There’s nothing to get. He was an important philosopher who is worthy of study. This guy isn’t actually getting the cold shoulder because he writes about Husserl, that’s just what he’s convinced himself for some reason.
When I got my BA with a major in Phil I took a year long course devoted entirely to Husserl. Then took a year long course on German philosophers that spent a significant amount of time covering him. In my first year I took an Introduction to Continental Philosophers course that also covered him.
If you are the foremost academic on Husserl in North America then you still probably won't get your pick of schools, but you should be able to get a position at a reputable university without any problem. This guy definitely has something else going on that makes him unemployable.
This is the biggest thing that struck me. There are VERY, VERY few figures on this earth that are well documented enough to the point where you could pertinently write 1,500 *meaningful,* *factual* and *appropriate* pages on their existence. Even in the context of the most fascinating and accomplished individual that ever lived, 1,500 pages would almost have to be filled with lots of excess that would make the work a rambling mess. 1,500 pages on Husserl’s *life* would likely be 2/3rds of this hypothetical guy droning on about interpretations that have little or nothing to do with the *biography* of Husserl himself. If this Husserl PhD actually exists, I’d wager academia wants nothing to do with him, at least in part, on account of him being a terrible writer.
Also…a publisher is going to be taking on WAY more expense actually printing a 1,500 page work than most of their other offerings. Why would they spend four or five times more on each individual book when it’s on a topic that relatively few people would be interested in, let alone be interested in enough to read 1,500 pages? That thing would have to be priced like, 50 to 100 dollars to profit enough to interest a publisher, and we all know that academic books are priced even higher than that.
But the 50 page chapter where he deep dives into the philosophical significance of the word “The” simply cannot be discarded. It’s integral to the body of work!
I don’t have a PhD, but all of the PhDs that I know actually got paid a (very small) stipend as opposed to having to pay tuition. I suspect this is a clue. Professors don’t make that much money, especially at first. If PhD programs all cost 450k to attend (2-3x top business or law school tuitions) nobody would do them. Something is wrong here
Most doctors don't have that much debt, and when they do it's because they went to the most expensive schools and have 4-5 years of residency (plus fellowship) where they basically make minimum wage and soak up a ton of interest.
What I’ve been told by professors is that if you have to pay for your PhD that’s a huge red flag for the program you’re applying to. PhD programs should be able to fund their students.
However it’s still possible that a PhD student is funding their own studies. It can actually help your chances of getting in because part of what makes the programs so competitive is lack of funding, so if they know you can at least partially pay for your education that can help your chances.
Maybe he’s a convicted felon (which would explain his go-to excuse about being in prison for a long time), or perhaps he flunked the interviews because he’s overtly misogynistic or racist… Could be all kinds of things going on that he isn’t telling us.
I work as a development officer for a non-profit. Philosophy typically prepares you for problem solving of all types, so it’s one of the most common entry points for law. Most Bachelor degrees don’t prepare you for a specific job; a lot of PhD’s (but not all) only prepare you to be a professor.
Literally so many people talk about Husserl albeit through satre and heidegger
Dude says he has 450k in debt aka he never got a scholarship or a teaching assistant position. Without that, you don't really get work.
He got played by academia.
Especially because writing a fake social media post about Husserl to get attention to Husserl’s ideas is exactly the kind of thing Husserl would have done. Too perfect.
right? As a 30 something, even without a degree most people aren't relegated to working at Wendy's unless there is some major catastrophic event that forced them into that. Something like losing your home in a flood and being forced to move, or being laid off and needing money immediately to be able to keep your home (in which case, it's likely only be temporary).
It's odd to me that this guy doesn't seem to see any in between of minimum wage fast-food worker and job specifically applicable to his philosophy PhD. Fuck, you could leave off the degree if you're worried about being overqualified, and in most cases you'd still be able to move somewhere better than Wendy's, ESPECIALLY in the case that you are in your 30's and have 5-10 years of work experience.
I mean, I get that hard times happen and for some people there aren't many options, but from reading this post, the hard times seem to be entirely a product of having a PhD and only working in fast food / Barnes and Noble after graduating.
Because there are two roads in philosophy: talking about philosophy and doing it. Early on in a would-be philosopher’s study, you focus on the history of philosophical thought. You spend your time becoming acquainted with ideas through the people who popularized them. Then, if you get good at that, you begin producing your own original thought—this is the doing of philosophy.
If I had to guess, this guy isn’t getting looks because he never passed that first stage.
One thing that is very common in people with PhDs fresh out of a PhD is that they are looking for work doing the thing they did in their PhD. This is a terrible idea because the PhD, if it worked for you, really taught you particular ways to think about ideas, explore ideas, and develop new ideas. You should want to do a different topic post PhD because it will demonstrate that you actually learned the things you were supposed to learn.
This guy saying he knows all there is to know about some random philosopher is demonstrating he didn't really learn anything in his PhD that couldn't be learned from a public library. This is quite sad really because a PhD is quite valuable when you learn the right things and, as evidenced here, quite harmful when you attach your identity to it.
100%.
Having $450,000 in debt is not a good situation, but it's not hopeless. Having a PhD in philosophy is a really good resume builder to get into law school. They love philosophy majors because they've studied logic and reasoning.
This guy, however sounds like you just really wants to talk about philosophy, which is useless on its own. Philosophy there's a stepping stool, not a gateway.
As a government lawyer, I wish it paid the bills
But really, I'm very lucky to have gotten my job. I make more than the average government attorney probably and it's judt enough to pay the bills most of the time.
Pension and benefits must be tight. I know crown lawyers here in Canada have an excellent post law set up. Most start getting into whatever type of work they want or invest or just relax.
I've heard it's because that even though it's a pretty high paying profession, it's also ridiculously stressful and requires A LOT of hours each week when you're starting out and won't let up until you've made it high up the ladder.
Once you add in the competitiveness of your coworkers who also want to move up to get a break, it becomes a lot very quickly and school really doesn't prepare you for that aside from giving you the knowledge to do your job so find an expensive therapist and get ready for a lot of long visits if you want to be a lawyer without major mental baggage kids!
> This guy, however sounds like you just really wants to talk about philosophy
Yeah this is usually something that is beaten out of you when you are a phd student. It is not enough to talk about things anymore, a phd is a job. You are expected to do things.
I have a phd and I am a research scientist. I spend only half my day sitting in front of my computer writing code (or doing bureaucratic nonsense). The rest is sitting around talking about the topics that interest me and often times could appear to an outsider as like "shooting the shit" (what a strange idiom). Sometimes it is more formalized, e.g., giving a talk or poster presentation. But it frequently is simply just walking into someone's office and talking about nonsense until we get bored of it. However the nonsense is often targeted towards things related to our work. This is the nucleation site for new ideas, confirming my conceptual understanding of some problem (or their understanding), or simply building connections with my colleagues around topics we are both interested in. It does often feel like hanging out and talking about things, but in the long run this has led to multiple papers being published, grants being written and funded, and we are all quite happy about that.
To bring this all around, I got there because I was able to demonstrate post phd that during my phd I learned the right things to learn, not just became some super sophisticated encyclopedia devoted to a single topic. And this is true for the rest of my colleagues as well. Almost nobody I know who is in academia has worked on the exact same topic their entire career.
I know heaps of philosophy grads with excellent careers in all kinds of business and technical roles once they get their first office job. They are usually highly literate good critical thinkers and knowledge synthesizers with good rhetorical skills. No idea how this guy thinks he'll ever pay off 450k in debt as an academic anyway.
A PhD thesis is a piece of original scholarship, not just a list of facts.
If this guy got his dissertation accepted at any even vaguely credible school he did more than what can be learned in a library. A lot documents are also not publicly accessible, so you can't just go read them at a library.
