The National Humanities Center (NHC) recently announced its fellows for the 2026-27 academic year, and two philosophers are among them.
They are S.M. Love (Georgia State University) for the project, “Freedom from the Market: A Kantian Account of Socioeconomic Rights,” and James Van Cleve (University of Southern California) for the project, “Roderick Chisholm and Philosophy in America, 1950–2000.”
There were 29 fellows in all. One might notice from looking at the whole list of them that 8 of the fellows are in history departments. Why just 2 philosophers but 8 historians? Why do philosophers seem underrepresented among interdisciplinary or general humanities fellowships and grants?
The answer is that philosophers tend toward disciplinary insularity. This may be changing somewhat (see, for example, this) but I suspect it will remain an obstacle for a while.
Rather than provide a definition of “disciplinary insularity”, what I offer below is some advice, based on my experiences working on interdisciplinary evaluation panels and my conversations with grant and fellowship administrators over the years, on how philosophers can try to overcome it or counter its effects when applying for humanities fellowships and grants (HFGs). Others are welcome to add their own advice in the comments.
1. Apply
You cannot win if you do not play. Philosophers appear to apply for HFGs at a lower rate than scholars in other disciplines. If you look at the recent NHC fellows, it would be a mistake to infer from the fact that 4 times more historians than philosophers were selected that any given philosopher applicant is at a disadvantage, or that the organization is somehow biased against philosophers. I am reliably informed that many, many more historians tend to apply for these kinds of fellowships and grants than philosophers.
2. Explain Importance & Interestingness
Sometimes, the importance and interestingness of a philosophical question or thesis or figure, while quite clear to people trained in philosophy, is not at all apparent to those not trained in philosophy, and for fellowships like these, the majority of your application’s evaluators, particularly at the final stages, will not be philosophers. So you need to make the case for the importance and interestingness of your project to non-philosophers. One thing to note about this is that the standards philosophers tend to have for whether a philosophical question is interesting are much lower than the standards non-philosophers tend to have. After all, philosophers are disposed to find philosophy interesting, and for us, it may be that all you need to do is show us that there is an actual philosophical question there, and we’ll say, “Huh. Yeah, that’s something interesting to figure out.” But this is not true for others, especially when those others are deciding to whom to award fellowships and funding.
Because projects vary so widely, it is difficult to give detailed advice about how to explain the importance and interestingness of your project to non-philosophers. But one thing I very strongly recommend is having several friends and colleagues in several other disciplines review your project description, and then have conversations with them in which you try to determine whether they understood the project, whether they were able to see why it would be important or interesting to philosophers, whether they themselves found it important or interesting, and what your project reminded them of in their home disciplines (related to #6 and #7, below).
3. Don’t Oversimplify
Dumbing things down may seem like a natural way to explain your project to non-experts, but it is a mistake to do that. The evaluators are fellow scholars all trained to be able to decipher difficult texts: they can understand explanations that are not oversimplified, provided that they’re clear and contextualized. Oversimplified explanations of projects risk coming off as explanations of overly simplistic projects.
4. Real Stories Are Helpful
HFG evaluators are people, and people like stories. Some of the strongest applications for HFGs include compelling, if brief, true stories that introduced or illustrated the subject of the applicant’s project. Such stories make things interesting, can demonstrate real-world relevance, and serve an explanatory function at the same time, and they will feel richer for being real. When considered alongside real world examples, the thinness of philosophy’s familiar thought experiments, as useful as they may be, becomes more noticeable, and that can bleed into evaluations of the importance of a project.
5. Show Your Project Reaches Beyond Itself
For an HFG, your application may be strengthened if you can show that your project reaches beyond itself, and perhaps beyond philosophy, in its focus or research materials or implications. This not only helps with showing its importance and interestingness, but with explaining its potential synergies. For some HFGs, evaluators may find it relevant to their assessment of your project how (and how much) you might benefit from interacting with scholars outside of your discipline, as well as how (and how much) you might benefit them.
6. Bibliographies Are Important
My impression is that philosophers pay less attention to bibliographies than scholars in other humanities—at their peril. If your project reminds an evaluator of relatively well-known authors or well-studied subjects in their home discipline, they may check your bibliography to see whether you included works by those authors or on those subjects. If you haven’t, there is a risk that you will appear insufficiently prepared to embark on your project, or that your project will appear to be flawed. You cannot count on the evaluator thinking, “this is just how they do things in philosophy” or “I can see why a philosopher would not include this.” So in preparing your application for an HFG, it behooves you to research how a version of your question, or something obviously related to your question, has been treated in other humanities disciplines. Who in other disciplines has written about it? What have their main concerns been? Find that out and then add the appropriate citations to your bibliography.
7. Show Your Project Is a Humanities Project
Sometimes HFG evaluators will ask, “How is this project a project in the humanities?” You should ask that of your project, too. Now you may be thinking, “(1) This is a philosophy project. (2) Philosophy is a discipline in the humanities. (3) Therefore, this is a humanities project.” That is not a helpful way of taking up this question. For one thing, you cannot assume that evaluators will have an inference like that in mind. For another, premise 2 is questionable: as an organizational claim it’s true but superficial; as a substantive claim, though, its breadth makes it suspect. Philosophers themselves have struggled with philosophy’s place among other disciplines, and one way of interpreting the development of the analytic/Continental division is that it came to be about whether philosophy is more like a humanities discipline or more like the sciences. In any event, sometimes it is not obvious why a project is a humanities project; if you (or one of your colleagues outside of philosophy) think this may be true of your project, you should probably include in your application something that makes it clear how, in its methods and subject matter, your project is a humanities project.
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I hope the foregoing is helpful. Discussion is welcome, as is further advice (especially from others who have served as evaluators or administrators for HFGs).
