio of job candidates to job advertisements hovers
around 2:1. And true, as universities and colleges seek
to cut costs, jobs are at best leveling off, and at worst
disappearing.
But what is true for the many may not be true for the
few. Universities--as conservatives often bemoan--are bastions
of liberalism, and have been seeking to diversify both
curricula and faculties. There is a huge demand for Ph.D.
philosophers who can teach courses on African American
philosophy (or at least can teach courses in traditional
areas of philosophy like ethics and American philosophy
using texts from African American traditions). A similar
situation obtains for feminist philosophy, African and
Caribbean philosophy, and so on.
Don't misread this point. It need not appeal to anyone's
good will. From an economic perspective the same case can
be made. As universities downsize, academic units (including
philosophy departments) have to justify the expense involved
in keeping them open. One way to do that, especially in
grant-hungry humanities fields, is through increased enrollments
of majors in courses. With the student populations of universities
and colleges everywhere yellower, browner, blacker, and
more female, departments are increasingly running courses
(and hiring professors) that appeal to those students,
with the ulterior motive of getting more majors. Departments,
given fiscal-driven downsizing, thus have every reason
to hire more philosophy faculty from across the ethnic
spectrum than ever before. The very market forces that
are choking off philosophy jobs for the many are ironically
sweetening the prospects for the few. (I'll leave it to
the moral philosophers to sort out the ethical questions
implicit here.)
Another thought is relevant. The field is becoming stacked
against philosophy graduates who have specializations in
lesser demand (has that ever not been true?). A strategy
suggests itself, which the many and the few alike can pursue.
A marketable philosopher is one who can fill courses and
attract new majors, and the fields I've mentioned are strong
candidates for doing that. But an interdisciplinary philosopher
is also extremely marketable. Of course, one needs to be
well-grounded in traditional philosophy to succeed in getting
any job worth having in the field, and there are intrinsic
reasons for wanting such a grounding. But a philosopher
who can tie philosophical concerns to problems in other
fields helps establish a philosophy department's importance
to budget-conscious administrators. Philosophers, for instance,
who not only know ethics, but who collaborate with medical
school professors or law school professors on fundable
joint research are valuable to a university. A philosopher
who researches problems in the philosophy of language and
logic who collaborates with engineering professors on an
artificial-intelligence project is similarly valuable and
hence marketable.
The punch-line is really no different for philosophers
than it is for other fields. The rewards go to those who
can show that they add value to departments seeking to
justify their continued existence to administrators increasingly
seduced by business models of the intellectual enterprise.
Oh well.
How Much Money Do Philosophers Make?
A beginning Ph.D. in philosophy hired as an assistant
professor (the rank of a tenure-track professor before
she or he has earned tenure) at a top-flight elite university
dedicated to research can expect a $50,000 salary. Those
jobs are hard to get, though. Upper forties is more common.
Lower forties or even upper thirties prevails at less prestigious
schools, schools without a national profile.
The rest of the story is much less uniform. There seem
to be three kinds of trajectories for a philosophy professor.
Some are happy to teach a heavier load of courses, publish
less, and contribute to making a department all it can
be. The financial trajectory for this sort of career is
less steep, leveling off at mid-sixties or so by retirement.
The second sort of trajectory includes a few key university
hops, resulting in more visibility in the profession, greater
publishing output (a couple of books perhaps, or at least
a handful of well-published scholarly articles), and more
conference participation. This sort of philosopher can
expect to make salary jumps here and there, earning anywhere
from the seventies to the eighties by retirement.
The third track is the star track. Stars publish much,
have lighter teaching loads at more elite universities,
and help define the scholarly understanding of the core
problems in their fields of research. Some stars stay at
one school for a long time (John Searle has been at UC/Berkeley
for decades, as has John Rawls at Harvard) while other
stars jump around a bit (Jerry Fodor taught at MIT for
awhile, then went to a joint position at Rutgers and CUNY,
finally settling in at Rutgers; Martha Nussbaum was at
Brown, but then moved to the U. of Chicago). Stars can
make big money, anywhere from $80,000 or $90,000 while
still in theirfifties to as much as $200,000 per year.
Like everything else, there are no guarantees. If you're
smart, creative, and willing to do the work, though, you
can write your own ticket.
What is Philosophical Research?
It seems more obvious what research means in the sciences
(whether natural or social) than in philosophy. But it's
not that strange. Just think of what you do in your courses:
you try to wrestle with philosophical problems by either
critically commenting on past proposals, or else tackling
them cleaning, as if on a clean (logical) slate.
In a course in ethics, for instance, you might investigate
the problem of justice. How should we define it, and what
does our definition entail for how society apportions its
goods? Well, you could begin by examining past answers
which still seem plausible. For example, you might critically
examine Plato's proposals in the Republic, or else Aristotle's
in the Nichomachean Ethics or maybe Hume's or Kant's. Or
else you might approach it more conceptually than historically,
and ask about what the notion requires we say of it. You
might then compare deontological notions versus utilitarian
notions, and then (within those) some communitarian variant,
say.
Philosophical research proceeds much the same way. In
any case, what you're after is to see what the current
state of the discussion among philosophers is regarding
some question you are interested in, eavesdropping to see
what is being argued. Then, if you have a constructive
amendment to any of the proposals on the table, or else--more
rarely--a constructive alternative program, you develop
the argument for it and publish it in a scholarly journal.
(Sometimes philosophers present early versions of such
arguments as papers read at scholarly colloquia and conferences.
On-line Internet discussions also serve as such a forum.)
Other philosophers then read your arguments, responding
to it with arguments and defenses of their own. The most
successful arguments--ones that endure sustained cross-examination--appear
as chapters in scholarly books.
The goal of all this arguing is greater clarity
about the logical geography of the questions we care
about most.
For a variety of reasons the time frame for research can
be maddeningly long. A paper a philosophy professor has
written (say, 45-50 typed pages) and sent to one of the
180-or-so philosophy journals published regularly might
not appear in print for up to two years. And of course
that's contingent on its being accepted. (Rejection rates
of 85-90% are common, especially for the most prestigious
journals.) Considering the tenure decisions turn on professor's
having published 5 or 6 such papers, or a book, you can
see why research is such an intense part of a philosopher's
work. That said, research can also be the most exciting
and pure area of academic work.
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