This piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education is something you should read. People should know what they are in for. But if ideas are your passion, and you have talent, and you are willing to take risks and perhaps later on have to retool for the modern-day equivalent of lense-grinding, then go for it! (Hat tip: Victor Reppert.)
As a grad student, let me say thanks for reminding me again how foolish a decision that I've made. :-) Seriously, though, what do you think would be a good contemporary equivalent of being a lens grinder?
Posted by: Derrick | Tuesday, February 10, 2009 at 10:37 AM
Bill,
Excellent article. Actually, several years ago, I was accepted into a doctoral program in philosophy at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. I decided against it because (a) they couldn't give me much in aid and couldn't guarantee that it would be there the following year; and (b) the market for philosophy professors seemed quite dicey.
I love studying philosophy but, in the end, cannot see any real viable career in it. (One gets a degree in philosophy to teach others to get degrees in philosophy so that they might teach others to get degrees in philosophy, etc.)
I am now waiting on acceptance letter from PhD programs in education, where the market is much more solid.
Check out Stanley Fish's commentary on a similar issue here:
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/
Posted by: Kevin Currie | Tuesday, February 10, 2009 at 01:40 PM
Hi Derrick,
See my latest two posts.
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for the Fish link. I take the Oakeshottian line: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”
The glory of philosophy is that it is useless in the very best sense of that word! (This requires elabaoration, but it is time for a bike ride.) But let me recommend Josef Pieper, Leisure as the Basis of Culture.
Posted by: Bill Vallicella | Tuesday, February 10, 2009 at 03:03 PM
I'm going for graduate school in modern European history. However, I'm also graduating with an undergraduate degree in Computer Science so I'm not completely unemployable... :)
Posted by: Richard | Monday, February 23, 2009 at 01:29 AM