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Taking on a new AOS mid-career?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I would like to hear people's experience of changing AOS(s), especially from mid-career philosophers.

I do not have a specific question. But this is why I ask. I am an early/mid career philosopher (recently tenured, 8 years out of grad school). I have been losing interest in my AOS in the past few years. Part of the reason is that I hold a teaching heavy position, and I find it really hard to keep up with the ongoing literature in my AOS, so I am already falling behind. At the same time, most questions that I was interested in have been discussed pretty thoroughly and I do not feel I have much to add (again, partly due to my struggle in keeping up with the ongoing discussion).

Meanwhile, I become interested in an area that is totally different from my AOS. But I have not done any serious research, and my only background in this new area is from a graduate course I took a decade ago and a couple of undergraduate courses I have taught. I am not sure if I should devote more time in further developing my interest. Given my limited time, maybe it is more reasonable for me to just work in my previous AOS and publish a few papers (hopefully). Starting working in a new area always scares me. And realistically, I may not be a competent scholar in this area in the near future (maybe never).

Anyway, thank you for reading, and I am curious to see what you think.

I did something a bit like this, also in a teaching-heavy position. I didn't give up my old AOS, but I did take on a couple of new ones. Although starting work in a new area might be intimidating, it can also be exciting. The OP says they have lost interest in their original AOS, so trying to develop a new AOS might be a way to rekindle their passion for research. You'll never know if you don't give it a shot!

What does everyone else think? Have other readers forged a new AOS mid-career? How did you do it, and how did it go?

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6 responses to “Taking on a new AOS mid-career?”

  1. Nick Z

    A beloved faculty member in my graduate program switched from ancient philosophy to biology and mind at the midpoint of their career and thrived. They published a couple of books with highly-respected presses and created a new class taken by many of the neuroscience students at our school. (Plus, they still managed to teach graduate-level courses on ancient philosophy that all of us enjoyed.) So, I say, do it!

    Reply
  2. Done it

    You are tenured, just do it. I have changed areas … from epistemology to philosophy of science. And I now also publish in two other disciplines (and have just picked up a third). It takes time, but if you are bored with your original area it will kill you to just keep working in it. Enjoy the freedom of thr academic life.

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  3. whatevet

    You’re tenured…..so who cares. Just work on whatever you want.

    Reply
  4. Lu

    Do it, and congrats on Tenure!
    I switched area after grad (no background), and have loved the new area and published a ton!

    Reply
  5. kevin timpe

    Most of my pre-tenure work was in free will, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. I still do some stuff on free will and philosophy of religion, but most of my work in the past 8 years or so has been in virtue ethics and philosophy of disability. (I only had one ethics seminar in grad school, and nothing in phil dis.) Granted, there are fairly obvious connections between my previous areas and my present ones, but like others have said, go for it. You can still keep a foot in the old area if you want.

