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In our newest “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:
What is the norm around publishing in an area that is outside of one’s AOS, especially as a graduate student? I have heard that this may work against you when you are on the job market but I have a paper from a graduate course that my professor thinks could be published. Is it work pursuing?
Note: the area is not adjacent or related to my field at all, it is in a much more specific different area.
What do readers think?
If you have a solid paper that’s worth developing into something publishable, go ahead and do it. I don’t think your AOS should matter, especially at the grad student stage. Being able to publish good work is what matters. Would you really not take the opportunity to show that off? Presumably doing it at all signals you can also do it in your currently declared AOS. And if you end up writing more on those other topics, then congratulations, they ARE your AOS now.
“This applicant published this great paper but it’s in a different area to their AOS so we should hold the paper against them” said no one ever.
Having an extra publication is not going to hurt. Unless preparing it takes up so much time that it prevents you from also publishing something in your AOS, or delays you in finishing your dissertation. Given OP is at the coursework stage that doesn’t seem to be a concern; there is plenty of time to do all that. Having a publication in another area can be evidence of an AOC, which is useful on the job market.
If it’s a good journal, do it.
I know at least one person who was hired based on a paper they “randomly” published in an area a university later recruited for. One data point, but I suspect it can be a good card to play.
If the paper is good and not just a way of squeezing out a line on your CV, I’ve ever heard of anyone say that that’s going to work against you (and I’m having a hard time trying to think of why) .
This is one of the silliest questions ever posed on this list. OF COURSE having a paper outside your AOS is not going to do you damage!!! There is absolutely no norm against this. On the contrary, having such a paper is a sign of breadth which is very much a plus on the job market. It will make you more desirable both as a teacher and as a colleague. In small-to-medium sized departments you will often be asked to teach outside your initial comfort zone. In my department, the logician teaches existentialism, the Spinoza scholar the Philosophy of Science, the Philosopher of Time teaches ethics and critical thinking, the expert of Kant’s politics teaches epistemology and environmental ethics, and the meta-ethicist (that’s me) teaches (or has taught) political economy, social epistemology, the philosophy of math and the philosophy of literature. I suspect that this sort of thing is fairly common in small-to-medium departments. If you have a non-AOS paper (or two), this will suggest to search committees that you are a quick study who can master a non-AOS subject sufficiently to say something intelligent about it. In which case, you will probably be a quick study who can master a non-AOS subject sufficiently to *teach* it, which is a highly desirable skill. But breadth is not just desirable from a teaching point of view. It is also desirable in a research colleague. Many of us like to develop our ideas in conversation with colleagues. As philosophers, we may not need somebody to lean on, but we often need somebody to talk to. People whose interests are restricted to their original AOS are not likely to be much use to colleagues with different research specialities. A non-AOS paper will suggest to potential colleagues that you are *not* a narrow specialist, *perhaps* somebody worth talking to, and therefore – possibly– more of a catch.
The idea that there is some sort of norm against publishing outside your AOS is so utterly bizarre that one wonders how it might have come about. I suspect that the OP mistook a piece of pragmatic advice for a disciplinary principle. In the current climate a young philosopher needs to pump out as many publications as possible to get a job and it may be that the best way to do this is to concentrate on your AOS, since bringing yourself up to speed with new research topics takes time and effort and tends to slow you down. Hence graduate students are sometimes advised to ‘Stick to your AOS’. But this is not because NOT sticking to your AOS is wrong in some way, in the sense infringing some disciplinary norm, but because in the short term (and I would say only in the short term) sticking to your AOS is a good strategy for maximising your output. In my view it is terrible long-term strategy, if the object of the exercise is to become a good, or even a competent, professional philosopher. But however the may be, if you have already written a passable non-AOS paper (hence no time out getting up to speed), there is no reason whatsoever not to try and get it published.
Charles: Anecdotally, I remember reading on a philosophy blog post (it was years ago, so I don’t remember which blog it was) making the case that one should not publish outside of their AOS because at research institutions one ought to be maximizing publishing potential in their area. So having pubs outside of AOS is a concern on the job market. Back then it already sounded like a weird idea to me.
I don’t think the question is silly. Advice like this sometimes comes from faculty at the top-leiterific doctoral programs. The idea is that young scholars should not appear “unfocused” and that demonstrating depth of expertise in a specific area rather than breadth of interests is necessary for a leiterific type research job. However, this advice may not reflect the reality of the majority of the job market. I also don’t think that having one published side project is in tension with demonstrating research focus.
If the OP’s question is whether to publish or not to publish as a grad student, then they should of course publish, since having publications is crucial on the job market. However, if the question were more along the lines of, should I currently focus time on preparing project X or project Y for publication, where X is slightly more complete but Y is more representative of my AOS, then I’d advise focus on Y since that would be a more appropriate writing sample.
In general, my experience is that one gets a lot of idiosyncratic advice from senior faculty and that there’s no optimal way to engage this advice given the extent to which the job market is simply a crapshoot. So I would tell the OP to do what they feel is best all things considered and try not to excessively worry about the contradictory advice they will receive.