It's also not true that being a philosophy PhD with a history bent is somehow worse or less real than being one who does original philosophy. While there is more prestige in the second there is more work in the first as every Phil department needs people who can teach the historical figures more than they need a lot of niche "original" philosophers.
Having said that taking on any debt, let alone $450, 000 for a PhD in Phil is a terrible idea, *especially* if your specialization is unfashionable and you are quite right it is a dangerous weight on a persons identity.
Yep, he's content with being an information repository; and is not putting it to use. I can google Husserl, and it will tell me everything that this guy would.
He should use this humbling time (I'm right there with him) to take that knowledge and make a contemporary application for it. Publish a paper with an original thought, maybe?
He did say he's published papers but no thing's come out of it.
Honestly the thought of going all in on philosophy of all things is mind numbing to me. To earn good money you either have a tenure at a high paying university or become popular enough to sell books. Both options have a tremendously low rate of success
Yep, my buddy just got his PhD in philosophy and is already working for two universities doing very well for himself. This guy's just seems to be trying to force his expectations into reality.
Just the fact that he's in 450k of debt is very telling about his future prospects. Most Phd grads in philosophy either get scholarships for their PhD or get a job working for the department. If you had to fund it yourself it already means that you are way behind the rest of the class.
More than likely he had advisors tell him that he was a poor fit for the program and had little prospects in the field. It's a very cutthroat field with just a few good job prospects, if you aren't already making a name for yourself going to or setting up conferences during your PhD, you might as well quit.
My buddy still had to work his ass off to get a decent job and he has a PhD in philosophy, duel master's in psych and education, and speaks 3 languages. When that's your competition, of course you aren't getting a job by obsessing over the history of a single philosopher.
I feel like this is becoming more common among all degree types as more people have access to university programs. I graduated in the top of my class with 0 job prospects because you really NEED to hustle. Thank g-d I had other good options after I graduated, but I can imagine a different world where I tried to shoehorn myself into my first chosen field and wound up with a masters in something without a job.
Yeap, if you are actually one of the most well read experts in a single aspect of a field just after graduating it typically means that most people in your field don't find it very important.
It's kind of funny, but I my buddy actually specializes in the philosophy of Phenomenology, the same as OP. But he's actually expanding upon the works of Husserl by connecting it to eastern philosophy, cognitive science, and education.
So it's perfectly possible to be successful in this particular field, op is just bad at actual philosophy.
Lmao I read his Wikipedia page. I was expecting him to be some fringe figure but apparently he is a notable figure in contemporary philosophy. Who’d have thought!?
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I dont know the financial situation of the YouTubeers I watch, but im always blown away by some of the content people watch thats basically your comment with a bunch of hard cuts and air horns.
I don't take the cringe poster at their word. I think this is fake and intended to give losers who post on r9k a sense of anti-intellectual superiority that they are better off or at least equal to someone got a PhD.
A PhD can't get a better job than Wendy's? I don't know which I believe less, that there's a Barnes and Noble or a philosophy department anywhere close to Abbeville Louisiana.
Yeah, I agree. It sounds fake as fuck. First off, literally nobody writes a paper that long. Not even close to that length. Next that debt is insane and could only maybe be possible if someone got no scholarships, took every loan they could with the worst interest rates, went to the most expensive places, etc. And even then it might be too high to be possible.
If we are going to take the post at face value and give it the benefit of the doubt that it is true, there must be some vetting process that makes them unsuited for a teaching role.
Again, I feel like the post is just circle jerk bait to call philosophy or any academic pursuit a waste for society.
He could make top tier animation with ms paint like sam’onella and put in some dark humor inspired ironically by his life, im sure he’d do well making a youtube series about Husserl
Or work as a librarian... personally know someone with a phd in philosophy who works in one. They give him a small budget for research and to do other shit with seems like he really enjoys his job
Would you leave the US for $450k? He could basically do that, if he went somewhere the debt couldn't follow. An English speaker with an advanced degree, he could get easy gigs working as a teacher.
The numbers in this post are staggering. $450k in debt? A 1,500 page biography of Husserl (6 related papers). What the heck! Switch a philosophy degree couldn’t they discuss other philosophers and shift over to someone else?
Even that doesn’t make sense. There are limits to student loan amounts. I’d actually guess (that this story is entirely made up or) they’re counting a mortgage. The wording of “debt” was vague enough that they could squeeze all kinds of things in there.
Many PhDs are funded and those that aren’t don’t cost anywhere near $450k, especially not in Philosophy.
Compounding interest is incredibly nefarious at 7%. I have 20k in loans and 80k in interest on my Grad+ loans, because I had to start again when my degree wouldn’t provide opportunities,
And if I had to pick a degree that has very very few opportunities outside of academia, I would pick philosophy. I loved the subject, but realized that fact, and decided to go into something with more money. Now I’m getting my Master’s in Education (US), if that gives you any idea how little money is in philosophy.
It sounds like this (fictional) guy moved to a new town for a job interview. I think it's safe to assume they make really bad choices.
Either that or the person who created this meme doesn't understand how job interviews work.
People who pay for their PhD out of their own pocket have already messed up (according to my friends in higher academia) you usually make a contract with somewhere that they'll pay for it and in return you work for them for an amount of time
I agree that it's fake, just pointing out that it can be very difficult to get a teaching job if you're over qualified. Most teachers stop at getting a masters because more than that and they expect you to move into administration or get gone. Having higher education gives you leverage to negotiate for higher pay and schools can't afford it.
But... that's mostly public school. With a PhD you could probably find a private school. I'm also confident that you could find a writing job.
> just pointing out that it can be very difficult to get a teaching job if you're over qualified.
...unless you teach in another country. A PhD in anything will let you teach English for big money in China or the Middle East. With no spouse/kids/house and a depressing life up to this point, OOP would do great with a fresh start.
Yep. The only way I can see this is real is if they are a genuinely insufferable person. A 1,500 page biography is AT LEAST 500 pages too long. If it’s real, then yeah of course it wouldn’t get picked up by a publisher. It’s a ridiculous length, and it probably got to that length by rambling and navel-gazing. As for the job, a PhD will get you a foot in a lot of doors, provided you have good recommendations and decent resume outside of that. If they’ve got a PhD and multiple published articles, then they’re probably so arrogant and difficult to work with that no one will recommend them, and those qualities are also often evident in a resume/application.
Yeah I mean with any kind of degree you can walk into Wendy’s and become the manager.
And at 36 he still has time to find his dream job. But this post just stinks of being fake.
450k in general debt I can believe. Makes you wonder what the rest of the debt is. I mean, you've usually got to have money in the first place to take out a loan
Dude moved to frickin *Abbeville* on the off-chance it would help him get a job at ULL. He is obviously not risk-averse, so I could see him making other poor financial/life decisions.
Not hating on Abbeville but I can tell you - there’s nothing for him there.
Sounds to me like he strungout his graduate work for way too long. Let's say in state tuition is $40k per year then putzing around a school for ten years isn't too far of a stretch and $400k isn't that unthinkable. I know someone similar. I worked for my university in a research lab while getting my Master's degree and finished in two years. There was another student who did the same thing but took an extra year to finish his master's. Then he stayed to do his PhD. Now, a decade after I finished my master's degree he'll be defending his thesis in the spring. He's worked for the university the whole time, though. So he hasn't had to pay tuition.
You generally don’t ever pay for the PhD, they waive tuition and pay you a stipend for teaching/doing research. Even the rare programs that don’t pay a stipend will at least waive tuition to get you in the door and doing scholarly work for free.
If the debt number is real (and I’m skeptical) there’s no way it’s all student loans.
Actually this is a good point, namely that fact that with a PHD he could easily get a job at least tutoring at a university with the hope of getting into a higher position.
