Philosophy in 10 Years
Here are five predictions about the state of philosophy in ten years:
1. Philosophy’s popularity as a major will increase. This will be owed in part to the swing of the cultural pendulum, to economic growth making people more comfortable with a major lacking a clearly-defined career path, to efforts by the profession to emphasize the practical value of philosophy, and also to attempts to bring philosophy to previously under-served populations.
2. Philosophy will have an increased presence in the business world—especially moral philosophy, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, philosophy of science, and experimental philosophy—as humans become increasingly served by “intelligent” automated services and goods. Think of the questions arising now—regarding, say, the uses of social media, or the programming of autonomous robots and self-driving cars—applied to all of the things we use. Relatedly, the American Philosophical Association will move from three annual meetings to just two: one focused on academic philosophy and one focused on “philosophy in practice,” aimed to attract philosophers and those doing philosophical work in the worlds of business, technology, medicine, and elsewhere outside academia.
3. The topic of “women in philosophy” will not be newsworthy.
4. Continuing a current trend, those working in academic philosophy will increasingly seek interdisciplinary collaborations with those outside the liberal arts. Disciplinary standards regarding the need for support for empirical claims made in philosophical works will be more stringent.
5. At the same time, philosophy will continue to be a refuge for those who insist that most important philosophical questions are not empirical, and who wish to study those questions. Additionally, atheism will become more commonplace in the broader culture, leading fewer atheists to feel the need to go into philosophy to argue about gods. For these and other reasons, there will be a higher proportion of philosophers who are theists. This could result in another fracturing of the discipline (along the lines of what happened in the 20th Century with analytic and Continental philosophy).
I’ve marked my calendar for October 27, 2025 to look back and see if any of these are right.
(Related: The Chronicle of Higher Education looks back to the predictions it made in 2005 about the state of higher education.)
(image: detail of “A Single Note” by Ben Sack)
1. Major popularity. I hope you are right Justin, though it may be that our visibility will be so low that we won’t get our old momentum back.
2. The Business World. I hope the business world will listen. In order to have much of an effect, we will have to be producing more work for business people to read.
3. I don’t see any sign that women in philosophy will stop being an issue. We just aren’t attracting that many female students. We’re working to diversity our faculty through affirmative action, but somehow we’ve got to do a better job of getting undergraduate women interested in philosophy.
4. Interdisciplinary work. I agree with the prediction.
5. Atheists. I don’t believe that a lower proportion of philosophers will be atheists. As atheism grows more popular in general, I expect it to grow more popular in philosophy too.
Hi Justin,
Can you find a way to operationalize these predictions, so that we could accurately measure whether they’ve come true or not? If you can, then, depending on how exactly you measure them, I might want to bet you that you’re incorrect.
I predict I will not have time to operationalize these predictions in any serious way. (Please don’t ask me to operationalize that prediction.) But if others care to help…
For a start, for #1 our raw materials can be the number of philosophy majors in the U.S. — around 20,500, according to the 2014 American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Departmental Survey and the number of current college students, around 20,200,000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
For #2, perhaps we could use as data the number of people at Fortune 500 companies who do philosophical work, or work for which specifically philosophical training would be clearly advantageous. I don’t believe such data exists, but perhaps something like it could be collected.
For #3, we’d have to look at some set of mentions of women in philosophy in the media (including blogs) today, and compare that with said mentions in the media of a decade hence.
Regarding interdisciplinarity (#4), again, data from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences might be helpful. This chart shows the percentage of philosophy dissertations that involve work in disciplines besides philosophy.
As for #5, we have the PhilPapers survey from several years back. Perhaps future surveys could be conducted.
6. Comic strips will have become a respected medium for doing serious philosophical work, thanks in no small part to the pioneering efforts of the Daily Nous Cartoonists.
