From Martin Schönfeld’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy on Kant’s philosophical development:

Modern thought begins with Kant. The appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 marks the start of modern philosophy, and Kant’s ideas have helped to shape global civilization. Today his texts are read on all continents. Although Kant is in the same league as Confucius or Aristotle…

I’ve got some relatives who have spent time in Antarctica, but I’ve never heard them talk about the Kant scholars down there. More seriously, there’s more than a few Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Berkeley, Reid and Rousseau scholars who might dispute that modern philosophy begins with CPR, and a few million Americans who would probably dispute that there was no modern thought before Kant.

I decided to do some counts of how many jobs there were of various kinds up for grabs on the market this time around. There’s 254 jobs listed in Jobs for Philosophers volume 159, and I broke these down along four axes. (UPDATE: I’ve now done this analysis for both volumes of JFP. The post is here.)

First, area. I was really crude here – just breaking down jobs in one of the following three categories

• Metaphysics – Construed to include logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, epistemology and philosophy of mind.
• Ethics – Construed to include political philosophy, feminist philosophy and aesthetics (which was surprisingly well represented this year)
• History – Construed to include, well, history

When a job was listed as being open, I counted it as 1/3 a vacancy in each field. When the area didn’t easily fall into one of these three areas, I guessed. When there was an open job with a preference listed, I read between the lines (i.e. guessed) as to whether it was really open or whether they were basically looking in the area listed as being preferred. So the margin of error on all this is off the charts already. A more precise breakdown would be more useful, but also more time-consuming. (If anyone does one, let me know and I’ll happily link to it/post it.)

Second, job standing. This was broken down into short-term, tenure-track and tenured. When a job was listed as open rank, I counted it as 1/2 a tenure track job, and 1/2 a tenured job.

Third, whether the job was listed in a philosophy department or not. (198 of the 254 were.)

Fourth, whether the job was in a top 50 program, or equivalent for departments without a PhD program. I imagine this category isn’t that important to some, but I care about it, so I ran those numbers at the end. Here’s how the 254 jobs available break down.

Metaphysics – 71.8
Ethics – 111.8
History – 70.3

Short-Term – 49
         Metaphysics – 10.3
         Ethics – 29.3
         History – 9.3

Tenure-track – 170
         Metaphysics – 47.9
         Ethics – 69.9
         History – 52.2

Tenure – 35
         Metaphysics – 13.6
         Ethics – 12.6
         History – 8.8

When we restrict attention to jobs offered within philosophy departments, the numbers are

Total positions – 198

Metaphysics – 63.3
Ethics – 74.8
History – 59.8

Short-Term – 16
         Metaphysics – 6
         Ethics – 9
         History – 1

Tenure-track – 154
         Metaphysics – 45.7
         Ethics – 57.2
         History – 51.2

Tenure – 28
         Metaphysics – 11.7
         Ethics – 8.7
         History – 7.7

When we restrict attention again to the top 50 (or equivalent) departments, the numbers are

Total positions – 63

Metaphysics – 31.2
Ethics – 26.7
History – 15.2

Short-Term – 13
         Metaphysics – 5.7
         Ethics – 6.7
         History – 0.7

Tenure-track – 37.5
         Metaphysics – 15.2
         Ethics – 13.7
         History – 8.7

Tenure – 22.5
         Metaphysics – 10.3
         Ethics – 6.3
         History – 5.8

Obviously there are some rounding errors so the numbers don’t all totally add up, but given the caveats at the top I think they’re not useless.

If you want the raw file to check my coding (and frankly I probably made dozens of errors on the top 50 list – I wouldn’t be surprised if I forgot to check that marker for one of the 15 Princeton jobs), it’s here, but be warned that’s a 400K Access file.

Language Hat objects to the sentence “Stephenson, who is sixty, is tall and deprecating.” by Field Malony appearing in the New Yorker. He says it should have been “self-deprecating”. But this seems excessive, since it’s clear from the context that the thing Stephenson deprecates is himself. If an author had written that Stephenson is “tall and charming” we wouldn’t be calling them out because the things Stephenson habitually charms are other people, rather than his pot plants, or his own temporal parts. I don’t see why deprecating should be any different.

Bonus question. If context is as clear as clear as I say it is, but Stephenson is a pot-plant-deprecator rather than a self-deprecator, is the proposition expressed by Maloney’s utterance true or false?

Language Hat objects to the sentence “Stephenson, who is sixty, is tall and deprecating.” by Field Malony appearing in the New Yorker. He says it should have been “self-deprecating”. But this seems excessive, since it’s clear from the context that the thing Stephenson deprecates is himself. If an author had written that Stephenson is “tall and charming” we wouldn’t be calling them out because the things Stephenson habitually charms are other people, rather than his pot plants, or his own temporal parts. I don’t see why deprecating should be any different.

Bonus question. If context is as clear as clear as I say it is, but Stephenson is a pot-plant-deprecator rather than a self-deprecator, is the proposition expressed by Maloney’s utterance true or false?

The Oxford Philosophy Graduate Conference has the program (or ‘programme’ as they sometimes call it) available online. It includes all the papers, so if you want a sampling of good grad student papers from round the northern hemisphere, take a look. I’ll list all these papers in the papers blog.