While on NDPR, I thought this comment from Timothy Bays’s review of David Corfield’s Towards a Philosophy of Real Mathematics was interesting.

The sociological differences between philosophy of physics and philosophy of mathematics really are quite striking. At present, I think it would be difficult for a junior candidate in philosophy of physics to do well on the job market without being familiar with (at least some) high-end topics in theoretical physics—i.e., without genuinely understanding the technical details of such topics. In contrast, there’s almost no expectation that candidates in philosophy of mathematics will be equally familiar with contemporary work in, say, algebra, analysis, topology or geometry.

So here’s an interesting question for discussion. For other area that can be labelled “Philosophy of X”, how much knowledge of cutting edge scientific work about X are new job candidates expected to have? The obvious initial candidates are when X is biology, or language, or mind. But we can look further. I really don’t know how much new grads in, say, political philosophy are meant to know about what’s currently going on in the political science department, and I think it would be interesting (both to me and to not a few grad students) to find out. How much are aesthetics grad students meant to keep up with what’s current in the many different departments (art, art history, music, theatre, etc) that do work potentially relevant to philosophical aesthetics?