I’ve been wondering for a while about what I should put as my AOS (Area(s) of Specialisation) on my CV. For a while I’d been playing with the idea of putting None, on the ground that there is no area in which I specialise. But that probably wouldn’t look too good. On the other hand, it seems a bit bizarre to claim I specialise in philosophy of probability and philosophy of language and philosophical logic and metaphysics and epistemology. So I’ve been a bit stuck about what to do about this. Until I saw a job ad the other day that may have resolved the problem for me.

The department in question was searching for someone with AOS ‘core analytic’. I’m not entirely sure that I could claim to be a specialist in all of ‘core analytic’, I don’t really know enough philosophy of mind for that, but it’s close. More generally, the idea that I should just create a new disjunctive category (for ‘core analytic’ surely is a disjunctive category) for whatever it is I do.

This all got me wondering about the provenance of the phrase ‘core analytic’. I had been under the impression that the contemporary use of the term ‘core’ to describe metaphysics and epistemology and related areas was due to Brian Leiter’s use of it that way in the Gourmet Reports.

If that’s true, it indicates that Prof Leiter really is quite powerful. He’s managed to have enough impact on the profession that people now create positions to fill his classifications. That’s quite an achievement. I should lobby him to create a new category for philosophy of probability and philosophy of language and philosophical logic and metaphysics and epistemology.