Lukeprog asks, and tries to answer the question with stats on what people specialize in at top departments. Mike Almeida at Prosblogion replies, asking how that data could be relevant and insinuating that Luke has sinister motives.
I think the significance of the data should be pretty obvious: presumably, what people specialize in at top universities reflects the priorities of the people doing the hiring. It really makes no sense for theists to be annoyed by Luke’s post, because the fact that universities aren’t thrilled about hiring philosophy of religion people is already a commonplace at philosophy of religion blogs. As Luke says in the comments, the fact that grad students are often advised to not specialize in PR supports his point, it doesn’t undermine it.
In and of itself, though, Luke’s data doesn’t show much else. Three other areas of philosophy (action, law, and math) do even worse than PR, and in all the plausible explanations of this fact vary a bit from case to case. Any explanation of the lack of interest in hiring PR people has to start with the fact that most philosophers don’t believe in God. In the case of philosophy of action, part of it may be that philosophers think that the free will issue has been settled in favor of free will and determinism being compatible, but there’s also the fact that thinking of action as an independent philosophical specialty just doesn’t feel right to a lot of people–they want to say its part of metaphysics or maybe ethics, so a hiring committee wouldn’t worry about it as long as they had people doing lots of other parts of metaphysics and ethics.
In philosophy of law, the explanation may be somewhat similar to that in religion: just as most philosophers don’t believe in God, I suspect most philosophers don’t think there are facts about the law above and beyond the social facts. (Contrast philosophy of language, where there seems to be a widely-shared assumption that there are facts about language that transcend mere patters of word use or psychological tendencies to assume words work in a certain way.) I admit may be wrong about this, though, as I haven’t talked with a lot of people about it and am mostly expressing my own prejudices.
Math is the area where the explanation is probably weirdest. No analytic philosopher I know of thinks math is all rubbish. Indeed, mathematically-inspired ideas like “proof” and “necessary truth” have been enormously influential in the history of philosophy. But when these ideas come up today in philosophical discussions, the treatment of the mathematical questions [clarification: philosophy of math questions] tends to be superficial in the extreme. Philosophers seems to think they can do mathematically inspired work without knowing anything beyond the few things they can remember from high school math. Though I hadn’t thought about this before reading Luke’s post, it is pretty weird.
In short, there’s a clear sense in which philosophers don’t take philosophy of religion, philosophy of law, or philosophy of math seriously, and a somewhat less clear sense in which philosophy of action isn’t taken that seriously. But the exact story behind these facts differs from case to case.
Uh, philosophy of mathematics is taken quite seriously as its own subfield. I’m not sure what high-level math you think it involves beyond a decent amount of mathematical logic and set theory, which I imagine virtually all philosophers of mathematics possess. It’s probably poorly represented because it’s so specialized (compare it to “philosophy of emotion” or something like that), and because many, if not most, philosophers lack some of the technical knowledge they’d need to understand or participate in it.
You talk as if it’s just obvious that philosophy of math is taken seriously, but in what sense? Obviously, yes, in that it’s not dismissed as thoroughgoing rubbish. But insofar as many philosophers are willing to use mathematically-derived ideas without considering the issue carefully qua issue about math, it seems fair to say they aren’t taking the subfield seriously.
Also, the “so specialized” charge is subjective. It has a lot to do with how you divide up sub-specialties. It seems to be part of the correct explanation for why there are so few philosophy of action people, but a slight tweak in lists of the big philosophical questions would make that explanation look silly: just imagine if every list of important philosophical specialties gave free will top billing, the way many Phil 101 textbooks do. If we thinking in those terms, maybe more graduate students would be encouraged to develop the skills needed to do philosophy of math.
I can’t really imagine how it’s not taken seriously. Some of the best-respected philosophers in the country specialize in it (e.g., Hartry Field and Kit Fine at NYU, Hilary Putnam at Harvard), philosophy of mathematics papers are published in some of the best philosophical journals, two philosophy of math books have won the Lakatos Award, etc. You seem to be saying that philosophers don’t take it seriously insofar as they “are willing to use mathematically-derived ideas without considering the issue carefully qua issue about math,” but I don’t understand what this means. Philosophy of math is primarily about the nature of mathematical objects, mathematical knowledge, mathematical objectivity and mathematical explanation. What “mathematically-derived ideas” in common philosophical usage depend on these issues? And what kind of math do you think these issues involve, if you feel philosophers aren’t mathematically literate enough to tackle them seriously?
Mathematical objects and mathematical knowledge are generally taken as paradigmatic examples of abstract objects and deductive knowledge, respectively, and will get casually mentioned in discussions of those things, but philosophers generally talk as if there’s nothing much to be gained from looking at the specific philosophy of math issues. That seems like a really bad idea.
A point of clarification, though: when I said “mathematical questions” in the original post, I didn’t mean the kind of questions mathematicians answer, I just meant questions about math, and in context philosophical questions about math. I thought that would be clear from context, but now I see it wasn’t. I don’t think we need more philosophers with masters degrees in math, I just think philosophers who cite mathematical examples in their work should know something about how mathematicians think about what they do beyond the crude picture given in high school geometry, and actually do some philosophy of math themselves.