Charles: a plausible conflation concerns tenure standards (at research-focused institutions). If you were hired as, say, a logician, it’s probably best not to seek tenure with a portfolio dominated by, say, feminist theory or aesthetics. That’s not to say one can’t or shouldn’t publish in several areas, just that when you go up for tenure, you are primarily being evaluated as an expert in your AOS.
Not that I would know, since there’s no tenure here, and no research requirements!
When I was first on the job market, I has several publications outside my AOS. Not only did these not hurt me in any way I could identify, there were many interviews where it was clear that one of my non-AOS publications had intrigued someone on the hiring committee. If nothing else, it shows intellectual breadth and communicates that one has worthwhile philosophical ideas outside their dissertation topic.
Having one paper outside your AOS probably won’t hurt. But having several papers in distinct areas outside your AOS certainly will. Research schools prefer candidates who publish almost exclusively in a niche area, and so spreading your publications around in different areas won’t be attractive to them. Teaching schools might not like the higher volume of publications, since they think you’re not likely to focus on teaching duties. So while one paper outside the AOS is probably fine, I wouldn’t take that as license to do a lot more than that.
hanks to NonTT & Michel & Tim for their responses.
To non-TT & Tim
Well I suppose that I work at a ‘research school’ since we are expected to do research, and we are in fact fairly good at it. We have books and book chapters with top academic publishers, SEP articles, papers in prestigious journals, editorships, grants and all the paraphernalia of research success. Most tellingly, perhaps, 87% of my colleagues are listed on Google Scholar and we have an average per person citation rate of 1856. So, presumably, a ‘research school’ or at least a research department. But I can assure Tim that WE most certainly do NOT look down on people who have published extensively outside their original AOS – unsurprisingly, since 65% us have done precisely that! Indeed, about half my own citations are to papers that aren’t in my original AOS, and only three of my seven most-cited papers (with over 100 citations apiece) are first AOS-related. Since most of the metrics that assess research output assess either the quantity or the quality of a scholar’s output (rather than the quantity or the quality of their output *in a specific area*), why would a research-heavy institution worry if *some* of that output was not in that scholar’s original AOS, so long as that output was otherwise up to snuff? Your idea ‘non-TT’ seems to be that, at research-heavy institutions, people are hired specifically as ‘logicians’ or ‘meta-ethicists’ or ‘metaphysicians’ rather than as philosophers who mostly specialise in logic, meta-ethics or metaphysics. Well, I suppose that may be true in some places, but it isn’t true at my university nor at any of the universities that I am familiar with.
To Michel (and again Tim)
Like Michel, I am a stranger to the tenure system, having spent my entire career since graduating from Cambridge in Australasia. So I suppose it is possible that *some* (recruitment and) tenure committees in America might look askance at people who publish outside their AOS. But given the history of analytic philosophy in the late 20th an 21st centuries, this looks like a bonkers strategy. For many of the biggest stars of recent philosophy have been notable for their wide-ranging interests and extra-AOS publishing. Hence telling young philosophers not to depart from their original AOS (except, perhaps, as a short term strategy for maximising research output during their early years) is telling them NOT to follow ‘best practice’ in their discipline, which would be a very strange thing to do.
Example a): David Lewis, with publications on logic, convention, the philosophy of language, moral psychology, political philosophy, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, social philosophy, meta-ethics the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of mathematics.
Example b); Hilary Putnam, with publications (often seminal ones) on logic, the philosophy logic, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, the philosophy of mathematics, ethics, meta-ethics, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of literature, economics, Jewish philosophy, pragmatism and Wittgenstein.
Example c) Alvin Goldman who (going by his online CV) published on individual epistemology, social epistemology, action theory, political theory (especially the nature of power), cognitive science, general philosophy of mind, simulation theory, ethics, the philosophy of law, the philosophy of science, education, meta-philosophy, economics and philosophy, informal logic and fiction. (One can only lament the sad absence of papers on formal logic, meta-ethics and the philosophy of mathematics.)
Example d) Martha Nussbaum (by comparison with Putnam, a narrow specialist) who started out with an AOS in ancient philosophy, but has written on economics of development (being the co-creator of the capabilities approach), feminism, ethics, politics (including the politics of sexuality) the philosophy of literature, the philosophy of the emotions the philosophy of law and (surprisingly) the import and aesthetics of opera. I could go on and on, listing *lots* of baby-boomer or pre-baby-boomer philosophers – Dan Dennett, Kim Sterelny, Greg Currie, Michael Devitt, Graham Priest, Graham Oddie, William Lycan, Paul Griffiths, David Braddon-Mitchell, Val Plumwood, Crispin Wright, Kristie Miller, Brian Skyrms, Richard Sylvan – who have done well, both intellectually and in careerist terms, despite, or sometimes *because of*, publishing outside their original AOS.