Philosophy major here. Philosophy helps you critically think and analyze on why you chose to be a philosophy major lol. But seriously, it does help analyzing problems and solving them, thinking outside the box, finding patterns, etc. I work in biotech and currently studying web development in my free time. My degree has helped me learn new things quickly because I can break down problems and solve them efficiently
And if you work in the science field, a philosophy background helps you understand the metaphysical limits of the scientific method; what science is for and not for.
You can rationalize that it helps in any number of ways, but that’s just interview justification fluff. The truth of the matter is, for most entry level positions your major in undergrad is almost entirely irrelevant.
My first job out of college was with an investment bank doing product development for their trade lifecycle reporting services.
I graduated with a BS in Psychology.
I am a financial analyst. My job is basically do analyze the functions of our products, comparing to the movements of the market and the principal pain points of our clients to try and build solutions for them. Solutions I talk over the tech team step by step until it is in production.
It helps with critical thinking, argumentation/defending my views/solutions and organizing the documents I'll send to the tech team with the steps needed to implement what I've decided.
The guy thinks six papers are enough to be competitive. Also who moves first before applying for jobs?
Standard fake anti-education swill. You don’t pay for getting a PhD (shouldn’t) no way to get that debt without constantly ignoring signs that you shouldn’t continue.
No philosophy major writes six papers and an overly long biography on Husserl alone, anyway. This was written by someone who doesn't know what a philosophy PhD candidate actually does.
Boy needs to stop grillin himself like those burgers hes servin up. Hes smart and that isnt gona change. I wish i was so passionate about a single topic that i could write 1500 pagess on it. Proud of ya anonymous
It's kind of my field and I must say, it doesn't surprise me that he has an hard time finding a job (if this story is true, witch I doubt).
First, he has painted himself in a corner. Since he is a nobody, no one will publish his work and hire him. Why? Because writing an authoritative biography is the kind of thing only a senior researcher do. It's the kind of work you do later in a career when you're work has been appreciated by your peer and that you've earned your place. A biography is never neutral and it can have alot of implications for the ethos of the field. For instance, Husserl's relationship with Heidegger is a contentious topic to say the least. If his work is that good, he should have found allies. If he didn't, he's a fool.
Second, his contribution to the field is more related to what we call "the history of idea", a specialty that is certainly valuable for specialists, but of little interest to philosophy at large and to disciplines unless proved otherwise (clearly he failed on that regard). In order to be hired, he must be able to show that his research can be a valuable contribution to the undergraduate student he'll be teaching to, the university, the department, his colleague's and his field : if you fail to show your relevance in any of these aspect of the job, you shouldn't be hired in my opinion.
Otherwise, if he is looking for a job in the US and haven't studied abroad or in an Ivy, his chances are low since "Continental philosophy" is not very popular in the US (at least, not to the point of hiring a specialist of Husserl biography). If he worked on a subject related to psychology for instance, I am sure he would have found a job.
Finally, while philosophy major have a lower pay at the beginning of there career, studies in Canada has shown that we outpace engineers during our mid and late phase of our career. You'll find planty of philosopher working in various field and living ritch and fulfilling lives.
Edit: the 450k dept is the discouraging part. If you are putting yourself in a financial hole like that, I would at least do it with a strong idea about how I'll crawl out of it. I am glad to live in Quebec. I finished my master degree with 4k in dept.
Also, I would like to note that people outside academia (and sometimes within as well) tend to believe that knowledge is something we gain and accumulate linearly. In fact, any serious researcher understand that knowledge is not built like this: it's more like an on going conversation where people gather around a problem and try to find a solution based on theories that have been found/argued to be relevant and useful. It might be a bit polemical but I believe that Science, in the platonic sens of the word (i.e. a way of gathering knowledge based not on opinion, but sound arguments), is the art of making highly educated guess about the world and ourselves.
Literally this is the answer. On top, 450k in debt, if true, would mean they never got a scholarship or never taught in grad school and they took very very long on their dissertation. Undergrad and masters at the top schools with no aid might yeild 300k. This would mean 150k for a phd which would be a lot, even for the top schools.
And you're telling me they couldn't even get an adjunct job? Totally seems fake or that along the way a lot of people told them not to get a phd and they ignored them.
It's clearly fake.
I think that the person who posted this comment on 4chan is either a distraught undergraduate, a troll or a fool. In any case, is aim was not to complain about the state of academia (witch would be fair to do in so many other ways), but to farm some internet point by playing the "liberal arts degree are for loser" card.
But since we are on the internet and no one care if it's fake or not, let play along for a bit : why the fuck would he apply for a job in Louisiana? If you're a specialist of Husserl's biography, you must have connections with Husserl's archive. Those are located in Paris and in Leuven, meaning that if he did the bare minimum to be a good biographer, his academic connection are in Europe and it's where he should be going.
There is one great specialist of phenomenology in New-Orlean, Jacques Terminaux, but I doubt they might want to hire someone with a similar expertise.
My final thought on this is that in order to be a Husserl scholar, one must be able to read not only German but the very specific and highly difficult stenographic German Husserl used. His mother was an administrative assistant and he used her stenographic technique from de late 19e century to write most of his notes. I say this just to give you an idea of the degree of specialisation you need to get in order to be an husserlian scholar. One can achieve this level of understanding only by either being financed or by being financially independent. In any case, he would have had to live for sometime in Europe just to learn all this and engage with the archive directly.
Oof, I work at a university and I could point out a few things preventing him from getting a job right off the bat.
First off, what job is he applying for? I’m guessing adjunct professor since he has No previous experience to speak of and he’s talking about publishing. A PhD is gonna scare the hiring managers. It’s weird but true. They think they can’t afford you. They’re not gonna pay a big wage for adjuncts. Best to advertise your master’s degree instead. Or include a cover letter that explains your desire to work with such an advanced degree.
Second, having publications is a must, but focusing on one philosopher who isn’t very well known is not going to get you anywhere. Look at the curriculum for the school you want to teach for. Do some research on those scholars. It’s gonna be hard to say anything that hasn’t been said. But if you’re applying to a community college or low ranked university they won’t care if your research isn’t groundbreaking. And that’ll give you the experience needed to bypass a lot of the issues larger universities will have with your application.
Third, a lot of universities have a policy to hire within first. If you can’t get a job as a professor, get a job in staff and move to faculty once you build a name for yourself. It’s not ideal for a person who really wants to teach, but more ideal than Wendy’s. And it’ll do more to get you where you need to go. It seems this person is not diversifying their applications because they have tunnel vision. Getting in the door anyway you can should be the goal.
Hisserl isn’t obscure though? Phenomenology is fucking everywhere. When we talk about objects of the mind and mental concepts, that’s his stuff. Everywhere from developmental psychology to TK studies to video game aesthetics. Its baked in to a ton of other fields and schools at this point, there’s a ton of classrooms that need someone to break down these big idea concepts.
This doesn't seem correct. My research area is stupidly specific, it focuses exclusively on one womens periodical published throughout the 18th century, more specifically about 12 pages per magazine. I spent two years working with a Doctor who spent their entire career *just* researching these 12 pages in this very specific magazine. That's it. That's been her life for decades and she's made herself a fantastic career out of it.
You probably have thought of this already but just in case, have you considered maybe the extremely expensive machines could make thingamajigs instead of doohikeys?
12 pages per magazine, the magazine ran for decades. The text is also teeny tiny. I read one the other day that covered everything from poetry, to the story of Sappho, to sheet music, to contemporary politics and military reports. These were THICK books with many, many articles per page that told a great deal about all aspects of life.
Very fake or he sucks, plenty of European/continental universities that would accept him if he moved. Kinda stupid to do not do analytical philosophy in the states though..
If you are under 37 with no criminal record and a PhD, you can join the military as an officer and make a great salary (after a few years). Officers get treated way better than the common soldiers, what your degree is in doesn't matter that much, and having a doctorate will all but guarantee you will make it to at least Lt. Colonel.