Hi Justin, this is interesting. I wish you were right about 3, but like Nonny Mouse I am not so sure. Also, a related question is about other underrepresented groups, and I’m afraid it will take a lot more than 10 years to truly diversify philosophy, both with regard to people and topics. But as I say “philosophy”, and I read your predictions, I am struck by how it just means “philosophy in the Anglophone” world and context. I don’t know enough about professional philosophy in Africa, or Asia or Latin America, but as to Europe, prediction 5 strikes me as not too relevant. Atheism is much less of an issue in Europe than in it is in North America. I’m ready to bet that, while there are more avowed atheists among philosophers in Europe too, there is more diversity with regard to religiosity (although I imagine most religious people are Christian, with some exceptions in Germany and France).
I agree that these predictions apply largely to “philosophy in the Anglophone,” as you put it. Thank you for highlighting that. I also agree that it will take more than 10 years “to truly diversify philosophy”; happily, I did not predict anything incompatible with that.
I agree with Sara–I think it will take a lot more than 10 years to diversify philosophy, including to bring it to the point where the discipline’s shabby treatment of women isn’t an issue. The tenured professors of ten years from now will almost all be people who are already in the discipline, since even in the best case (finishing grad school quickly, tenure-track job right away) someone who is just starting grad school will usually take ten years or more to get tenure. I hope those of us who are in the discipline already will be able to change enough so that the treatment of women in philosophy is no longer newsworthy before we all retire, but I think it’s going to take more than ten years to completely solve the problem.
2025…If man is still aliiiiiive!
Any predictions re: citations counts of dead philosophers? I’m bullish on Dewey.
Ooooh, that’s a great question. I agree on Dewey. I would also bet on philosophers outside the Western canon, as venturing beyond the traditional boundaries becomes more professionally acceptable.
I don’t see why the theist/nontheist distinction is in the same ballpark as the analytic/Continental distinction. These cases just look totally different to me. Can you say a little more on why the scenario you predict would have any interesting tendency to fracture the philosophical community?
M, see my comment below at 1:43pm
I predict that in 10 years, less than 30% of college philosophy courses will be taught by people with tenure track positions.
10 years is awfully optimistic for 3.
The only one of those predictions I would judge to be a ‘good bet’ would be #4 on interdisciplinary cooperation. I would love to believe 1 is correct, but I see no reason to believe it. Philosophy and the Humanities are struggling and both institutional funding and cultural pressures are against us.
2. Strikes me as a coin toss. We might have a slight increase, so more than zero presence in business is possible as some of the smarter businesses recognize applications of philosophy.
3. Women will continue to be an issue in philosophy. I would bet against you. There aren’t enough women in graduate school to eliminate the issue concerning the number of women faculty within the decade. So, even if there is a sharp increase among women going into philosophy (which I don’t see much evidence of), it still wouldn’t end the issue that quickly.
5. Might be correct, more theists might enter philosophy but not for these reasons. As cultural pressure increases against traditional religion, smarter theists may realize that the way to defend their faith isn’t going to some dogmatic seminary but entering philosophy. But, I would not expect a split in philosophy over it. Lots of competing worldviews have always co existed in philosophy.
I would be astonished if a single one of these predictions were borne out, but #5 in particular seems to me very strange. In my experience of philosophers, religiosity is on the rise. I even know young feminists who, now that the most egregious political injustices have been curbed, are looking for finer notions of, e.g., freedom and respect, notions which have been extensively theorised in religious traditions (and in quasi-religious traditions like Hegelianism), and who (the philosophers) are open to religion in a way that would have astonished me – and them! – only five years ago.
The a/theism distinction also strikes me as unhelpful because what seems particularly urgently valuable about religion at the moment is how well it can act, and has been acting, as a bulwark against neo-liberalism and its tendency to quantify the meaning out of things. The resistance to this on the political (and atheist) Left strikes me as deeply parallel to religious resistance to it. If these two strands of resistance can be united, their philosophical/spiritual resources marshalled, then there could be a rise in religiosity among the anti-neo-liberal Left and so in the broader culture, in a way that sidesteps questions about whether there is a God – a question which is meaningless when understood in the way that atheists typically currently understand it. If religion is seen as a way of resisting neo-liberalism through its rich philosophical resources, then this could lead to an increase in philosophy students.
