October 2009 Archives

ARLINGTON, VA - The search for a job in any field in the midst of an economic downturn can be harrowing; for those seeking jobs in a field like Philosophy where even in good economic times, the competition for jobs is stiff, the job search can be especially demoralizing.

Here I have gathered some resources for the graduate student who attended the Graduate Student Colloquium at the 2009 Society for Phenomenology and Existentialist Philosophy (SPEP) where I spoke on a panel entitled "The Job Market in Today's Economy."

The Situation
There is no question that the job market in Philosophy and the Humanities is tightening.  Inside Higher Education emphasized in their article, The Tightening Humanities Job Market, published at the end of last year the particular difficulties in the discipline of Philosophy. Last spring, the New York Times was reporting that Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times, and it looks like we are seeing that play out in the list of job offerings in Philosophy this year.

On a more positive note, a number of institutions with which I am familiar, particularly the large state universities, have received substantive funds from the Stimulus Bill passed earlier this year.  This will allow them to proceed with some hiring this year. However, we might need to anticipate another downturn in job opportunities in two years when the stimulus money dries up.

Of the 140 jobs listed in the October 2009 Jobs for Philosophers, only 4 explicitly mention an interest in continental philosophy.  So SPEP students will have to position themselves to compete for jobs in areas that are not explicitly announced as "continental." This will not be difficult as the large majority of students at SPEP have a broad range of interests and expertise.

Good Preparation
There are a number of concrete ways to improve your chances on the job market:

• Write a marketable dissertation.  Decisions about what to write your dissertation on are complicated.  Primary consideration needs to be given to your passion for and interest in the topic.  However, such decisions ought not be made in a vacuum and one important consideration will be the degree to which you will increase your opportunities for placement by writing such a dissertation.
  
  Specifically, it is advisable to write a dissertation that goes into some depth with regard to a specific thinker or theme that cuts across a broader spectrum of traditions and is able to speak to a wide range of approaches.  Even if you don't orient your own work by those other approaches, be aware of them and able to articulate and position your work in relation to them.
  
  
• Publish something in a well-respected journal.
• Give a Paper at a Conference where they use blind review.
• Develop Pedagogical Excellence: work on your teaching, teach as much as you can, write your one page teaching philosophy, develop a teaching portfolio.
  
• Ask yourself: what distinguishes me from other candidates, what do I bring to a job that others don't?

Cultivate an online, digital identity
As we experience the transformative possibilities new social media opens for education, it is important for students to begin to think intentionally about how this media can be use to further the pedagogical and intellectual ideals of philosophy. With regard to placement, the question as to one's online, digital identity becomes critical.

• Use Facebook, Twitter, blogging, etc., to articulate a serious, academic and engaged voice of your own.
• Leigh Johnson: readmorewritemorethinkmorebemore
  
• Joshua Miller: anotherpanacea
  
• Participate in social media related to Academia generally and Philosophy in particular:
• Academia.edu is a site where faculty, graduate students and institutions can establish profiles to highlight their work.
  
• Philosophywiki.org is a site where you can set up a profile about yourself and your work.
  

Opening Other Options
Post-doctoral Fellowships
Below is a list of a few post-doctoral fellowships that might be relevant to graduate student and early PhD members of SPEP working in contemporary continental philosophy and related areas in the history of philosophy.

• German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for students doing work on German thinkers and topics related to German Philosophy who intend to spend time at a German University.
  
• Henry Frank Guggenheim Research Grants are given to research that can increase understanding and amelioration of urgent problems of violence, aggression, and dominance in the modern world.
• Fulbright, Council for International Exchange of Scholars offers a wide range to funding opportunities for US Scholars, both post-docs and graduate students.
• The Spencer Foundation has fellowships for doctoral students and post-docs working in research areas related to education.
• The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has a dissertation research awards available for students working in Ethics and Religion (Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship) and Women & Gender (Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women's Studies).
• The American Association of University Women has dissertation and post-doctoral fellowships for women US citizen from accredited institutions.
• The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has post-doc fellowships for work related to German philosophy.
  

Fixed term positions at home university or local colleges
Despite the economic situation, teaching still goes on, students are applying to college and colleges are offering classes. Many colleges and universities are offering fixed term positions for their students or for students from other institutions.

• Ask department chairs, directors of graduate studies if such opportunities exist at your institution.
• Talk to faculty such possibilities at the institutions of their colleagues.
  

Some Resources

• SPEP has introduced a jobs announcement section of the website, but this seems only to be as good as the institutions who submit. It does provide insight into which institutions are interested in the work being done by members of the society.
  
• American Philosophical Association publishes, of course, the Jobs for Philosophers; they also have a Job Seekers Database, which seems to be under construction at the moment, but which students should use when it is up.
  
• The Philosophy Jobs Wiki lists jobs offered by many institutions and is updated by the users.  It is only as accurate, of course, as the users are engaged and reliable. My experience, though, is that it is often very accurate, although it is important to recognize that it is not to be taken as the official mode of communication from colleges and universities.
• Penn State Philosophy Department Best Placement Practices page was developed to help our students think about how to position themselves to success on the market.  The suggestions are available for all interested students.
• Shortened URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/spepjobpanel09

Contact Information

Christopher Long
longc@psu.edu

"The Voice of Singularity and a Philosophy to Come: Schürmann, Kant and the Pathology of Being," Philosophy Today 53, supplement (2009), 138-150.

This article traces what Schürmann calls the "double comprehension of being" in Kant in which the sense of being as pure givenness is said to be recognized but denied by Kant as his thinking undertakes its Copernican turn. Schürmann insists that this can be heard in the ambiguous ways the German terms "Position" and "Setzung" are used in Kant. Schürmann shows that these two terms point at various moments in Kant either to the notion of being as a category that arises from the transcendental operations of the subject or to being understood as pure givenness external to the transcendental subject.  Schürmann argues that this second sense of being threatens to undermine the entire transcendental project and so must be denied by Kant.