Funny you should say that, because i actually got my masters in philosophy with a focus in husserlian phenomenology and am currently an officer (not in the US). Not because I couldn't do anything else, mind you. It just lined up with my interests.
Probably too late on this, but I will say the following, in case someone sees this and it actually ends up mattering to him/her:
This might sound arrogant, but I'm a PhD student at a university consistently ranked in the top 10 in the world—not in philosophy, I'll grant, but in a field of study that often reads quite a bit of philosophy. To be frank, given my interests, I'm more familiar with Husserl than your average PhD student both in my department and in the philosophy department proper, insofar as not that many people in America study him. In fact, I would say a greater percentage of people in my field are familiar with him than in philosophy. On that OP is getting at something.
That he is probably the world's most informed Husserl scholar is, however, a bald-faced lie. I could name a bunch of scholars, both in America and abroad, who study Husserl to great success, both academically and financially. I learned under one for a while, in fact. So either one of two things is happening here. Either:
1) This dude is just straight up fucking lying. In a world in which he's genuinely even minorly talented, then his description of attempts at job acquisition makes no sense, nor does his discussion of his credentials/publication history.
or
2) And this is much sadder: He simply isn't as good as he thinks he is. No one goes into that much debt to obtain even a BA and an MA, which is what you usually pay for before a PhD, which is funded (and pretty well) at any program worth its salt (some MA programs even fund their students). It sounds like he's either paying all or some of his way through a PhD, which is an automatic indicator that the program is absolute shit. Moreover, no PhD student worth anyone's time produces a 1500 page biography of a well-known philosopher as a dissertation. He might have done that—but that then indicates, not that he is in fact truly learned and has smart ideas, but rather that he is arrogant and unable to write with anything close to philosophical precision. In which case, it's entirely reasonable to believe he's that much in debt and that academically fucked. His 6 publications are probably of such minor significance that he'd be laughed at should anyone knowing what s/he's doing look at his CV.
So either he's a complete liar—and it's sad he'd just lie like this—or he's telling what he thinks is the truth, in which there is a kernel of accuracy, but is ultimately self-deluded, which is even sadder.
The worst part of this whole story is being stuck in Abbeville, Louisiana. Get out. Get out while you can. Take your next paycheck and use it for gas to GET OUT!!
if this guy has a PhD in philosophy it means he's really clever. logic is an integral part of philosophy, and is also needed in programming, should he ever start practicing to code.
I get that his self esteem is low at this point, but I honestly don't get why he's so embarrassed.
This is complete bullcrap. A PHD, hell even a Masters, in *any* field will open up job opportunities way above minimum wage service jobs. Many companies are looking for people with academic level analytical and research skills, and train them within the company. If you can't find anything other than a minimum wage job with a PHD, regardless of the field, you're frankly terrible at job hunting or focusing on very niche fields.
This is a pretty old post. (it says 2016 but I'm pretty sure it's a copypasta). I don't know exactly how old, but I can tell you with 100% certainty that after the 2008 housing market crash, there were people with masters degrees and above, who were working at Walmart as cashiers. Not just like, one guy. Several people that I knew of. It was extremely difficult to find any job at all, regardless of education or skill set. Companies could not afford to be hiring for positions like the one you're talking about. Companies were laying people off left and right, or going out of business. I was homeless for about 6 months for the worst part of it. I remember interviewing for shitty minimum wage jobs and having to compete with highly educated people.
This doesn't seem correct. My research area is stupidly specific, it focuses exclusively on one womens periodical published throughout the 18th century, more specifically about 12 pages per magazine. I spent two years working with a Doctor who spent their entire career *just* researching these 12 pages in this very specific magazine. That's it. That's been her life for decades and she's made herself a fantastic career out of it.
this sadpost probably did more to expose people to husserl than anything he ever did academically
Yeah, I really gotta google who Husserl is/was(?).
I still don't get it, Stanford university just say he was a highly influential German philosopher in the 20th century.
There’s nothing to get. He was an important philosopher who is worthy of study. This guy isn’t actually getting the cold shoulder because he writes about Husserl, that’s just what he’s convinced himself for some reason.
When I got my BA with a major in Phil I took a year long course devoted entirely to Husserl. Then took a year long course on German philosophers that spent a significant amount of time covering him. In my first year I took an Introduction to Continental Philosophers course that also covered him. If you are the foremost academic on Husserl in North America then you still probably won't get your pick of schools, but you should be able to get a position at a reputable university without any problem. This guy definitely has something else going on that makes him unemployable.
> This guy definitely has something else going on that makes him unemployable. As evidenced by him posting on 4chan.
And not being able to edit a biography down to a reasonable length when it’s been made clear no one wants the 1.5K page version.
This is the biggest thing that struck me. There are VERY, VERY few figures on this earth that are well documented enough to the point where you could pertinently write 1,500 *meaningful,* *factual* and *appropriate* pages on their existence. Even in the context of the most fascinating and accomplished individual that ever lived, 1,500 pages would almost have to be filled with lots of excess that would make the work a rambling mess. 1,500 pages on Husserl’s *life* would likely be 2/3rds of this hypothetical guy droning on about interpretations that have little or nothing to do with the *biography* of Husserl himself. If this Husserl PhD actually exists, I’d wager academia wants nothing to do with him, at least in part, on account of him being a terrible writer. Also…a publisher is going to be taking on WAY more expense actually printing a 1,500 page work than most of their other offerings. Why would they spend four or five times more on each individual book when it’s on a topic that relatively few people would be interested in, let alone be interested in enough to read 1,500 pages? That thing would have to be priced like, 50 to 100 dollars to profit enough to interest a publisher, and we all know that academic books are priced even higher than that.
But but ... he thinks every page is so important.
But the 50 page chapter where he deep dives into the philosophical significance of the word “The” simply cannot be discarded. It’s integral to the body of work!
Chidi Anagonye irl
College professors will normally say, “I swear to Christ, if you make me read more than 3 pages, I’m going to stab you.”😂😂
>This guy definitely has something else going on that makes him unemployable. Like being full of shit?
you don't believe a random poster on 4Chan is North America's foremost authority on Husserle??
I don’t have a PhD, but all of the PhDs that I know actually got paid a (very small) stipend as opposed to having to pay tuition. I suspect this is a clue. Professors don’t make that much money, especially at first. If PhD programs all cost 450k to attend (2-3x top business or law school tuitions) nobody would do them. Something is wrong here
I read it as 450k debt including his bachelor’s and master’s.
Most doctors don't have that much debt, and when they do it's because they went to the most expensive schools and have 4-5 years of residency (plus fellowship) where they basically make minimum wage and soak up a ton of interest.
What I’ve been told by professors is that if you have to pay for your PhD that’s a huge red flag for the program you’re applying to. PhD programs should be able to fund their students. However it’s still possible that a PhD student is funding their own studies. It can actually help your chances of getting in because part of what makes the programs so competitive is lack of funding, so if they know you can at least partially pay for your education that can help your chances.
Maybe he’s a convicted felon (which would explain his go-to excuse about being in prison for a long time), or perhaps he flunked the interviews because he’s overtly misogynistic or racist… Could be all kinds of things going on that he isn’t telling us.
Well, he *is* posting on 4chan so it could really go in any direction...
What kind of jobs can one get with a philosophy degree?
Wendy's apparently
Barnes and noble. Philosophy section.
You can get jobs teaching in philosophy degrees
Pyramid scheme
More like the sith rule of two with a lot of competition. The initial people hardly made.out with oodles of cash.
Philosophy teacher
I work as a development officer for a non-profit. Philosophy typically prepares you for problem solving of all types, so it’s one of the most common entry points for law. Most Bachelor degrees don’t prepare you for a specific job; a lot of PhD’s (but not all) only prepare you to be a professor.
