Marcus Arvan over at Philosopherscocoon tallied the distribution of Areas of Specializations (AOS) of this year's paltry number of tenure track listings; on Nov 14, there were no more than 110 according to Zombie. It gives a good snapshot of hiring trends. (It would be nice if somebody could find a link to some older tallies, so we could check some longer-term trends.) The large number of 'open' jobs (about 25%) means that we need to be extremely careful about making any claims about extrapolating to future composition of the profession. But Arvan's list does give us a snap-shot of where the aggregate 'demand' in the job-market is. Here are some random observations.
Philosophy is giving up on research in logic (this is ceded to mathematics and computer science departments). This is a long-term trend, of course. But still notable given how important logic once was to self-conception of analytical philosophy. On a related point, I was amazed to see no hiring in history of analytical philosophy, despite the fact that history (even if we don't include 'Continental') is holding its own (hurray for early modern!).
Departments are not explicitly investing in X-PHI--a new field that has generated a lot of discussion. This is not to say that they won't hire X-PHI; there are (relatively speaking) a large number of ethics, applied ethics, and mind/psychology openings out there, any one of which could be used to hire in X-PHI. But still. (I guess score one for the PGR advisory board, which voted against making it a recognized specialty.)
Applied ethics is the single largest AOS. Given that this covers a huge variety of topics (biomedical, law, war, sport, etc.) and approaches, it probably makes sense to start distinguishing the area in fine-grained fashion in listings as well as future editions PGR (score one against the PGR advisory board).
Applied ethics and ethics jointly are about half the job-listings. Value theory more broadly, including aesthetics, meta-ethics, and socio-political philosophy (etc.), dominates. Judging by the Healy co-citation data -- a trailing measure, of course --, this is a sharp break with what gets published in our purportedly leading, generalist journals. Given that many of our leading ethics and applied journals do not follow -- shall we be polite -- best editorial practices, this will be an increasing flashpoint in the profession.
Although the PSA is a huge and exciting conference, it seems that philosophy of science is becoming less important Stateside. (A few decades ago it was core.) As I have suggested before, I suspect that philosophy of science is increasingly becoming a European phenomenon.
Non-European philosophy (Asian, Comparative, Islamic, and African American) is still relative small, but at least non-neglible anymore.
I was surprised to see almost no listings in philosophy of religion, which I would have thought be attractive to departments eager to take a gamble on attracting Templeton money or student enrollments.
I was pleased to see that PP&E now has more job-openings than, say, Kant. A decade too late, but to my old graduate school buddies: told you it would happen in the long run!
My impression is that math departments ceded logic to philosophy and computer science decades ago. If philosophy is following suit, that will leave only computer science (where it is at best a tiny niche in a huge discipline, though that tiny niche might be quite big compared to smaller disciplines like math and philosophy).
Posted by: Kenny Easwaran | 11/17/2014 at 05:30 PM
Re: "I was amazed to see no hiring in history of analytical philosophy." I have the impression that most advisors tell their Ph.D. students that listing your AOS as "History of Analytic" will hurt your job prospects. So candidates are supposed to instead say something like "AOS: Philosophy of Language, History of Analytic."
I hadn't really thought about this before (since I was focused primarily on my own survival), but this seems like it might be a Catch-22 for History of Analytic really coming into its own as an independent sub-discipline: So long as departments can get historians of analytic who are ALSO metaphysicians, or ALSO epistemologists, or ... then departments will (almost) never have a need to search for a historian of analytic, even if that department feels the area needs to be covered by someone on their faculty (a big 'if').
Posted by: GF-A | 11/18/2014 at 12:14 AM
Very interesting. It is hard to read off information about experimental philosophy jobs from "AOS needed" data, since it is more a method than an area. There was a blog post from last year that listed the philosophers who do x-phi and where they got hired. I see at least 6 that got Tenure Track jobs and many others got postdocs.
Posted by: A | 11/18/2014 at 01:49 AM
here's the link
http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/2014/05/jobs-for-experimental-philosophers.html
Posted by: A | 11/18/2014 at 01:50 AM
Now 10 years old (perhaps time for a followup) but back then I concluded that perhaps the reports of the death of logic in philosophy have been exaggerated:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/rzach/blog/2004/05/status-of-logic-in-philosophy.html
Philosophy departments may not advertise jobs with AOS logic, but that doesn't mean that they don't hire logicians.
Posted by: RrrichardZach | 11/18/2014 at 04:08 PM
Yes, as I noted in the post (in commenting on the fate of X-PHI)--folk can be hired in one area of specialization while also easily fitting in a differently labeled area of specialization. But if folk working in Y systematically have to be hired 'under cover' of something else (X), then the long-term fate of Y will come under systematic pressure.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 11/19/2014 at 10:05 AM