To say more about #5: the prediction was “there will be a higher proportion of philosophers who are theists.” I added that one upshot of this *could* be “another fracturing of the discipline.” I mention this as a possible outcome, not as a confident prediction or a desirable outcome. It’s a possible outcome worth noting, I think, because:
(a) people enjoy conflict and the opportunity to define themselves in opposition to others they think are wrongheaded, philosophers are people, and philosophers are losing one mode of oppositional identification (as the analytic – Continental distinction continues to lose significance). So they may glom onto the theism/atheism dispute as a substitute.
(b) one’s stance on theistic matters is closer to one’s self-understanding (of one’s identity) than one’s position on many other theoretical questions in philosophy. People tend to take disagreements over such matters more personally, and when that happens, disagreement turns into conflict.
(c) Some important ways of disagreeing over the existence of deities and other supernatural entities involve fundamental methodological differences about philosophy (not just differences over conclusions). This is one way in which some disagreements over theism are similar to disagreements between analytic and Continental philosophy.
What kind of utopia are you anticipating living in? All indicators are pointing to increasing global unrest with large numbers of displaced peoples moving across national boundaries due to the impacts of global warming and localised social and economic upheavals from sectarian and global violence. Economic and political power is consolidating in fewer and fewer hands due to the corporatisation of the planet, facilitated by global trade deals which circumvent sovereign courts. Those fewer hands control the MSM which in turn ensures that the population focus on external fears rather than fearing the very people who are creating said global unrest and the disenfranchisement of the population. Where will philosophy fit in such a scenario? People will be struggling to survive let alone survive let alone thrive.
I predict that soon, very soon, The Feminists will finally be revealed as the self serving, all powerful puppet masters we have always known them to be. After that: all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
Plum, if I were going to show my hand, I’d wait more than ten years to do it.
I think (1) may depend more on the willingness of government/political parties (on the right, in particular) to “black box” issues of higher-education funding – ie, the humanities does /not/ benefit from intense scrutiny by the general public. This is what has been happening in Australia since Brenda Nelson took over the Education portfolio. Nelson basically allowed himself to be pushed around by right-wing media shock jocks, Andrew Bolt in particular, who deliberately targeted humanities applications made to the Australian Research Council. The humanities are an easy target for this kind of “common sense” anti-intellectualism and tax payer reservations about wasted dollars on parasitic dilettantes. (Good article on it here: https://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-gideon-haigh-nelson-touch-research-funding-new-censorship-214).
You can pump up the idea of outreach programs all you want, but at the end of the day, I think philosophy is always going to be a hard sell to the general public. The best thing we can hope for is that we get a political status quo where all sides of politics agree to not draw undue attention to the issue, while at the same time selling higher education reform/contribution in terms of scientific progress, ie, magic cancer curing pills etc. Much depends on whether those who can deliver what the government wants, ie the scientists, want to throw us under a bus or not. Whining and yelling at the sciences will probably just accelerate the demise of the humanities. One question is whether the attitude towards the humanities held by Sokal and his ilk still have a grip on the imagination of most scientists, particularly the generation that now find themselves in high-level administrative positions? If that’s still an issue then it would seem that an overt science/humanities gap will need to be repaired if things are going to pick up for disciplines like philosophy. I think Science Communication is the discipline to watch, insofar as it promises a vision of the sciences and humanities working in synergy and is well-positioned to advise governments on how to sell research policy to the public.
I’m getting some pushback on #3, the prediction regarding the status of women in philosophy, here and on Twitter and even offline. So first, I’m not saying that philosophy in 10 years will be a utopia. Nor am I saying that there aren’t serious problems today. Nor am I talking about other groups who have been treated inequitably.
What I’m saying is that a lot of what the woman’s movement in philosophy is after—for fairness when it comes to inclusion of women, recognition and valuing of their work, and their holding positions of responsibility in the profession, and against gender bias (explicit and implicit) and sexual harassment and assault—will be achieved. Does this mean that in ten years, say, there won’t be any episodes of sexual harassment? No. But it does mean that any such instances of sexual harassment will not be reasonably thought of as symptomatic of a widespread problem in the discipline.