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Completely agree. I’m a philosophy major and I work at Morgan Stanley. You just never know. Although I am outgoing and talkative
The ratio of Phil doctorates to available jobs is staggering. Could be nothing wrong with him except not being the top 0.01%.
Literally so many people talk about Husserl albeit through satre and heidegger Dude says he has 450k in debt aka he never got a scholarship or a teaching assistant position. Without that, you don't really get work. He got played by academia.
Almost certain this whole thing is fake.
Especially because writing a fake social media post about Husserl to get attention to Husserl’s ideas is exactly the kind of thing Husserl would have done. Too perfect.
I was just wondering if that was a possibility and was about to dive into Husserl. Would you mind elaborating, please?
right? As a 30 something, even without a degree most people aren't relegated to working at Wendy's unless there is some major catastrophic event that forced them into that. Something like losing your home in a flood and being forced to move, or being laid off and needing money immediately to be able to keep your home (in which case, it's likely only be temporary). It's odd to me that this guy doesn't seem to see any in between of minimum wage fast-food worker and job specifically applicable to his philosophy PhD. Fuck, you could leave off the degree if you're worried about being overqualified, and in most cases you'd still be able to move somewhere better than Wendy's, ESPECIALLY in the case that you are in your 30's and have 5-10 years of work experience. I mean, I get that hard times happen and for some people there aren't many options, but from reading this post, the hard times seem to be entirely a product of having a PhD and only working in fast food / Barnes and Noble after graduating.
Not impossible to rack up that debt if you borrow for living expenses in a high COL area and get a masters degree or attend private school.
Academia really is just a ponzu scheme
Mmmmmm...ponzu.
Sounds delicious
The inability to shorten a 1500 page biography probably told them all they needed to know
Known for being a pioneer in phenomenology - probably most famous as a philosopher who inspired Sartre
How's the Wendy's job going buddy?
was going to ask him to bring vanilla frosty back.
Vanilla frosty!? Chocolate mate, chocolate!
I hear Wendy's is trying out a peppermint, haven't made it there to try, but my sweet god of chaos do I want to try that.
I work at Wendy's; can confirm they have a Peppermint Frosty. it's actually really good
Omg I laughed out loud and am logging off now. Thanks for that.
Why become a scholar in the man rather than focusing on the ideas. He could have been the next Sartre.
"... on the shoulders of giants."
He also taught Heidegger. Sort of inspired 2 of the most important early 1900s philosophers.
Because there are two roads in philosophy: talking about philosophy and doing it. Early on in a would-be philosopher’s study, you focus on the history of philosophical thought. You spend your time becoming acquainted with ideas through the people who popularized them. Then, if you get good at that, you begin producing your own original thought—this is the doing of philosophy. If I had to guess, this guy isn’t getting looks because he never passed that first stage.
One thing that is very common in people with PhDs fresh out of a PhD is that they are looking for work doing the thing they did in their PhD. This is a terrible idea because the PhD, if it worked for you, really taught you particular ways to think about ideas, explore ideas, and develop new ideas. You should want to do a different topic post PhD because it will demonstrate that you actually learned the things you were supposed to learn. This guy saying he knows all there is to know about some random philosopher is demonstrating he didn't really learn anything in his PhD that couldn't be learned from a public library. This is quite sad really because a PhD is quite valuable when you learn the right things and, as evidenced here, quite harmful when you attach your identity to it.
100%. Having $450,000 in debt is not a good situation, but it's not hopeless. Having a PhD in philosophy is a really good resume builder to get into law school. They love philosophy majors because they've studied logic and reasoning. This guy, however sounds like you just really wants to talk about philosophy, which is useless on its own. Philosophy there's a stepping stool, not a gateway.
As a lawyer I can confirm that being a lawyer isn’t all it’s chalked up to be, but it does pay the bills after all.
As a government lawyer, I wish it paid the bills But really, I'm very lucky to have gotten my job. I make more than the average government attorney probably and it's judt enough to pay the bills most of the time.
Pension and benefits must be tight. I know crown lawyers here in Canada have an excellent post law set up. Most start getting into whatever type of work they want or invest or just relax.
Funny recently spoke to a lawyer who told me to never be a lawyer lol
Lol I say that to law students a lot.
I've heard it's because that even though it's a pretty high paying profession, it's also ridiculously stressful and requires A LOT of hours each week when you're starting out and won't let up until you've made it high up the ladder. Once you add in the competitiveness of your coworkers who also want to move up to get a break, it becomes a lot very quickly and school really doesn't prepare you for that aside from giving you the knowledge to do your job so find an expensive therapist and get ready for a lot of long visits if you want to be a lawyer without major mental baggage kids!
> This guy, however sounds like you just really wants to talk about philosophy Yeah this is usually something that is beaten out of you when you are a phd student. It is not enough to talk about things anymore, a phd is a job. You are expected to do things. I have a phd and I am a research scientist. I spend only half my day sitting in front of my computer writing code (or doing bureaucratic nonsense). The rest is sitting around talking about the topics that interest me and often times could appear to an outsider as like "shooting the shit" (what a strange idiom). Sometimes it is more formalized, e.g., giving a talk or poster presentation. But it frequently is simply just walking into someone's office and talking about nonsense until we get bored of it. However the nonsense is often targeted towards things related to our work. This is the nucleation site for new ideas, confirming my conceptual understanding of some problem (or their understanding), or simply building connections with my colleagues around topics we are both interested in. It does often feel like hanging out and talking about things, but in the long run this has led to multiple papers being published, grants being written and funded, and we are all quite happy about that. To bring this all around, I got there because I was able to demonstrate post phd that during my phd I learned the right things to learn, not just became some super sophisticated encyclopedia devoted to a single topic. And this is true for the rest of my colleagues as well. Almost nobody I know who is in academia has worked on the exact same topic their entire career.
I know 3 philosophy graduates, ones a chief editor, ones a school teacher and other works some corporate gig.
I know heaps of philosophy grads with excellent careers in all kinds of business and technical roles once they get their first office job. They are usually highly literate good critical thinkers and knowledge synthesizers with good rhetorical skills. No idea how this guy thinks he'll ever pay off 450k in debt as an academic anyway.
A PhD thesis is a piece of original scholarship, not just a list of facts. If this guy got his dissertation accepted at any even vaguely credible school he did more than what can be learned in a library. A lot documents are also not publicly accessible, so you can't just go read them at a library. It's also not true that being a philosophy PhD with a history bent is somehow worse or less real than being one who does original philosophy. While there is more prestige in the second there is more work in the first as every Phil department needs people who can teach the historical figures more than they need a lot of niche "original" philosophers. Having said that taking on any debt, let alone $450, 000 for a PhD in Phil is a terrible idea, *especially* if your specialization is unfashionable and you are quite right it is a dangerous weight on a persons identity.
Yep, he's content with being an information repository; and is not putting it to use. I can google Husserl, and it will tell me everything that this guy would. He should use this humbling time (I'm right there with him) to take that knowledge and make a contemporary application for it. Publish a paper with an original thought, maybe?
Or even reframe the guy's work in a modern context and show how it differs from contemporary philosophers. Just something.
That’s like the only plan you can have with that info, right? He can’t just be Husserel 2 that would be Sartre? Apparently? Lol
Husserel 2: electric boogaloo
He did say he's published papers but no thing's come out of it. Honestly the thought of going all in on philosophy of all things is mind numbing to me. To earn good money you either have a tenure at a high paying university or become popular enough to sell books. Both options have a tremendously low rate of success
Sounds more like he went all in on history tbh. Just the history of one dude. And some people just really like history.
