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Tom Cochrane
Adelaide, Australia
Philosopher at Flinders University
Recent Activity
The point of a faculty restructure is to cut administrative staff. So you might think- good right? Reduce administrative bloat. Anyway, in my experience, upper management usually do that stuff first. Then they come for teaching staff the following year.
University of Sydney adopts restructuring plan...
...that reorganizes administrative units (including philosophy) but involves no cuts to faculty positions. Australian readers: what is going on? Is this good, bad, indifferent?
I also recently used my publication metrics in a (successful) promotion application. It's particularly useful how they break it down by sub-field. Just one of the many useful services philpapers provides! I wish there was a bit more philosophical discussion on there.
PhilPapers publication metrics?
In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes: I am wondering what - if anything - is the use of one's "Publication metrics" on PhilPeople. For those who aren't aware of this feature, PhilPeople provides users with their percentile rankings (Q1, Q2, Q3, top 5%, top 1%, etc.) ...
Interesting Helen. The aesthetics of character matters to us when we make friends, so it's probably also relevant in hiring decisions. But effortless mastery is not a quality I'd intuitively associate with job candidates! I'd also be wary when writing a reference not to create expectations of quick-wittedness or brilliance that might not come across under pressure.
I like the comparison to music competitions. It reminds me that probably the best job talk I ever gave was on a subject I'd mastered years before so only had to brush up a bit.
Sprezzatura in Academia: is the myth of brilliance the aesthetic of cool?
Baldasar Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528) is a series of dialogues between hip Italian Renaissance courtiers who stayed over at the court of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and Elizabetta Gonzaga and who debated a range of topics over several evenings. Their discussions ranged on which sport ...
Hi Samuel. This sounds interesting! A couple of questions.
1. How did you mark the assignments? Just as regular essays? What are you giving credit for?
2. Presumably, you had to present some options before students could make their choices- but then, what do you lecture on after the first few weeks? How would this tie into what they doing?
Teaching a course on the meaning of life
This is a guest post by Samuel C. Rickless, University of California, San Diego, part of our series on unusual teaching ideas. I am happy to have been invited to share my experience of teaching a meaning of life course at UC San Diego. Until 2019, no course at UCSD focused on the meaning of li...
I agree that numbered propositions are awful. Also the version of this where a principle is labelled say-'PHP' expecting me to remember what this is. Now I have to hunt back through the paper to find out what that means. Much better if it's something like 'the transitivity principle'. But even then, how hard is it just to use prose? Are you really saving that much space?
Pretending your claim is stronger than the evidence actually warrants. It's ok to be modest!
Just boring writing. And I think it's worth noting that if your abstract is boring, I may not even accept the review request.
What bugs you as a referee?
One of the things I've learned over the years is that some ways of writing philosophy papers seem to go over better with referees than others. I've also heard that there are ways of 'writing like a grad student' that referees can spot, and which tend not to work well. This certainly coheres with...
Hi Samuel
I just wanted to say congrats on your Obsessive–compulsive akrasia article. I was one the referees for Mind & Language.
I'm sorry to hear that a career in academia didn't work out for you. You'd certainly have deserved it as much as anyone else.
What I learned from leaving academic philosophy (Guest post by Samuel Kampa)
By Samuel Kampa By the end of April 2019, my academic career was over. My on-campus interview did not yield a TT job. For personal reasons, I made the wrenching decision to turn down a one-year postdoc offer. Every other opportunity ended in polite rejection, impolite rejection, or ghosting. Wit...
Before I switched to individual articles, I used Gordon Graham's Philosophy of the Arts: An introduction to Aesthetics It's particularly handy for the first four chapters where he outlines different values of art (pleasure, beauty, expression, understanding). After that he turns to individual art forms, but he's defending his preferred cognitive theory so they are less neutral as introductions. I still use his chapter 4 on understanding when teaching that topic though.
Best introductory texts in philosophy of art/aesthetics?
MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 22--ADDITIONAL COMMENTS WELCOME Continuing with our new series about the best introductory texts in various areas of philosophy, I now invite readers to name what they think are the best introductory texts in philosophy of art or aesthetics. As before, don't just nam...
Hi John
Have you ever considered giving credit for good referees, e.g. by awarding points that can be displayed on your website? This could be both very motivating, and helpful as feedback.
How to write a referee report (John Greco)
This guest post is by John Greco, currently Leonard and Elizabeth Eslick Chair in Philosophy at Saint Louis University, and soon in McDevitt Chair in Philosophy at Georgetown University I am sure that there will be varying opinions about how to write a referee report. In keeping with the spirit...
I think one thing not mentioned yet, but which has become clearer to me over the years (both as author and reviewer) is that if the editors like your paper, they will allow several rounds of revision, even given strong objections. If the editors don't like (or just don't care about) your paper- they will reject for any trivial reason. Editors are the true gatekeepers of our profession and their power is immense.
The upshot is that, as an author, polishing doesn't matter so much. A sympathetic editor will let you do this during revisions anyway. So just make sure the fundamentals are strong and clear.
Meanwhile, your first job as a reviewer is to convince the editor one way or the other. If you like a paper, but you have problems with it, but don't let these bury your support for the paper!
On rejections for journal submissions
This is a guest post by Jon Robson, University of Nottingham for our series How to Write Philosophy. Rejection is a big part of academic life. By far the most likely response to any job application, funding bid or journal submission is rejection. Here, I offer some thoughts on a very narrow aspe...
Thanks very much for your reply Neil.
55% is an extremely good acceptance rate (assuming that means about 2 rejections per 1 acceptance), particularly if you aren't being highly perfectionist about them (i.e. making them impregnable to referee objections). This is why I think you must demonstrating certain virtues in your writing that make it particularly acceptable to reviewers/editors. If I get some time, I shall have to examine your style closely! Anyway, you have a paper on OCD that I intend to read, since it's a shared interest.
Writing papers - in lieu of a guide
This is a guest post by Neil Levy, Senior research fellow at the University of Oxford I’ve published a lot of articles – more than 200. So it seems like I should have some tips worth sharing on how to write them. I’m not sure I do. I thought of calling this post How to write a philosophy article...
Hi Neil
I think there's more to your process. You're probably one of the best-published philosophers alive right now! I have some questions.
1. What's your journal rejection rate like?
2. Do you ever write with a particular publication venue in mind? Are do you just start at the top ranked and work your way down?
3. When you review your papers, what sort of virtues are you checking for?
4. Like Marvan above, I don't commit to writing a paper unless I think it's got something original to say. Is originality a big factor for you? What's the priority of this as compared to say, scholarship (being situated in a certain debate, referencing the current literature)?
5. Are you following any structural templates (e.g. problem-solution-objections/relies) or generally following the material where it leads?
6. Are you highly perfectionist about your material (to the extent say, of radically working an essay over a long period) or will you submit relatively quickly?
7. Where work is rejected, do you send it right out again or make sure all referee problems are accommodated?
Writing papers - in lieu of a guide
This is a guest post by Neil Levy, Senior research fellow at the University of Oxford I’ve published a lot of articles – more than 200. So it seems like I should have some tips worth sharing on how to write them. I’m not sure I do. I thought of calling this post How to write a philosophy article...
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