My Crystal Ball

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At the end of October, 2015 I made five predictions about “the state of philosophy in ten years.” How was my forecasting?

[“Opus of Time” by Ben Sack]

Let’s take a look.

Below are my predictions, along with my verdict for each, in bold text. (You can check out the original post with its predictions here.)

**1. Philosophy’s popularity as a major will increase. **

False. According to data compiled by Eric Schwitzgebel, while the number of students graduating with undergraduate degrees in philosophy in the US increased year-by-year from 2016 through 2021, it started to decline in 2022.

At the time, I predicted an increase in part because of “economic growth making people more comfortable with a major lacking a clearly-defined career path.” However, I did not at the time predict Donald Trump’s election as president nor the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, two of the most significant socially destabilizing forces of this century.

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.

Mixed. The number of people in the workforce with degrees in philosophy has increased from around 302,000 in 2015 to 362,000 in 2023, according to one source. Many AI and other technology firms are employing or working with people with graduate training in philosophy, and the technology has seemed to bring greater attention to questions of ethics and consciousness. Additionally, the development of AI technology has had some influential business people advising students, as prospective employees, to study philosophy and other humanities disciplines. Yet the extent of these developments is difficult to measure.

Under the same heading I predicted that “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.” This has not happened, though the APA has adjusted its schedule to two in-person meetings and one remote meeting per year.

3. The topic of “women in philosophy” will not be newsworthy.

Mixed. As I noted in a comment on the original post, I got a fair amount of pushback on this prediction, which led me to clarify it. Here’s an excerpt:

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?

There has been a lot of progress. The number of women earning PhDs in philosophy in the US increased by about a third over the decade ending in 2024. During roughly the same time, the share of undergraduate degrees in philosophy earned by women went from around 33% to over 41%. The number of women in faculty positions in philosophy has been increasing, according to US and UK reports (though those reports do not include the past 5 to 7 years). A 2022 study concluded that applicants who are “women have 58 – 114 percent greater odds than men” in finding a permanent academic position in philosophy.

The gender distribution among honors and grants in philosophy does not seem extremely skewed, given the gender make-up of the profession, and at this point, I believe every major award in philosophy has been won by at least one woman (“at least one” is not trivial, taking into account the demographic cohorts of those suitably senior to be considered for what are typically “lifetime” achievement awards).

Along with the rest of society, philosophy went through a “#metoo” period in which several high profile cases of sexual harassment were exposed. The extent to which this and other cultural changes have contributed to a reduction in sexual harassment of women in philosophy is not something about which I have data. Nor do I have data on the prevalence of gender discrimination in philosophy. I invite women to share their impressions of how things have changed in these regards over the past decade.

**4. Those working in academic philosophy will increasingly seek interdisciplinary collaborations with those outside the liberal arts. **

True. At least I think it is. For one thing, the past decade has seen dozens of multi-million-dollar grants for large interdisciplinary projects (funded by the John Templeton Foundation, many European government research councils, and other organizations) and the founding of philosophy-centric interdisciplinary research centers. New interdisciplinary philosophy journals have sprung up, bridging philosophy, the sciences, and other disciplines.

As part of the same prediction, I said that “Disciplinary standards regarding the need for support for empirical claims made in philosophical works will be more stringent.” This strikes me as correct but I’d welcome input from others about their sense of things. Yes, anecdata—ironic here, I know.

5. (a) 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. (b) 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, (c) there will be a higher proportion of philosophers who are theists. (d) This could result in another fracturing of the discipline (along the lines of what happened in the 20th Century with analytic and Continental philosophy).

This was four predictions in one. The results are: (a) **True, (b) Unknown, (c) False, (d) False. **(a) wasn’t much of a prediction, so I’m not going to give myself any credit for that. As for (b), it’s true that atheism is on the rise around the world, and philosophy of religion seems to have broadened its focus a bit beyond questions of theism, yet it’s not at all clear whether fewer atheists have felt the need to go into philosophy to argue about gods. A quick look at PhilPapers suggests that over the past decade we’ve seen a reduction, year-by-year, in the articles that mention “atheism,” but that doesn’t tell us much. Those who work in philosophy of religion: have there been fewer philosophy papers defending atheism over the past decade? (c) According to the 2020 PhilPapers survey, there was a slight swing towards atheism since 2009. I don’t know of any data for the past few years that would indicate a change in that trend. (d) The speculated fracturing has not come to pass. There’s tons of disagreement, but no commonly accepted bright lines have emerged across which people accuse those on the other side of not really doing philosophy.

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As it turn out, I’m not much of a prognosticator. Or at least I wasn’t in 2015. Have the intervening ten years given me more insight into the future? Answering that would seem to involve making a prediction about the future, which I dare not do today, after the above showing (though we did recently speculate about academia ten years in the future). Maybe some other day.

In the meanwhile, your comments—and predictions—are welcome.