fragments of consciousness

PhilJobs update

The new PhilJobs website has been progressing in leaps and bounds.  It now has 250 active listings for 315 jobs in philosophy (some listings advertise multiple jobs).  The listings now include both full ads submitted directly by employers and "stubs" for jobs advertised in other venues (such as Jobs for Philosophers) containing the basic information about the positions (institution, position, AOS, AOC, deadline) and links to venues with full information.  As a result the site now has listings for all jobs advertised in the major venues for philosophy jobs.

PhilJobs has also introduced a "My Jobs" feature, where users can "save" some jobs to their personal "My Jobs" page.  Users can also "exclude" other jobs in which they are not interested, so they do not come up in future searches.  We hope that these features are useful for job candidates in keeping track of the jobs in which they are most interested.

See the PhilJobs FAQ (especially the last four items there) for more details on these new features.

PhilJobs

The PhilPapers team is announcing a new service: PhilJobs, an online database of philosophy job advertisements.  The database is to include philosophy job ads of all sorts and from all over the world, and will be searchable in many different ways.  We hope that it provides a useful service both for people advertising philosophy jobs and especially for philosophy job candidates.

PhilJobs aims to provide an international year-round service for philosophy job advertisements.  It builds in features such as email alerts to let users know when relevant jobs are advertised.  It also provides integration with PhilPapers: for example, jobs will be advertised on PhilPapers where appropriate, and users can login under their PhilPapers account and to exploit saved searches and the like that way.

As we explain in the FAQ, PhilJobs is not intended to undercut the APA's Jobs for Philosophers or any other national association's job service.  We see this as an international project: the PhilJobs directors have appointments in the US, the UK, and Australia, and the project is run out of the Institute of Philosophy in London.  PhilJobs also offers a numbers of features that the APA does not, including notably an online searchable database.

We've been working on this service for a few months now (Brian Leiter foreshadowed it here).  A couple of weeks ago, another service with a fairly similar aim, Phylo Jobs, was announced.  This took us by surprise, but in the end we've decided to launch on our planned schedule.  The people at Phylo have done a very nice job.  PhilJobs offers a few different features, including saved searches, email alerts, and integration with PhilPapers.  It will also offer many new features in the future, including the possibility of online job submissions.  So we'll just see where things go from here.

The chief architect of the PhilJobs project has been David Bourget, working along with his team at the newly formed Centre for Computing and Philosophy, of which he is director.  (As with PhilPapers, David and I are co-directors of PhilJobs, but I've played a much smaller role on this project.)  We're all lucky to have someone with David's vision and his combined talents for software design and for philosophy doing this sort of work for the philosophy community.  The new Centre is part of the University of London's Institute of Philosophy, directed by Barry Smith.  We're grateful to the Institute and to Barry for infrastructure and support.

For now, we encourage anyone advertising a philosophy job to submit it to PhilJobs (submission is easy and free), and we encourage anyone looking for a job in philosophy to try out the search mechanisms on the site.  Any feedback (either via the site or via the PhilJobs discussion forum on PhilPapers) will be very welcome.