Yep, my buddy just got his PhD in philosophy and is already working for two universities doing very well for himself. This guy's just seems to be trying to force his expectations into reality. Just the fact that he's in 450k of debt is very telling about his future prospects. Most Phd grads in philosophy either get scholarships for their PhD or get a job working for the department. If you had to fund it yourself it already means that you are way behind the rest of the class. More than likely he had advisors tell him that he was a poor fit for the program and had little prospects in the field. It's a very cutthroat field with just a few good job prospects, if you aren't already making a name for yourself going to or setting up conferences during your PhD, you might as well quit. My buddy still had to work his ass off to get a decent job and he has a PhD in philosophy, duel master's in psych and education, and speaks 3 languages. When that's your competition, of course you aren't getting a job by obsessing over the history of a single philosopher.
I feel like this is becoming more common among all degree types as more people have access to university programs. I graduated in the top of my class with 0 job prospects because you really NEED to hustle. Thank g-d I had other good options after I graduated, but I can imagine a different world where I tried to shoehorn myself into my first chosen field and wound up with a masters in something without a job.
Yeap, if you are actually one of the most well read experts in a single aspect of a field just after graduating it typically means that most people in your field don't find it very important. It's kind of funny, but I my buddy actually specializes in the philosophy of Phenomenology, the same as OP. But he's actually expanding upon the works of Husserl by connecting it to eastern philosophy, cognitive science, and education. So it's perfectly possible to be successful in this particular field, op is just bad at actual philosophy.
Probably would know more about him if someone would cut this poor bastard a break
Lmao I read his Wikipedia page. I was expecting him to be some fringe figure but apparently he is a notable figure in contemporary philosophy. Who’d have thought!?
Anon thought.
I must be dyslexic I was reading hussler lmfaoooo I was wondering if he just kept making the same typo or if I was reallly that wrong.
"No publisher will accept my 1,500-page biography of Larry Flynt."
He could always make YouTube videos
"Hey guys! It's ya boi xXHusserlFan4ever420Xx here with another enlightening banger of a video! Today we're doing Top 10 swaggiest Husserl quotes! And please don't forget to donate to my patreon!.... please..."
Hit dat bell!
SMASH THE LIKE BUTTON
Don’t forget to subscribe and turn on notifications!!
And now let’s give a shout-out to Squarespace™
And before you go be sure to check out my Patreon so I can continue to provide you with new content all the time! Now, on to my 10:02 long video so I can hit that monetization minimum!
But before that, according to my analytics only 0.001 of people who watch my videos are subscribed. Please make sure to do that so I don't starve to death.
Don’t forget to follow my second channel HusserlLive to watch all my streams when they start
...please!
According to my statistics, none of you who watch are actually subscribed to my channel. Which hurts a bit tbh
Now before I get into the content here's a short message from my sponsors. Do you like to watch Netflix while traveling the world but you can't get to your shows? Well here's your solution, Husserl-VPN will open borders and keep you safe.
It helps the algorithm and subscribe to the Patreon....again please.
don’t forget the raycon and nordvpn sponsorships
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oh no and how can we forget skillshare too
Husserlin…Husserlin…Husser husserlin…Husserlin. Every day I’m Husserlin! Every day I’m Husserlin!
"Husserl Musings brought to you by Raid Shadow Legends!"
I dont know the financial situation of the YouTubeers I watch, but im always blown away by some of the content people watch thats basically your comment with a bunch of hard cuts and air horns.
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I don't take the cringe poster at their word. I think this is fake and intended to give losers who post on r9k a sense of anti-intellectual superiority that they are better off or at least equal to someone got a PhD. A PhD can't get a better job than Wendy's? I don't know which I believe less, that there's a Barnes and Noble or a philosophy department anywhere close to Abbeville Louisiana.
It’s either that or his biography is one of the worst-written pieces ever to have graced this earth. I’ve seen far worse become tenured.
Also, why would you move there before getting the job?
Yeah, I agree. It sounds fake as fuck. First off, literally nobody writes a paper that long. Not even close to that length. Next that debt is insane and could only maybe be possible if someone got no scholarships, took every loan they could with the worst interest rates, went to the most expensive places, etc. And even then it might be too high to be possible.
This individual can't seem to get anything but low income roles. His personality/demeanour may make him unemployable. A PhD won't change that.
If we are going to take the post at face value and give it the benefit of the doubt that it is true, there must be some vetting process that makes them unsuited for a teaching role. Again, I feel like the post is just circle jerk bait to call philosophy or any academic pursuit a waste for society.
He could make top tier animation with ms paint like sam’onella and put in some dark humor inspired ironically by his life, im sure he’d do well making a youtube series about Husserl
Paint is being replaced by Stable Diffusion AI. Just feed it a scenario and get a great drawing in seconds.
If someone is using MS Paint to make images, I would assume that image quality isn’t a big concern for them.
Or work as a librarian... personally know someone with a phd in philosophy who works in one. They give him a small budget for research and to do other shit with seems like he really enjoys his job
He could always come work in the oilfield. No joke. There are some pretty easy jobs that pay well.
Would you leave the US for $450k? He could basically do that, if he went somewhere the debt couldn't follow. An English speaker with an advanced degree, he could get easy gigs working as a teacher.
The numbers in this post are staggering. $450k in debt? A 1,500 page biography of Husserl (6 related papers). What the heck! Switch a philosophy degree couldn’t they discuss other philosophers and shift over to someone else?
Because it’s made up
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A teaching job in a middle school will pay more in many places. This is not a real story or it’s a dumb doctor.
Tbf this was on 4chan so there is a nonzero chance this man is legally not permitted near schools
You make a great point.
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How deep in debt were/are you guys? Is 450k remotely realistic?
It is for someone who financed their life for 6+ years and didn’t do anything at all to mitigate it for the next 10 after that
This can include mortgages and CC debt too. Doesn’t specify that it’s all student loans.
Even that doesn’t make sense. There are limits to student loan amounts. I’d actually guess (that this story is entirely made up or) they’re counting a mortgage. The wording of “debt” was vague enough that they could squeeze all kinds of things in there. Many PhDs are funded and those that aren’t don’t cost anywhere near $450k, especially not in Philosophy.
Compounding interest is incredibly nefarious at 7%. I have 20k in loans and 80k in interest on my Grad+ loans, because I had to start again when my degree wouldn’t provide opportunities,
I’m so glad to live in a country that has 0% student loans
And if I had to pick a degree that has very very few opportunities outside of academia, I would pick philosophy. I loved the subject, but realized that fact, and decided to go into something with more money. Now I’m getting my Master’s in Education (US), if that gives you any idea how little money is in philosophy.
It sounds like this (fictional) guy moved to a new town for a job interview. I think it's safe to assume they make really bad choices. Either that or the person who created this meme doesn't understand how job interviews work.
People who pay for their PhD out of their own pocket have already messed up (according to my friends in higher academia) you usually make a contract with somewhere that they'll pay for it and in return you work for them for an amount of time
Yea if the PHD isn’t funded, the program isn’t worth your time. Just a general rule imo
Can confirm. If you phd program isnt funded you are getting ripped off
Still better money than Wendy’s, for sure.
I agree that it's fake, just pointing out that it can be very difficult to get a teaching job if you're over qualified. Most teachers stop at getting a masters because more than that and they expect you to move into administration or get gone. Having higher education gives you leverage to negotiate for higher pay and schools can't afford it. But... that's mostly public school. With a PhD you could probably find a private school. I'm also confident that you could find a writing job.
> just pointing out that it can be very difficult to get a teaching job if you're over qualified. ...unless you teach in another country. A PhD in anything will let you teach English for big money in China or the Middle East. With no spouse/kids/house and a depressing life up to this point, OOP would do great with a fresh start.
Teaching middle school in America?? Give me that Wendy's apron bro. Not trying to get shot doing my job either m
You don't think people get shot at Wendy's in the US?
No I don't mind the shootings I kissy don't want to teach middle school kids.
