A survey of working conditions in philosophy departments

A survey announced on 20 August on Daily Nous, one of the most widely read professional sites in the field, sets out to collect data on working conditions in academic philosophy.

The rationale#

The researchers behind it describe the problem as one of missing information: trans and non-binary academics deciding which country or which university to apply to for graduate study or a post cannot find reliable information about the conditions they would actually face. The survey aims to fill that gap with comparable data.

An epistemic question#

What makes the story philosophically interesting is that it concerns the field's own concepts.

Miranda Fricker's framework of epistemic injustice describes precisely this kind of situation. Hermeneutical injustice is the deprivation of the shared concepts with which a group could name its own experience. A neighbouring case is inequality in the distribution of information: the knowledge required to make a decision is available to some groups and not to others.

Career decisions are a concrete example. What a department "is like" usually circulates in informal networks rather than official documents. Anyone outside those networks has to make the same decision on less information.

The survey's method follows that logic: turning scattered, personal knowledge into something that can be collected and compared.

An argument in the field#

The subject has been discussed in the philosophy community for some time, and the field is divided on it. This site reports the survey as a professional measurement exercise without adopting the position of any party to that argument.

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