Well, you might say, that was then, this is now. Maybe those old philosophers could get away with this sort of thing, but nowadays success in terms of a secure job in a research-valuing department is to be sought by sticking to one’s AOS. So let’s take a look at a few highly successful but AOS-transcending *Millennial* philosophers, that is, philosophers with no (or very few) publications prior to 2000.
Example 1) Catarina Dutihl Novaes, original AOS, medieval philosophy with an emphasis on logic. She has published on the philosophy of mathematics, modern logic (including paraconsistent logic), pornography, conspiracy theories, human cognition (including the nature of reason), Argumentation theory, fake news, genealogical arguments, the history of analytic philosophy and the philosophy of psychology, and has written the *The Dialogical Roots of Deduction’ which counts as a contribution to the Philosophy of Science, having won the Lakatos prize..
Example 2) the late Helen de Cruz. They (Helen preferred a gender-neutral pronoun in later life) already had a PhD in Archaeology and Art before they got into philosophy, but their original AOS, in so far as they had one, was the philosophy of religion (with an evolutionary and cognitive science twist). Here are some of the other topics that Helen wrote about: philosophy and science fiction, indigenous philosophies, meta-philosophy (the idea of philosophical of progress), ‘the novice-expert problem in polarized scientific communication,’ prestige bias, the philosophy of mathematics, aesthetics, ‘Evolved cognitive biases and the epistemic status of scientific beliefs’; ‘the role of material culture in human time representation’, ‘linguistic determinism’, Animal cognition, and ‘Emotional responses to fiction’ . This multitude of departures from their original AOS did not to seem to impede Helen’s stellar career (a named Chair by the time they were 40, and a huge string of grants, fellowships, awards, editorships etc), a career which terminated only with Helen’s tragic and untimely death a the age of 46.
Example 3) Carrie Jenkins. Primary AOS, the Philosophy of Mathematics. But she has also written on metaphysics, the psychology of concepts, general epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of sex and romance, as well as being a poet and novelist.
I suppose somebody might argue that these examples don’t count since neither Catarina nor Helen nor Carrie Jenkins came up through the American graduate school system. So here are a couple of successful but AOS-transcending Millenial philosophers who did.
Example 4) Jennan Ismael (cheating a bit because she has four 20th Century publications), original AOS (in so far as she can be said to have had one) the Philosophy of Physics. She’s a Princeton Alumna. She has published on chance and probability, the nature of causation, laws of nature, free will and determinism, mind and the self, epistemology, educational policy (humanities and the sciences), political philosophy (Rawlsian ideal theory), and attitudes to death.
Example 5) Neil Sinhababu (UT/Austin): Neil is a lot less versatile than some of the philosophers listed, since most of his work deals with his two original areas of specialisation, Nietzsche and Humean motivation theory. However, he has also argued for hedonism in ethics, for partisanship in politics, has expounded and critiqued Heidegger’s argument for fascism, and has written the metaphysical jeu d’esprit,’Impossible Girls’. And he has at least one paper on epistemology. I doubt whether any of this has done him any damage at the National University of Singapore where he works.
Moral: Now, as in the past, you can be a highly successful research philosopher, despite (or perhaps because of) multiple departures from your original AOS. Historically, this is true of some the biggest names at the most Leiterific Schools: Lewis (mostly Princeton); Putnam (mostly Harvard), Goldman (mostly Rutgers) and Nussbaum (mostly Chicago). If recruitment and tenure committees at top schools think that you can’t be a successful research philosopher *unless* you stick pretty strictly to your original AOS (and make their decisions on that basis), then they would have to be amazingly ignorant both of the history of philosophy and of the histories of their own departments. So, on the assumption that they are NOT that ignorant and silly, they won’t be discriminating against candidates with non-AOS publications.
But I guess it is just about possible that there are some departments that really are that silly. If so, I would expect them to be a tiny minority and not worth worrying about since in small-to-medium departments where undergraduate teaching is a requirement (that is, the vast majority of departments) breadth and versatility are a plus.
This thread, like some others, is making me suspect that the concept of an AOS is becoming a danger to philosophy. . It is harmless enough if it simply means what is (for the moment) your primary area of interest, where you have done, or expect to do, a fair amount of your research work, and the topic that you could teach with relatively little effort. But for some young philosophers, it appears to mean a lot more. It is the intellectual equivalent of a feudal lord to whom you pledge a lifetime of exclusive allegiance. Why is this a bad thing? Because in philosophy, the principle of universal incest applies: everything is related to everything else. This means that the metaphysician who is just a metaphysician won’t be much of a metaphysician, the meta-ethicist who is just a meta-ethicist won’t be much of a meta-ethicist, the philosopher of mind who is just a philosopher of mind won’t be much of a philosopher of mind and so on and so forth through all the domains and subdomains of philosophy. In my experience, high-achieving philosophers, even those who stick pretty closely to their AOS knitting, tend to be people with a wide philosophical culture (and a breadth of culture generally). If areas of specialisation become fortresses or intellectual prisons rather than places where people like to hang out, then philosophy will descend into a slough of over-specialised and irrelevant mediocrity.
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