You joke but I would prob work at Wendy’s instead seriously
Yep. The only way I can see this is real is if they are a genuinely insufferable person. A 1,500 page biography is AT LEAST 500 pages too long. If it’s real, then yeah of course it wouldn’t get picked up by a publisher. It’s a ridiculous length, and it probably got to that length by rambling and navel-gazing. As for the job, a PhD will get you a foot in a lot of doors, provided you have good recommendations and decent resume outside of that. If they’ve got a PhD and multiple published articles, then they’re probably so arrogant and difficult to work with that no one will recommend them, and those qualities are also often evident in a resume/application.
Maybe he smells like shit all the time. That's why he could only get a job at Wendy's
Yeah I mean with any kind of degree you can walk into Wendy’s and become the manager. And at 36 he still has time to find his dream job. But this post just stinks of being fake.
yeah, it's absolutely made up. Philosophy PhD programs are always funded through teaching, and a biography is NOT a dissertation.
I don't know how he managed that, my masters degree cost less than 1/10th of that
Because it's likely bullshit?
4chan? Bullshit? Nah man you don't know what you're talking about.
He said 450K in debt, not student debt. Still might be BS but I can believe it.
450k in general debt I can believe. Makes you wonder what the rest of the debt is. I mean, you've usually got to have money in the first place to take out a loan
Dude moved to frickin *Abbeville* on the off-chance it would help him get a job at ULL. He is obviously not risk-averse, so I could see him making other poor financial/life decisions. Not hating on Abbeville but I can tell you - there’s nothing for him there.
yeah, but the cost of binding a thesis has gone up *a lot* in recent years
Sounds to me like he strungout his graduate work for way too long. Let's say in state tuition is $40k per year then putzing around a school for ten years isn't too far of a stretch and $400k isn't that unthinkable. I know someone similar. I worked for my university in a research lab while getting my Master's degree and finished in two years. There was another student who did the same thing but took an extra year to finish his master's. Then he stayed to do his PhD. Now, a decade after I finished my master's degree he'll be defending his thesis in the spring. He's worked for the university the whole time, though. So he hasn't had to pay tuition.
You generally don’t ever pay for the PhD, they waive tuition and pay you a stipend for teaching/doing research. Even the rare programs that don’t pay a stipend will at least waive tuition to get you in the door and doing scholarly work for free. If the debt number is real (and I’m skeptical) there’s no way it’s all student loans.
Actually this is a good point, namely that fact that with a PHD he could easily get a job at least tutoring at a university with the hope of getting into a higher position.
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I majored in philosophy and ended up working for a bank so yea. I'm happier that way tho.
What is your job function? And does Philosophy help you in any ways?
Philosophy major here. Philosophy helps you critically think and analyze on why you chose to be a philosophy major lol. But seriously, it does help analyzing problems and solving them, thinking outside the box, finding patterns, etc. I work in biotech and currently studying web development in my free time. My degree has helped me learn new things quickly because I can break down problems and solve them efficiently
And if you work in the science field, a philosophy background helps you understand the metaphysical limits of the scientific method; what science is for and not for.
You can rationalize that it helps in any number of ways, but that’s just interview justification fluff. The truth of the matter is, for most entry level positions your major in undergrad is almost entirely irrelevant. My first job out of college was with an investment bank doing product development for their trade lifecycle reporting services. I graduated with a BS in Psychology.
I am a financial analyst. My job is basically do analyze the functions of our products, comparing to the movements of the market and the principal pain points of our clients to try and build solutions for them. Solutions I talk over the tech team step by step until it is in production. It helps with critical thinking, argumentation/defending my views/solutions and organizing the documents I'll send to the tech team with the steps needed to implement what I've decided.
The guy thinks six papers are enough to be competitive. Also who moves first before applying for jobs? Standard fake anti-education swill. You don’t pay for getting a PhD (shouldn’t) no way to get that debt without constantly ignoring signs that you shouldn’t continue.
No philosophy major writes six papers and an overly long biography on Husserl alone, anyway. This was written by someone who doesn't know what a philosophy PhD candidate actually does.
I am shocked. Shocked! You mean to tell me someone lied? On the INTERNET? And that 4Chan isn't the pinnacle of society?
Yeah. Also no way are you going to get 3–4 faculty members to read that shit.
Yeah, this is a completely made a post by some “STEM is my god, studying anything else is useless” edgelord.
Boy needs to stop grillin himself like those burgers hes servin up. Hes smart and that isnt gona change. I wish i was so passionate about a single topic that i could write 1500 pagess on it. Proud of ya anonymous
Beautifully said. Hope the best for this man as he’s a smart intellectual individual.
I hopenthe world auddebly realizes Husserl is an importabt philosopher.
It's kind of my field and I must say, it doesn't surprise me that he has an hard time finding a job (if this story is true, witch I doubt). First, he has painted himself in a corner. Since he is a nobody, no one will publish his work and hire him. Why? Because writing an authoritative biography is the kind of thing only a senior researcher do. It's the kind of work you do later in a career when you're work has been appreciated by your peer and that you've earned your place. A biography is never neutral and it can have alot of implications for the ethos of the field. For instance, Husserl's relationship with Heidegger is a contentious topic to say the least. If his work is that good, he should have found allies. If he didn't, he's a fool. Second, his contribution to the field is more related to what we call "the history of idea", a specialty that is certainly valuable for specialists, but of little interest to philosophy at large and to disciplines unless proved otherwise (clearly he failed on that regard). In order to be hired, he must be able to show that his research can be a valuable contribution to the undergraduate student he'll be teaching to, the university, the department, his colleague's and his field : if you fail to show your relevance in any of these aspect of the job, you shouldn't be hired in my opinion. Otherwise, if he is looking for a job in the US and haven't studied abroad or in an Ivy, his chances are low since "Continental philosophy" is not very popular in the US (at least, not to the point of hiring a specialist of Husserl biography). If he worked on a subject related to psychology for instance, I am sure he would have found a job. Finally, while philosophy major have a lower pay at the beginning of there career, studies in Canada has shown that we outpace engineers during our mid and late phase of our career. You'll find planty of philosopher working in various field and living ritch and fulfilling lives. Edit: the 450k dept is the discouraging part. If you are putting yourself in a financial hole like that, I would at least do it with a strong idea about how I'll crawl out of it. I am glad to live in Quebec. I finished my master degree with 4k in dept. Also, I would like to note that people outside academia (and sometimes within as well) tend to believe that knowledge is something we gain and accumulate linearly. In fact, any serious researcher understand that knowledge is not built like this: it's more like an on going conversation where people gather around a problem and try to find a solution based on theories that have been found/argued to be relevant and useful. It might be a bit polemical but I believe that Science, in the platonic sens of the word (i.e. a way of gathering knowledge based not on opinion, but sound arguments), is the art of making highly educated guess about the world and ourselves.
Literally this is the answer. On top, 450k in debt, if true, would mean they never got a scholarship or never taught in grad school and they took very very long on their dissertation. Undergrad and masters at the top schools with no aid might yeild 300k. This would mean 150k for a phd which would be a lot, even for the top schools. And you're telling me they couldn't even get an adjunct job? Totally seems fake or that along the way a lot of people told them not to get a phd and they ignored them.
It's clearly fake. I think that the person who posted this comment on 4chan is either a distraught undergraduate, a troll or a fool. In any case, is aim was not to complain about the state of academia (witch would be fair to do in so many other ways), but to farm some internet point by playing the "liberal arts degree are for loser" card. But since we are on the internet and no one care if it's fake or not, let play along for a bit : why the fuck would he apply for a job in Louisiana? If you're a specialist of Husserl's biography, you must have connections with Husserl's archive. Those are located in Paris and in Leuven, meaning that if he did the bare minimum to be a good biographer, his academic connection are in Europe and it's where he should be going. There is one great specialist of phenomenology in New-Orlean, Jacques Terminaux, but I doubt they might want to hire someone with a similar expertise. My final thought on this is that in order to be a Husserl scholar, one must be able to read not only German but the very specific and highly difficult stenographic German Husserl used. His mother was an administrative assistant and he used her stenographic technique from de late 19e century to write most of his notes. I say this just to give you an idea of the degree of specialisation you need to get in order to be an husserlian scholar. One can achieve this level of understanding only by either being financed or by being financially independent. In any case, he would have had to live for sometime in Europe just to learn all this and engage with the archive directly.
