Recently a student contacted me to ask for advice on becoming a professional academic in the history of philosophy, and I thought others might be interested in the answer, so I promised to write a blog post about it. I hope others will add comments with more ideas and advice!

1. Ideally you should have already studied philosophy at undergraduate level; if you didn't major in it as an undergraduate or have it as your primary subject in the European system, then you will need to do an MA in Philosophy somewhere to “convert” to being a philosopher.

2. Beyond that the most urgent thing is learning languages. Almost every period of the history of philosophy demands a high level of competence in a language other than English (I will assume you know English since you are reading this). So unless you are planning to, say, work on Hume and ignore all the non-English secondary literature on him, get going on some other language immediately. Remember that you will need not only the primary language (e.g. ancient Greek if you are working on Plato) but also modern languages for secondary literature: the more languages you have, the better, but for most periods of history of philosophy French and German are especially important; you cannot do serious work in medieval philosophy for instance without being able to read both of these. You'll need excellent primary language skills to do publishable work on any historical text, and by "excellent" I mean you should be able to read it pretty readily without the help of a translation.

3. Next, where to go to graduate school? One frequently consulted guide to the top departments, including listings by strength, is the Philosophical Gourmet Report. It has its limitations: since I live in Germany the most obvious one to me is that it basically ignores the continental European departments. So you wouldn't know from reading it, to give you a completely unbiased example, that Munich is one of the best places in the world to study ancient philosophy. Another good source to look at is the American Philosophical Association's Guide to Graduate Programs; again, note that this covers USA and Canada only and a lot of the best graduate programs are in the UK or Europe; don't be frightened off by the prospect of doing graduate work in a non Anglophone country, for instance here in Munich many of our grad students write their PhDs in English. By the way, one other point on this: don't take numerical rankings seriously. This includes not only rankings of philosophy programs but also of whole universities - the lists of "20 best universities" in the UK, US, or the world are basically nonsense because it is a pretty arbitrary aggregation of numbers that are very inaccurate measures of anything you'd actually care about. It is to my mind meaningless to say that one philosophy department is ranked 3, and another 6, in general or within any particular field. All you really want to find out is where there are programs that are well-regarded and are especially strong in your likely specalization, and everything else is just noise.

4. How do you know which grad school to go to, apart from the (rather dubious) rankings? Well, even before going to grad school you should have an idea of what you want to specialize in (as already implied by your choice of languages to learn, see above) and you should read around enough to get an idea of who you may want to work with. At this stage it would make sense to think in terms of a broad period/culture, like "early modern" or "Indian", it is too soon to pick a single author to specialize in – see further below on specialization during and after grad school. By the way if you want to be a professional historian of philosophy, the easiest way to do that is to get a PhD in Philosophy. You could also study, say, Classics to work on Plato, Islamic Studies to work on Avicenna, or Indology to work on Buddhism. But generally speaking hiring committees take the PhD label very seriously and philosophy departments very rarely hire people whose PhD is not in philosophy.

5. Make sure to verify, when you are choosing your grad school, that the person/people you want to work with there are actually likely to be there in the coming few years, like, not about to retire or move to another job. Of course no academic can promise that they won't move in the coming few years but it is still ok to ask, politely, whether you can probably expect them to be there (the best way is to emphasize how excited you are to work with this professor and ask in that context).

6. While you are still an undergrad bear in mind you will probably need letters of recommendation and a strong writing sample to get into grad school. Look out for chances to impress your professors, talk to them in their office hours, and put lots of effort into one paper in particular – maybe a term paper you got a good grade on, work on refining it and really showing what you can do. It would be worth showing it to a professor with relevant expertise for advice, even after having it marked.

7. Ok now you are in grad school, congratulations! Now that you’re here, don’t be in any hurry to get finished. In fact, practical considerations aside (like, having money to live on or a family to support), it is almost true to say that the longer you take in grad school, the better. It would totally make sense to do things like taking a year out to go improve your languages: the time you spend in grad school is your chance to build up intellectual capital for the career to come, because once you are an academic you will be dealing with teaching, administrative duties, and pressure to publish quickly. So this is your time to really lay down the basis for what you will do for the rest of your career.

8. Both at this stage and as a young academic, you want to strike a balance between specialism and breadth. Many aspects of contemporary academic life push people towards specialism, but this is not really a way to be a good historian of philosophy (cf several of my “rules for history of philosophy”). So what you want to do is gain a broad understanding of your historical period, which again should be something the size of “ancient philosophy” or “Islamic philosophy”, say. Your attitude should be: anything in that area is of extreme interest to you. Go to talks at your university, or organize talks yourself like by getting students together to invite visiting scholars; read widely, browse in the library and in journals. I have have students tell me they were skipping a visiting talk on, say, Aristotle because their dissertation is on Plato. That is not the right attitude. At the same time, bear in mind that you want to develop a further area of interest that you’d be interested in teaching in but probably not doing research: in North America this is called an “area of competence (AOC)”, whereas your main area of research is your “area of specialization (AOS)”. Having a broad knowledge of your AOS and some knowledge of an AOC means you can teach widely enough to be useful to a department, and also it will benefit your research because it gives you context, ideas for comparison, etc. For a historian of philosophy it is usually a good idea that the AOC is an area of contemporary philosophy: hence if you are working on, say, Kant’s ethics, you might try to become very conversant with Modern or German philosophy and especially all areas of Kant (your AOS) and pretty conversant with modern ethics (your AOC).

9. The flip side is that within your research, as a junior academic you should try to establish yourself as an expert on one very specific thing: for me it was al-Kindi, so I did pretty much all my publishable work in grad school and my first five years of academic on al-Kindi and his circle. He is admittedly fairly obscure but it was a topic I could get known for specializing in, and that helps because people are like “oh Adamson, he is that kid who works on Kindi” or “hm, who works on Kindi? Oh, I guess that Adamson kid.” This is harder to do if you are working on, say, Kant or Aristotle, but nonetheless it is easier to get known in your field by making some topic “yours” and then broadening out as your career progresses (e.g., once you have tenure, in the American system).

10. This goes hand in hand with a more fundamental point: when deciding what to do your dissertation on, thematically speaking less is more. Usually grad students who come to me sketch their idea for a dissertation topic and I tell them to do 20% of what they have in mind as their actual thesis. So in the context we’re discussing here, one philosophical topic in only one text by one author is the norm: obviously there are exceptions (one topic in all of Plato’s early dialogues, or a narrower topic in several authors) but the rule of thumb is to try to do less, but better and more deeply. Incidentally this goes for shorter pieces too like term papers or articles: I sometimes tell my undergrads that if they select one sentence from an author like Aristotle and really explain that sentence in a deep way, that is enough for a 10-15 page paper.

11. At the risk of being discouraging, these days it is getting pretty difficult to get a job out of grad school unless you have at least one publication (which has led to some debate and lament in the field, but it is true and won’t be changing any time soon). Here quality is more important than quantity: one article in a well regarded blind review journal is worth several papers in collected volumes or more obscure sounding places. Also don’t publish anything (even in a relatively obscure place) that isn’t your top-level work: you don’t want to be embarrassed by it later or have members of a hiring committee come across it on the net.

12. Everything I say above is really about the academic world I know, i.e. North America and Europe, and it is geared towards the goal of getting a job in a philosophy department. Of course there are many other ways to contribute to the history of philosophy: academics in other fields do so, non-academics do so, etc. I don't mean to undervalue that in any way, it's just not what this particular advice is aiming to help people achieve.

I think that’s what comes to mind for now but as I say I hope others will add more below!