Drawing on this reading, I attempt to show that Schürmann's own deep skepticism about philosophical language and particularly his insistence that language always involves the violent suppression of singularity is undermined by his own suggestion that the singular comes somehow to language in the tension between Position and Setzung in Kant.

By attending to the voice of singularity as it expresses itself in Kant's texts, this essay seeks to open the possibility of a "philosophy to come" that remains attuned to the dynamic between natality and mortality that is always at play in articulation.

The full text of "The Voice of Singularity" in pdf format is made available here by the generous permission of Philosophy Today.

This presentation is based on two insights that have grown over time but came into sharp focus over the summer of 2009 during which time I was a faculty fellow at Teaching and Learning with Technology here at Penn State:

1. Education is being radically transformed by technological advances that allow communities of learning to grow in ways that cut across time, space and philosophical perspective.
2. In higher education, these technological innovations can be leveraged to integrate scholarly research and teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in ways that extend the reach of research and deepen the scholarly roots of teaching.

The Project
The figure of Socrates who appears in the Platonic dialogues is shown to practice a very peculiar form of politics: he enters into dialogue with each individual he encounters, attempting to turn their attention to the question of the Good, the Beautiful and the Just. My current research focuses on the various dimensions of the Socratic practice of politics and specifically on the question of how to cultivate the excellences of dialogue that open possibilities of human relation that are socially and politically transformative.

The Structure of Integration
I use my blog, the Long Road, which has been redesigned in as three blogs in one, to integrate my research and teaching.

The blog platform offers me a dynamic digital environment in which to develop a community of learning that roots my teaching in my scholarship and infuses my scholarship with new insights and connections that emerge out of the living dialogue of the community.

• The Pedagogy of Blogging
• Blogging Rubric (pdf)
  

The Community of Learning

• The Digital Dialogue - a podcast dedicated to cultivating the excellences of dialogue in a digital age. (Subscribe via iTunes)
  
• Invites scholars from around the country working on issues related to ancient Greek philosophy, social and political theory, the question of deliberative democracy ...
  
• Generates interest in the work, cross-pollination of ideas, and attempts to model the excellences of dialogue it seeks to theorize.
  
• Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue - a blog that hosts the Digital Dialogue, my undergraduate course (PHIL200: Ancient Greek Philosophy) and my graduate seminar (PHIL553: Ancient Greek Philosophy).
• Undergraduate Teaching: blog rubric (pdf), weekly round-up podcasts, the emergence of a community of learners engaged with the material:
  
• Jordan's Why Are You Here? post generates self-reflection
• Participants from outside the class: Holly Moore, Asher; UPDATE Nov. 2, 2009: Marina McCoy, Associate Professor from Boston College, has encouraged her students to join our digital community.  See my presentation to the IT Faculty Advisory Committee where I discuss how we are blurring the boundaries between institutions.
  
• Dynamic and substantive commenting on posts about: Religion, typical post with comments;
  
• Integration of video: Conan, Big.
• Graduate Teaching: more sophisticated level of discussion, community of scholarship via Zotero - allows for collaborative collection of references: Socratic Politics Group.
  
• Integrating the blog into the classroom: using Evernote to identify posts and comments on which to focus in-class discussion.
  
• The Search for Justice video - an attempt to provoke responses from a wider audience and to encourage those who watch it to consider: What is Justice?
  

On October 9th, 2009, I received official word that my manuscript, The Saying of Things: The Nature of Truth and the Truth of Nature in Aristotle, was accepted for publication at the Cambridge University Press under the title: On the Nature of Truth as Justice in Aristotle. I am excited and honored to be part of a tradition of publishing that extends back 475 years to when King Henry the VIII first granted the University of Cambridge Press a "Letters Patent" that allowed them to print "all manner of books."

The manner of my particular book involves taking up the thinking of Aristotle in a way that challenges the traditional understanding of the meaning of truth as the correspondence of idea and object. The Saying of Things is rooted in a reading of Aristotle as a naturalistic phenomenologist who is able to help us understand truth as co-response-ability, that is, as involving an ability to respond to the expression of things in ways that do justice to what it is they are.  Thus, the book attempts to think truth in terms of justice even as it recognizes that justice is rooted in the attempt to give voice to the truth of things.

Specifically, the book draws on the traditions of American naturalism, particularly that of Woodbridge, Randall and Dewey, and Continental phenomenology, particularly that of Heidegger, in order to offer a dynamic and novel reading of Aristotle that has important implications for our ongoing understanding of the relationship between human-being and the natural world.

ALTOONA, PA - Today I gave the keynote address at the West Virginia Philosophical Society being held at Penn State Altoona.

This presentation is drawn from the penultimate chapter of the manuscript for my book, The Saying of Things: The Nature of Truth and the Truth of Nature in Aristotle. In the book, I draw on Aristotle's naturalistic phenomenology in order to articulate truth in terms of the ability to respond to the ways things express themselves. This understanding of truth as co-response-ability is rooted in Aristotle's recognition that human-being is natural being and its ways of saying naturally co-operate with the logoi of things, the manner in which things express themselves. This allows me to argue that truth is a question of doing justice to the saying of things.

The chapter from which this presentation is taken is designed to suggest the degree to which truth as justice must not only be rooted in concrete encounters with individual things, but that it also must attempt to articulate things within the larger context of the whole to which they and we belong. This chapter, then, attempts to account for the peculiar way in which human-being is bound up with and related to the manner in which the whole expresses itself as beautiful and good.