Brian Leiter’s blog featured this discussion of the ACLS’s “New Faculty Fellows” program, which awarded 53 jobs to junior scholars in the humanities, but not one to a philosopher. In the comments, one of the reviewers on the ACLS panel ventured this opinion:
Philosophers fare poorly in these things mainly because we are not part of a sort of overlapping consensus about what the humanities are and should be up to. Folks in History, English, Comp Lit, the various language disciplines, Cultural Anthropology, etc have a lot that they can talk about to one another. Although their precise methods of inquiry differ from one another, they do basically understand one another and share overlapping intellectual goals. A cultural anthropologist reading a Comp Lit proposal gets it, almost instantly. And doesn’t really need it spoon fed to her.
Philosophy and philosophers are just outliers to this overlapping consensus. Take gender and race, as examples. Lots of humanistic disciplines have long been seized with the project of reshaping their disciplines by thinking very, very hard about gender and race. In philosophy, there’s some of that, but not a whole lot. For example, we were part of a five department competition this year for a junior appointment for someone working on race and ethnicity. Five different departments were invited to search for candidates, each would be allowed to have three people come to campus, and each would be entitled to nominate one finalist to a central committee. We searched and in perhaps the worst or second worse market in decades we got a total of 18 candidates, many of them not really plausible. Now you would think that in today’s market anybody who was even marginally qualified would have applied for our job. So assume that they did. That means there are precious few young philosophers out there working race and ethnicity.
I mention this last thing just to illustrate that many of the intellectual issues with which the broader humanities are concern are just not on the radar screen of many philosophers. And, correlatively, many of our concerns are hardly on the radar screens of many humanists — even very smart, well meaning, well-read ones. So we start out at quite a competitive disadvantage in these things. And unless philosophers are very astute about selling themselves to panels of humanists, they are almost bound to lose out. Indeed, I anticipate it being something of an uphill struggle for many of the philosophy files I’ve read for the panel that I am on.
I’m wondering if there is truth in this. I know that in my own experience I often have little interest in how people in other disciplines engage with the issues that interest me. (I don’t often read literary analyses of Spinoza’s works — are there are any?! — though I do read works by historians of ideas, like Jonathan Israel.) Am I then insular? Should I be reaching out more to my colleagues in the other humanistic disciplines? Or is it just a fact that a lot of what interests philosophers doesn’t interest anyone else? That sounds unfortunate.