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  6. Charles Pigden

    Two points to make, one friendly and one more critical.
    1) OF COURSE you can change your AOS or add a new one as an early-to-mid-career researcher!! Why would you think otherwise? I have done this successfully twice, maybe even three times. I started out as a meta-ethicist with a particular interest in Is/Ought, the Naturalistic Fallacy and the error theory. When I was 38 years old and 7 years into a permanent job, I published a piece on the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories. I am now a world leader in this area (which I helped to create) with 763 citations to my credit, which is 63 more than the citations to my work on the Naturalistic Fallacy and No-Ought-From-Is. At about the same time I developed an interest in the life and work of Bertrand Russell specialising in his moral and political philosophy. I think I can honestly say that I am now the leading expert on Russell’s ethics, (with an annotated collection of his writings and an article the Stanford, plus several articles and book chapters on the subject ) and an expert on his life and work generally. Perhaps it is worth pointing our that during this period – when I was branching out from my original AOS in early-to-to-mid-career – I had a substantial teaching load with between 3.0 and 3.5 courses per annum (amounting to between 156 & 182 classroom hours) plus, of course, course prep, marking etc. But it is not as if I am alone in developing new AOS’s in mid-career. Kim Sterelny, a slightly older contemporary, started out as a mind-and-language sort of guy but is now a very bright star in the Philosophy of Biology generally and the evolution of human intelligence in particular. Another slightly older contemporary, Graham Oddie, started out a as a philosopher of science/logician with a book on likeness to truth, but now he lists his specialties as Metaphysics, Value Theory, Metaethics, Formal epistemology, Philosophical Logic, and Aesthetics. Greg Currie, on his website, describes himself as having published ‘books dealing with fiction, film, imagination, narrative and the arts’ but this is to omit the publications of his first AOS which combined the Philosophy of Maths, the Philosophy of Science and the Philosophy of Logic, since he co-edited Lakatos’s Collected Papers and published a book on Frege. One colleague, Elisabeth Ellis, started out as a specialist in Kant’s political philosophy and now has plenty of publications on Climate Change, sustainability, aviation policy etc. Another, Heather Dyke, is by trade and training a Philosopher of Time , but she also has an important book (The Representational Fallacy) on language, metaphysics and philosophical method. So, yes, there are plenty of examples of people who have successfully added a new AOS to their intellectual portfolios, though without, necessarily, dropping the original one.
    2) However the presuppositions of this question, strike me as just strange. The idea seems to be that (normally perhaps) you develop an AOS when young and publish on that and virtually nothing else for the rest of your career. The OP writes ‘My only background in this new area is from a graduate course I took a decade ago’ and s/he seems to think that the relative paucity of graduate-level training in some area is a barrier to publication. This attitude is totally alien to me. Even when I was a member of the precariat and did not have a permanent job I was publishing papers well outside my original AOS. Indeed my first paper was on the analytic/synthetic which has nothing much to do with meta-ethics. And I have been doing the same thing ever since, with plenty of papers not only outside my original AOS but outside the new ones too, with publications in at least ten different areas of Philosophy. Furthermore (having done a dissertation-only PhD) I have never published on any topic on which I had any graduate-level formal training, since I have had no formal training on any topic whatsoever at graduate level. The last taught course I ever attended on any subject was in 1979! Similar things are true of most of the philosophers listed above, since all but one – Lisa Ellis – did dissertation-only PhDs. And let me stress that this sort of thing is normal. Lots of philosophers that I have know or I have known publish outside their original AOSs, though some more than others. You read something or attend a paper; you get an idea; you read around enough to be reasonably sure (you can’t know for certain) a) that you have not been anticipated, and b) that the reason you have not been anticipated is not that your idea is stupid or fundamentally misconceived in some way; and then you write it up and send it off. That’s it. That’s how things began with my new AOSs and that’s how it has been with my side-hustle papers. Now publishing outside your (original) AOS takes a little time as you have to be bring yourself up to speed with at least a representative sample of the relevant literature. And for that reason, publishing side-hustle (and potentially new-AOS) articles may be a risky strategy for young philosophers who need to pump out the papers as fast as possible to secure a permanent post. But once you have got a permanent post, so long as ascending the academic ladder at maximum speed is not a priority for you, why not have a bit of fun by seeking out new ideas and new conversations and boldly going where you have not been before? What’s the risk, what’s the downside? That the papers you produce may not be up to snuff? But you take that risk every time you write a paper about anything. So I’m with some of the previous posters. If you have a permanent job, use the freedom that it gives you (if you want to) be a wide-ranging scholar and to live an intellectually adventurous life. After all, you may get lucky and make the intellectual big-time with a side-hustle or a new-AOS paper. Marcus Arvan is not the only philosopher to have made a successful go of this sort of thing. And even if you don’t, life is likely to be less boring.
    One other thing. Over at Daily Nous there is a thread about a survival strategy for Philosophy Departments in tough times. They should cultivate allies amongst the academic community by pursing collaborative projects with non-philosophers, both in teaching and research. Hopefully, this means that when the axe of public spending cuts falls, it will be less likely to fall on Philosophy. This is, I think, a good long term strategy, though you can’t really pursue it unless you have a genuine interest in interdisciplinary work. But if going outside their original AOS’s within Philosophy is an intimidating prospect for many philosophers, they are hardly likely to be reaching out across the aisle to colleagues in other disciplines. I therefore hope, for the sake of Philosophy in America, that the OP’s attitudes are unusual.

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