Guest Post: An open letter to dude philosophers regarding your crap manners

At last! Our first guest poster! (Um, for such a bunch of whiners, y'all are pretty slow on the guest post submissions. Nothing, before this one. And publishing my email address like that now means that I'm getting a bunch of spam. Not cool, people. Not cool.) Anyway, this one's a doozy. I present to you Random Feminist, with "An open letter to dude philosophers regarding your crap manners." -- PGOAT

Dear dude philosophers,

Can I suggest something? When first meeting a feminist colleague, try not to start with comments like, "I've never really understood what feminist philosophy is supposed to be, anyway." It doesn't make you come across as collegial or interested in our work. It doesn't even come across as your garden-variety intellectual aggression. (We're fine with that. Seriously, we are.) It comes across as asking us to justify the existence of our subdiscipline. And you know what? That's just rude. As it happens, I think the philosophical interest of your JTB/S knows that P/Gettier masturbation ran its course a good 20 years ago, if it was ever interesting in the first place. (Didn't Dretske already solve that problem? Why are you still talking about it?) But despite my opinions about how lame your subdiscipline is, see how I manage to keep this to myself in the first three minutes of meeting you? Isn't that nice of me? Give it a try sometime.

XOXO,

Random Feminist

Your turn.

The grumblings in the comments have been getting louder for quite a while now. Our collective lack of posting here sucks. You need us. We're failing you.

We know. And we're sorry. And so, I propose that it's time for the improbable story that is this little blog to begin a new chapter. A chapter in which all y'all start pulling your own damn weight around here.

Here's the deal. You write a post about the job market. You email it to me at PGOAT01@gmail.com. If I like it, you, gentle reader, will find your ontological status upgraded from mere Loyal Fan to Guest Poster.

Some rules. Because I'm bossy like that.

1. Posts must be pseudonymous. We don't want to know who you are.
2. We reserve the right to be picky. We won't promise to post anything and everything that's sent to us.
3. Posts that PGOAT finds funny are much likelier to be posted.

Okay, go!

-- PGOAT

Wherein it is established that philosophers do not need to eat.

From comments:

I hate the predominantly instrumental view of philosophy that some readers of this blog have. None of the great philosophers in history had become great with such a mediocre mentality. Do you think that Wittgenstein or Kant or Aristotle were worried about 'job prospects' or 'job markets'?

Yeah, we're all so fucking crass.

And I like your examples, dude. As it happens, Aristotle and Wittgenstein weren't worried about this shit because they were both independently wealthy. As for Kant, before he got the chair at Konigsberg, he was a privatedozent, which is to say, the old-timey version of an adjunct, for a whole lotta years. He got paid per student, and so busted his ass to teach as many students as possible every single semester. So yeah, every semester he was worried about the job market.

I guess the lesson to take away from all this is that if you set me up with a trust fund, I'll stop worrying about the job market.

-- PGOAT

A little perspective

Apparently the Guardian has an advice column about work that included this little nugget of wisdom:

Q: "Will my philosophy degree work against me in business?"

A: "Being a philosophy graduate student makes you different and quirky; turn that into your unique selling point . . ."

I had it all backwards. I thought being weird made it harder to get a job..

-- Second Suitor

And that has made all the difference

Lately, there has been this choice looming heavy on my mind. So heavy, in fact, that I've been finding it hard to sleep at night and being whisked away to a special dream land in which tenure-track jobs are as abundant as lollipops on Lollipop Lane. The customary warm glass of milk and spoonful of peanut butter at 3 a.m. haven't been working their dormitive magic; I stay up watching infomercials about cookery devices, exercise machines, and combination stationary bicycles/rotisserie grills that can cook cornish hens in the same amount of time it takes to power-the-grill/pedal off the calories you'll take in from eating that same cornish hen.

These things don't help me in making my choice.

It's like I've come to two roads in a forest. One road being writing posts and drawing comics for the PJMB and thus placating the calls from the teeming masses on the comments board whining for more whining from Team PJMB so that they can call us out for whining when we should be writing dissertations. Let us call this the road more traveled (though people may dispute this particular labeling). The other road involves starting and finishing a new chapter, thus placating my advisor (or preparing for the market, or creating a syllabus). Let us call this the road less traveled.

Let's just say that this post should serve as fair warning that I'm about to get all Robert Frost up in this motherfucker.

--STBJD