Is this optimistic? Yes. Is it unreasonably optimistic? I don’t think so. I realize it’s provocative but who wants a list of boring predictions?
Here are a couple of reasons to think the prediction is reasonable:
(a) Social change happens slowly, until it happens so fast you can hardly believe it. That is, it can be a long slog begun by brave pioneers, carried on by hard working and dedicated people following in their footsteps, who are eventually joined by more and more people inhabiting the new social spaces that the pioneers and their followers opened up. And then enough is in place for quick and noticeable and significant change to happen. I think we are close to, or perhaps even at the beginning, of that significant change.
(b) The build-up for the kind of social change under discussion has been happening for a while and has accelerated lately. Compare the discipline today to the discipline 15 years ago. Today, there are more women philosophers, there are more women philosophers in positions of power in the profession, and, I would guess, there is less ghettoization (self- or other-imposed) of women in a small number of specializations. Today, there is more awareness of and open discussion of sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. Some sexual harassers are being held accountable for their actions, despite their fame and the lustre they lend their home institutions—a new development. There are various institutional structures in place to support the professional development of women philosophers. Lots of people’s attitudes have changed. In important ways, there has already been significant progress in a short amount of time.
“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.” –Noam Chomsky
My predictions:
1. Existential Comics will be a regular feature in the JAPA in order to bolster dues-paying membership (and it will succeed in doing so).
2. Philosophy of humor/satire will become the #2 AOS (and explains #1 above) just after neuro-political philosophy and X-Phi ethics (tied for #1).
3. The Walmart Chair of Rhetorical EconoPhilosophy at UA-Fayetteville will become the most sought-after position in the discipline (4.2 million annual salary, just ahead of the Target Chair of Moroeconomics at UM–Twin Cities 3.9 million).
4. Dissertations assembled from AIditor(c) that takes random bits of data from net sources and produces, under some guidance from the owner of the app (at least 42 guidance points required), an intelligible dissertation, will be accepted by UA-Fayetteville and UM–Twin cities for the PhD in humanities. The PhD in philosophy at UM will require additional rigor from being further processed by an I-Logic (Apple tm) module (open source alternatives not acceptable by UM contract) with only 2 formal deviations allowed, but 42 informal deviations at maximum.
5. DN receives one of the very first E-Pulitzer nominations in that year, only to be beat out by the Existential Comics feature of the JAPA.
Because i am a pessimist, i have a somewhat more glum vision of the future:
1. Philosophy will not exist as an independent department in the majority of non-R1 institutions; it will have been subsumed in mixed departments like “Philosophy and Religion” or “Liberal Studies”
2. New PhDs in philosophy will not receive tenure because tenure will no longer exist.
3. Academic publishers will cave to market demands and no longer publish most philosophy monographs, particularly those that used to be dissertations
4. All philosophy journals of any repute and interest will have switched to open-access online versions.
5. There will be fewer PhDs produced, and most of them will work in non-academic jobs that do not likely call for a PhD as a qualification.
6. There will be no more Leiter reports or rankings to rankle us. (maybe i’m not a pessimist after all).
” At the same time, philosophy will continue to be a refuge for those who insist that most important philosophical questions are not empirical, and who wish to study those questions. Additionally, atheism will become more commonplace in the broader culture, leading fewer atheists to feel the need to go into philosophy to argue about gods. For these and other reasons, there will be a higher proportion of philosophers who are theists. This could result in another fracturing of the discipline”
I think this has already happened except for the “fracturing of the discipline” part–as I see it, the discipline is already fractured in deeper ways (metaphysics, epistemology, language vs ethics, philosophy of science, political philosophy, cognitive stuff, etc.).
I think these are pretty good predictions. But I think without 2 & 4 you don’t get 1, and if you don’t get 1 then you probably don’t get 3. In other words, if philosophy doesn’t reach out for collaboration with other disciplines and seek more practical connections with the world at large it will not increase in popularity, and if it does not increase its appeal to those it views as “other,” universities will stop funding it. Though I suppose in this case 3 might still be a good bet; not because women have gained some parity, but because they will have long since given up trying to save philosophy from itself.