I have an impression that, within philosophy, large and prominent granting agencies are more likely to fund works in the history of philosophy than in other areas of philosophy. I can only judge this based on awards granted, though, since I don’t have data on the profile of the total set of philosophy proposals (outside of the cycles/cohorts when I have served on a committee that decides such things). But just looking at the results over the years, I’m surprised by the long term trend that, of total awards going to philosophy projects, a disproportionately high number of them seem to be in the history of philosophy. (I do not work in the history of philosophy, so I’ve basically stopped trying to apply for these because of this suspicion.) Justin, do you have the same impression?
If that is right, I wonder if there is a bias toward historical work. Note that this is compatible with there also being something about philosophy proposals that is problematic, such as not submitting a proportionate amount of proposals, etc. So I wonder if humanists in other fields on the award panels are more likely to trust their judgments about the significance of history-of-ideas projects over something in mereology, actualism in ethics, or the many other topics that contemporary (analytic, at least) philosophers work on.
It would be useful to have answers on these questions, but it could also just be that historians of philosophy are the one group of philosophers that tend to apply for these grants at the same rate as humanists in other disciplines.
I agree that it would be interesting to have a better sense of the base rates, but there is also something of a looping effect here. A logician or a metaphysician is less likely to apply in part because they are less likely to win and rationally decide its not worth the effort.
It’s worth contrasting the humanistic bias to the historical with the fact that philosophers of science (and I think especially philosophers of physics) have been pretty successful at getting grants in nonhumanities interdisciplinary contexts (e.g. NSF, Templeton, etc.). I think this tells against the idea that philosophers are simply worse grant writers (as the advice above more or less assumes).
(Maybe I’m just a failure, but) I want to push back on the contrast claimed: that philosophers of science have been “pretty successful at getting grants in nonhumanities interdisciplinary contexts”.
I expect the base rate of attempts to get grants in nonhumanities interdisciplinary contexts is itself considerably *higher* in philosophy of science than the base rate of attempts in philosophy to get grants in humanities contexts **merged with** the attempts in philosophy outside of philosophy of science to get grants in nonhumanities interdisciplinary contexts. And meanwhile, the successes we hear about are few and far between in that larger population.
There’s a relevant discussion in Michele Lamont’s How Professors Think, based on examining the work, and interviewing the members of, committees awarding grants in the humanities and social sciences. She has a brief section on each relevant discipline and, as I recall, the one on philosophy calls it the “problem discipline” because of the difficulties non-philosophical members of the committees have in understanding and assessing philosophy proposals. One of the members interviewed is an unnamed philosopher who makes pertinent comments. Much of what emerges echoes what Justin says above.
I might add, re the high number of history fellows at the NHC: that’s not uncommon. In any year, for example, there are far more Guggenheim Fellowships awarded to historians than to philosophers and also than to people in English departments. I remember reading somewhere (not in Lamont) that, among other virtues, historians are good writers — their research often has a narrative form — and also in broad agreement about methodology, so referees tend to agree on what’s a strong proposal, i.e. there won’t be disagreements as there can be in philosophy. I have to say that the one time I was on an interdisciplinary panel the proposals from historians all looked interesting and worth funding to me.
This is helpful information for applicants. Having both been a fellow at the NHC and been a member of its selection committee one year, I’d like to share a bit about my own experience. The year I was at the NHC, which offers wonderful support to scholars, I would sometimes converse with historians over lunch. What they would ask me was “which philosopher(s) are you working on”? When I would try to explain that I was doing philosophy, not working on a particular philosopher, they really did not seem to understand this and were pretty dismissive. Maybe it was just the particular historians with whom I spoke, but my sense is that academics in other disciplines often really do not understand what we do. The following year, I served on the selection committee. If I recall correctly, I was the sole philosopher on the committee, whereas there were a number of historians and literature professors. Others on the committee found it very difficult to understand any of the philosophers’ projects or why they were of interest, so I had to do a lot of explaining and arguing in support of funding good projects. Regarding “not dumbing it down,” that’s right, but I would advise applicants to explain their project as if they were explaining it to a smart undergraduate–someone with no technical background. Avoid technical terminology and machinery, and if you must use some technical terms, explain them. Use simple examples to help to clarify complicated ideas. Examples can also help to show the importance of and motivation for the project.
This would also explain (if it is really a phenomenon in need of explanation) why history of philosophy proposals succeed disproportionately more than proposals in other areas of philosophy: they’re almost always projects about other figures.
Maybe Justin is right (in part) that the underrepresentation of philosophers among the fellows reflects the underrepresentation of applications from philosophers, but when most of the evaluators are historians and literature professors, is it any surprise that historians and literature professors are overrepresented among the fellows? If philosophers are routinely underrepresented among the evaluators, that seems to be a bias against our discipline.
I was a referee for a research foundation recently, and the call for proposals was open to many disciplines, including philosophers. I was a bit surprised and dismayed at how poorly the philosophers’ proposals were received and assessed by others.
In fact, I do not think the philosophers were very good at making their proposals accessible to referees from other disciplines. But I also thought that the referees from other disciplines were not especially charitable.
This was a two stage vetting process. I was supposed to be involved in both stages but for complicated personal reasons (a huge medical problem), I was only involved in the first stage (though invited to the second). Two of the proposals from philosophers made it to stage II. I was quite confident that at least one would be awarded a grant. In fact neither were.
(one further complication: I did recuse myself from evaluating one of the philosophy proposals because of a perceived conflict of interest).
It depends: There are philosophers who were awarded interdisciplinary fellowships/grants that do not always receive mention in the broader philosophy community/news; they routinely are philosophers of science and inherently interdisciplinary (and thus perhaps overlooked in their profession as philosophers).
Philosophers being overlooked is a genuine concern, of course. Yet, recognition goes both ways.