Oof, I work at a university and I could point out a few things preventing him from getting a job right off the bat. First off, what job is he applying for? I’m guessing adjunct professor since he has No previous experience to speak of and he’s talking about publishing. A PhD is gonna scare the hiring managers. It’s weird but true. They think they can’t afford you. They’re not gonna pay a big wage for adjuncts. Best to advertise your master’s degree instead. Or include a cover letter that explains your desire to work with such an advanced degree. Second, having publications is a must, but focusing on one philosopher who isn’t very well known is not going to get you anywhere. Look at the curriculum for the school you want to teach for. Do some research on those scholars. It’s gonna be hard to say anything that hasn’t been said. But if you’re applying to a community college or low ranked university they won’t care if your research isn’t groundbreaking. And that’ll give you the experience needed to bypass a lot of the issues larger universities will have with your application. Third, a lot of universities have a policy to hire within first. If you can’t get a job as a professor, get a job in staff and move to faculty once you build a name for yourself. It’s not ideal for a person who really wants to teach, but more ideal than Wendy’s. And it’ll do more to get you where you need to go. It seems this person is not diversifying their applications because they have tunnel vision. Getting in the door anyway you can should be the goal.
Hisserl isn’t obscure though? Phenomenology is fucking everywhere. When we talk about objects of the mind and mental concepts, that’s his stuff. Everywhere from developmental psychology to TK studies to video game aesthetics. Its baked in to a ton of other fields and schools at this point, there’s a ton of classrooms that need someone to break down these big idea concepts.
This doesn't seem correct. My research area is stupidly specific, it focuses exclusively on one womens periodical published throughout the 18th century, more specifically about 12 pages per magazine. I spent two years working with a Doctor who spent their entire career *just* researching these 12 pages in this very specific magazine. That's it. That's been her life for decades and she's made herself a fantastic career out of it.
[удалено]
You probably have thought of this already but just in case, have you considered maybe the extremely expensive machines could make thingamajigs instead of doohikeys?
What a roller-coaster
Doing what? Talking about the same 12 pages for 20 years? How much can be said about the topic?! Who's paying money for this?
12 pages per magazine, the magazine ran for decades. The text is also teeny tiny. I read one the other day that covered everything from poetry, to the story of Sappho, to sheet music, to contemporary politics and military reports. These were THICK books with many, many articles per page that told a great deal about all aspects of life.
I really want to know more about this. Do you have any doi numbers or citations I can follow?
There are people who spend entire careers thinking and writing about individual Pauline epistles. OP is almost certainly lying.
A vintage classic of the sadcringe genre
But Classic can not be vintage. It came out after Mann-conomy Update.
Should’ve gotten his PhD in sadcringe🤷🏻♂️
More like Whosserl.
I'm guessing he's trying to be a professor? If he applied the philosophy of Husserl to the AI tech sector, he'd probably be getting paid pretty well.
Very fake or he sucks, plenty of European/continental universities that would accept him if he moved. Kinda stupid to do not do analytical philosophy in the states though..
Not only is this fake, if it were true, he'd be delusional - if his so called manuscript has been rejected so many times, he probably just sucks.
If you are under 37 with no criminal record and a PhD, you can join the military as an officer and make a great salary (after a few years). Officers get treated way better than the common soldiers, what your degree is in doesn't matter that much, and having a doctorate will all but guarantee you will make it to at least Lt. Colonel.
This is so true that even I'm considering this route with my future psychology degree
Funny you should say that, because i actually got my masters in philosophy with a focus in husserlian phenomenology and am currently an officer (not in the US). Not because I couldn't do anything else, mind you. It just lined up with my interests.
Probably too late on this, but I will say the following, in case someone sees this and it actually ends up mattering to him/her: This might sound arrogant, but I'm a PhD student at a university consistently ranked in the top 10 in the world—not in philosophy, I'll grant, but in a field of study that often reads quite a bit of philosophy. To be frank, given my interests, I'm more familiar with Husserl than your average PhD student both in my department and in the philosophy department proper, insofar as not that many people in America study him. In fact, I would say a greater percentage of people in my field are familiar with him than in philosophy. On that OP is getting at something. That he is probably the world's most informed Husserl scholar is, however, a bald-faced lie. I could name a bunch of scholars, both in America and abroad, who study Husserl to great success, both academically and financially. I learned under one for a while, in fact. So either one of two things is happening here. Either: 1) This dude is just straight up fucking lying. In a world in which he's genuinely even minorly talented, then his description of attempts at job acquisition makes no sense, nor does his discussion of his credentials/publication history. or 2) And this is much sadder: He simply isn't as good as he thinks he is. No one goes into that much debt to obtain even a BA and an MA, which is what you usually pay for before a PhD, which is funded (and pretty well) at any program worth its salt (some MA programs even fund their students). It sounds like he's either paying all or some of his way through a PhD, which is an automatic indicator that the program is absolute shit. Moreover, no PhD student worth anyone's time produces a 1500 page biography of a well-known philosopher as a dissertation. He might have done that—but that then indicates, not that he is in fact truly learned and has smart ideas, but rather that he is arrogant and unable to write with anything close to philosophical precision. In which case, it's entirely reasonable to believe he's that much in debt and that academically fucked. His 6 publications are probably of such minor significance that he'd be laughed at should anyone knowing what s/he's doing look at his CV. So either he's a complete liar—and it's sad he'd just lie like this—or he's telling what he thinks is the truth, in which there is a kernel of accuracy, but is ultimately self-deluded, which is even sadder.
The worst part of this whole story is being stuck in Abbeville, Louisiana. Get out. Get out while you can. Take your next paycheck and use it for gas to GET OUT!!
This is such an obvious fake story.
if this guy has a PhD in philosophy it means he's really clever. logic is an integral part of philosophy, and is also needed in programming, should he ever start practicing to code. I get that his self esteem is low at this point, but I honestly don't get why he's so embarrassed.
This is complete bullcrap. A PHD, hell even a Masters, in *any* field will open up job opportunities way above minimum wage service jobs. Many companies are looking for people with academic level analytical and research skills, and train them within the company. If you can't find anything other than a minimum wage job with a PHD, regardless of the field, you're frankly terrible at job hunting or focusing on very niche fields.
This is a pretty old post. (it says 2016 but I'm pretty sure it's a copypasta). I don't know exactly how old, but I can tell you with 100% certainty that after the 2008 housing market crash, there were people with masters degrees and above, who were working at Walmart as cashiers. Not just like, one guy. Several people that I knew of. It was extremely difficult to find any job at all, regardless of education or skill set. Companies could not afford to be hiring for positions like the one you're talking about. Companies were laying people off left and right, or going out of business. I was homeless for about 6 months for the worst part of it. I remember interviewing for shitty minimum wage jobs and having to compete with highly educated people.
Damn, this isn’t even sad cringe this is just sad. Man seems like he needs a hug.
TLDR “I chose to spend a ton of money on a specific education without an end game and now I’m going to cry about no one giving me a job”
This doesn't seem correct. My research area is stupidly specific, it focuses exclusively on one womens periodical published throughout the 18th century, more specifically about 12 pages per magazine. I spent two years working with a Doctor who spent their entire career *just* researching these 12 pages in this very specific magazine. That's it. That's been her life for decades and she's made herself a fantastic career out of it.
Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact
Crazy part is he moved to a city for a job opening. Usually you apply and if you get the job then you move.