Last month, I was invited by Carthage College to provide a workshop to members of their Philosophy Club, and to the philosophy majors. It's one that I've spoken on a number of times, on a topic that always proves to be a good draw: Outside of academic teaching, with a Philosophy degree, how can you make a living?
It is much more reflective of our culture - academic, popular, and otherwise - that this is even a question that requires the sort of answers I (and others) provide. People are genuinely puzzled about this. Students, professors, parents, academic administrators, advisors - among others - they all do want to know: what can you do with a philosophy degree? And they're asking because it seems to many that the only reliable prospect is teaching that same discipline one studies.
As the possibilities for pursuing academic career tracks become more restricted - it's been a brutal job market for decades now, and the available jobs have seen pay, benefits, and security continually eroding - this problem becomes more pressing.
One of the positive aspects to giving these sorts of talks and workshops (I also coach individual clients as well) is that I do get to deliver good news. Provided they don't passively rely upon the credential of a philosophy degree to automatically slot them into a position, people who earn a philosophy degree - whether a BA, an MA, or a Ph.D. - actually do find decently remunerative and intellectually engaging work in an amazingly wide range of fields.
It gets even better. Skill-sets, dispositions, and even areas of knowledge that the discipline of philosophy turn out to be consistently in high demand from potential employers and clients. How do we know that? Survey after survey after survey, year after year. Relative positions change from list to list, but you're almost always going to find critical thinking, complex problem-solving, written communication, and a number of other important skills and dispositions asked for (and viewed as all too often lacking)!
There is plenty of evidence, in multiple modes, that getting - or rather earning - a philosophy degree is actually a prudent career move. So why all this anxiety then? Why these concerns? You could say that it's just a matter of ignorance, which can be ameliorated or dispelled. But that's only part of the picture. There's an assumption resting at the core of this, one that is really strange, if you consider it.
The assumption is this: The right use of a philosophy degree - and everything that goes into it - is to teach the discipline of philosophy. Anything else is in some way inferior, less philosophical. There's actually a perception among some philosophy professors - and they pass it on to their students - that if you can't find a job teaching philosophy, and you do something else that draws upon your philosophy degree, you have failed. You have "sold out" rather than persevering.
When you step back from it, that's a really weird way of thinking about a body of literature, a set of activities, a family of intellectual traditions, and sets of intentional practices and modes of living - because in its fuller sense, that's what philosophy really is - that philosophy's prime purpose and function would be replicating itself through teaching and publishing.
What other discipline - unless it is in a kind of decline or corrupted state - would construe its relation to the wider world, and all the other human activities and occupations, in that way? That's not how philosophy was understood by many of its practitioners - whose texts we still study and teach (and for some of us, apply) - throughout most of its history. Many of them were in fact polymaths and interdisciplinary experts. Some actually had day jobs, or took side gigs. Quite a few of them served in other capacities. And for many of them, this was not something radically separated from their philosophical education and activity.
It is a strange assumption, one that so many take for granted in my field today. Only when we linger with it, and think about just how weird that notion is, can we begin to undo the damage and rigidity of thinking it imposes on its believers. And to bring this to a close, the fact that we don't have to buy into that assumption is another bit of good news I try to convey to philosophy students in these talks and workshops.
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