A Case For More Collaboration In Philosophy

At the Chronicle.

I think it's probably a bad sign that there's so little collaboration in philosophy.

In my department, incidentally, you only get 1/2 credit for a collaborative paper with respect to tenure and promotion. Or, rather, you get 1/n of a paper credit for it, where n=the number of authors. I don't think that's unfair, and, in fact, I'm partially an architect of that system. But it means that you do have to think hard about collaborating. By the time you get to two or three co-authors, you're really not going to get any appreciable T&P mojo for the thing. So you have to think hard about a project like that. OTOH, in disciplines in which there's a lot of collaporation, people tend to have enormous CVs with enormous numbers of collaborative papers. So it probably all works out to be about the same.

Anyway...we should probably try more of the collaboration thing. In general, if the sciences do something, that's decent evidence that there's something to it.