A Philosopher Squeaks By

Surely, there is an oversupply of philosophers. Jobs in philosophy regularly attract hundreds of applicants per job, and very smart people struggle to find employment anywhere. Even more so, there is a vast oversupply of philosophy papers and books. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. For almost any little topic that you want to do research on, you can quickly find an overwhelming number of things written, including dozens of recent, relevant items in leading journals, too many for any human being to read.

So there would not exactly have been a critical philosophy shortage if I were not in the field. Nevertheless, I think most of my readers would agree that I should indeed have been let into this profession, i.e., it was not a mistake to let me in. And that my books should have been published. According to Google Scholar, I have 3200 citations as of now, which is a lot for the field, and some people apparently like my books very much.

But I barely made it in the profession. Some people find this story amusing, so I'll retell it here.

(I) A kid squeaks into graduate school

Before I graduated from college, I had to decide what to do after college. I decided to apply to graduate school in philosophy, because I loved philosophy. I applied to five schools: Syracuse (because Peter van Inwagen was there), Michigan, Cornell, Stanford, and Rutgers. If I didn't get into any of them, I was going to do something else; I didn't know what. (I now think I would probably have become a computer programmer or something similar.)

I thought that Rutgers was the least good of the five, because I looked at some book with general graduate school rankings which ranked Rutgers around 40. I had somewhat randomly picked Rutgers as the 5th school to apply to, you know, in case none of the good ones accepted me. (This is funny now, because Rutgers was actually the best of the 5 schools.) Four schools rejected me. Only Rutgers accepted me. (Which, in retrospect, was good.) Barry Loewer called me to invite me to come. He later called my application "far out"; I had promised to solve the mind/body problem, the problem of induction, and the problem of external-world skepticism.

So I went to graduate school in philosophy.

(II) A guy squeaks into the profession

Six years later, I graduated with a PhD. Before graduating, I "went on the job market" as we say. I looked through Jobs for Philosophers (the 1990's version of PhilJobs) and found 20 jobs to apply for. If I didn't get any of them, I was going to stretch out my dissertation for another year, and apply again the following year. If I still didn't get anything good, I would have reevaluated my options then. Perhaps I would have changed professions; perhaps have waited another year and tried a third time.

Of the 20 schools that I applied to, four offered to interview me: the College of William & Mary, UC Davis, Univ of Utah, and Univ of Colorado. The last was looking for an epistemologist, which I was. I think maybe the other four were open area. People rarely do open area searches anymore, so today, I would probably have been unable to apply to those schools. (Schools today usually search in some very specific, unusual area -- like "philosophy of technology", not like "epistemology". Also, today we're more oriented toward affirmative action, and people with "connections", so I would probably not get interviewed.)

Then, you had to fly to the APA meeting in December to do interviews. I did that, and had my 4 interviews. In the Colorado interview, some gray-haired dude kept grilling me. He must have been totally unpersuaded by my arguments.

It turned out that the griller was Michael Tooley, and he was a very strong advocate of me. I was called back by Colorado, which invited me for a campus visit. The other schools all found someone else.

The campus visit went well. So I became a professional philosopher.

(III) Some books squeak into the catalogs

I started writing articles and books, as one does. My first book was taken by Rowman & Littlefield without much fuss, after being rejected by several other publishers.

My second book, Ethical Intuitionism, was rejected by something like 15 publishers. I've forgotten now, but it was a lot. Most of them didn't send it out for review. I think Oxford might be the only one that gave me a referee report. Some editors felt that the audience for the book was unclear, because it was a very academic topic, but the tone was informal. E.g., one sentence in the introduction simply read, "No." (This is funny because that book now has almost 600 citations, which is a lot more than most books that those presses have published.)

Meanwhile, an editor at Palgrave (the academic branch of Macmillan) found my web site, which he liked. He wrote to me to ask if I had any book projects. I wound up sending him Ethical Intuitionism. He sent it to sympathetic reviewers. So my book got published.

Many of my articles, by the way, have been hated by referees. Most were rejected at least a few times before finding a home. The most common problem is that the referee thinks I'm wrong. He writes up some objections to my argument; then either the referee himself or the editor decides that, since the referee has objections to my argument, that means it's a negative report, which means that the paper shouldn't be published. (These days, though, I rarely send things out, because I write books and invited chapters instead. I bet I'd have an even harder time today getting most of my papers published, if I weren't already known.)

Anyway, several years after Ethical Intuitionism squeaked by, I was sending out The Problem of Political Authority (which was originally called Freedom and Authority, before Bryan Caplan said that he hated that title). Again, editors hated it. A dozen or so publishers rejected it. Again, most didn't bother to send it out for review. Some referees thought it shouldn't be published because it wasn't "new" enough, because John Simmons had already refuted political obligation.

Good old Palgrave, however, was interested. My first book with them had done well, so that might have gotten the second one in the door. Again, they were the only ones interested in my book. So TPPA got published.

The next 2 books I gave to Palgrave too. I decided not to waste time sending them out to the dozen or so editors who would just desk reject them.