This series questions and complicates what ‘reporting from abroad’ can mean in a globalised world that faces interconnected and local crises alongside forces grappling with how to liberate our beings from oppressive structures rooted in past and present (neo)colonialism and imperialism. We can take this as a chance to collectively and constructively consider both broader and different conceptions of philosophy than those more widely studied within USA institutions and culture—and the conditions that shape such studies around the globe by APA-related thinkers. We can learn how local institutions and global contexts shape the possibilities of research, speech, and our visions of philosophy.
Meet Peter Adamson:
Professor Peter Adamson is an American who has gone abroad twice over. After getting his degrees at Williams College and the University of Notre Dame, he worked for King’s College London for 12 years and then moved to the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich in 2012. He retains a connection to King’s but the LMU is his main institution. His area of specialism is in ancient and medieval philosophy, mostly on late antiquity (Neoplatonism) and philosophy of the Islamic world. Some readers might have come across his “History of Philosophy without any gaps” project which appears as a weekly podcast and a series of books published by Oxford University Press.
How did you come to be doing research in this location, whether happenstance, long-term goal, or a quick vital decision, for example?
By chance, I have spent about a decade in three different academic worlds—American, British, and German—albeit at different stages of my career. I wound up in London just by the stroke of luck of getting hired at King’s after graduate school. That was very fortunate because the Philosophy Department there was looking for someone whose specialism was late ancient philosophy, and I had just written a PhD thesis on Plotinus and his Arabic reception. Much to the credit of the department at King’s, they were also excited about getting someone who could cover Islamic philosophy. This was back in 2000, before ‘non-western philosophy’ (for lack of a better term) was getting the kind of attention it finally is today—more on this later.
I really enjoyed my years at King’s and still have a fond and close relationship with the philosophers there. But I did have good family reasons for moving to Germany, and Munich in particular, because my wife is from Bavaria. Being able to raise our kids as fully bilingual and in the excellent (and more flexible) German school system was also a strong consideration here. Also, it was easier for me to move to a German institution than it would be for most Americans, since by that time I could already speak German fluently, having learned it from my wife and her family. Moreover, in coming to Munich I was joining the Munich School of Ancient Philosophy (MUSAPh) which was set up by my then-new colleagues Christof Rapp and Oliver Primavesi. We have several dozen people across permanent staff, postdocs, and masters and doctoral students working on a wide array of topics in ancient philosophy: quite an exciting place to be plying my trade. So this move was motivated by a mix of academic and personal factors.
How does being in this location and institution support your research?
I like to say that I have, by sheer good luck, had one version of the ideal academic career: graduate student in the USA, junior faculty in the UK, senior faculty in Germany. In America, I benefited from the relatively long time period and funding available to PhD students. Then in the UK, conditions for young faculty were more favorable than in the USA (though they were probably better twenty years ago than they are now). There was no daunting tenure process as such, just a fairly light-touch period of probation. You just get promoted up the scale once you are able to show sufficient achievements in research, teaching, and administration, so it is more carrot and less stick than in the US. The biggest downside of being in the UK is the heavy burden of administration placed on academics, and junior staff are phased into that in a more or less gentle way, with senior staff taking on the most onerous tasks—or at least that is possible at a big department like King’s.
As for the advantages of being a senior faculty member in Germany, full professors have the opportunity and expectation to build up a whole research group around themselves. I have been fortunate in managing to bring in grant money to support postdocs and PhDs so that I have quite a big group of people to work with. I also got a lot of help from the LMU here as they have an experienced team who advises staff on grant applications.
This is linked to a feature of German academic life which took some getting used to, namely, around professorial chairs as the basic units of administrative and academic life. In a way each philosophy chair is like a small department in its own right—or rather in my case, joining MUSAPh was like becoming part of a ‘department of ancient philosophy.’ This is an intense and specialized research environment, which I have found has been stimulating and productive. But there is another side to that coin. Whereas in London I spoke about philosophy every day with people in all areas across the whole department, in Germany my colleagues are mostly right in my area of specialization. I do try to talk to colleagues who are more outside my area, but it is more of an effort than it would have been at King’s. So it’s been a trade-off of breadth for depth, in terms of my research environment.
How do the institutional structures and daily routines there affect the philosophy you do?
Here at the LMU, we are very free in setting our research agenda and linking it to teaching. This is, in part, because in general German professors have a lot of autonomy (as I say, each chair is practically its own department, by Anglo-American standards) and, in part, because the LMU has such a huge Philosophy faculty, so there is plenty of teaching going on in practically any area you’d care to name. This has given me the chance to explore in my teaching a wide range of texts and themes from not only my main fields of late ancient and Arabic philosophy, but also women in the history of philosophy, Africana philosophy, and Indian philosophy—all of which I taught here after getting interested in these areas through doing my podcast. There’s also been a kind of feedback loop between my institutional teaching, ‘popular philosophy’ activity, and research. I have written several papers, and have some more in the works, on topics I found through doing the podcast.
How do different countries understand and treat your area of specialisation and research topics?
Despite what I was just saying, my impression is that Germany as a whole is a little bit behind the UK and significantly behind the USA in terms of diversifying the philosophical landscape. While it is easy for any professor to offer a course on whatever they want, there is so far not a lot of momentum behind the idea of integrating non-western philosophy, or the history of women in philosophy, into teaching and research. That is beginning to change but, as I say, I think the US is well ahead in terms of thinking about that issue and addressing it, not least by creating college and university posts specifically for non-western philosophy.
And yet, Europe as a whole is much stronger than North America in the area of philosophy in the Islamic world. There are certainly leading specialists in North America, but they are mostly pretty far apart from one another (North America is big!) and we simply have many more total here. I’m guessing that each of the UK, France, and Germany has as many or more people in this field than the USA, with other European countries including Italy, Finland, the Netherlands, and Belgium faring strongly too. It’s an interesting question why this should be, given that there are so few positions that are explicitly for specialists on philosophy in Arabic. I suppose that the main factor is the long history of Islamic studies in Europe: there were already scholars of Islamic philosophy in France and Germany in the nineteenth century, like Ernest Renan and Friederich Dieterici. The exception that proves the rule might be Franz Rosenthal, a German scholar who went to Yale and gave a kickstart to the study of this topic in the USA. Proximity to the Islamic world could also be an important factor; just anecdotally quite a few of my PhDs, postdocs, and visiting researchers are from Iran, Turkey, or the Arab world. Actually, the study of late ancient Platonism, my other main area of interest, is also stronger in Europe, especially in France and the low countries, than it is in North America. So in this respect I’m lucky to have wound up on this side of the Atlantic.
Please describe any difficulties you face or have overcome, any surprises you have encountered.
I think the main difficulty, or at least adjustment, has been to the teaching system here. Again there is a two-sided coin here, which ultimately has to do with money. In Germany tuition is almost free—to attend university you only have to pay a small administrative fee plus, of course, living costs. This is a great social good that every country should imitate. It also means that student-teacher relationships don’t take on the customer-provider aspect that will be very familiar to any academic in the USA, and has become increasingly familiar in the UK since they brought in the high tuition fees over a decade ago. (I already started to see the changes this wrought before leaving the UK in 2012.) The feeling here in Germany is much more that the university is a free public resource, and students can make use of it or not, depending on how engaged they are and whether they’re finding a particular course useful. Students are thus expected to be more self-motivated and autonomous, and those who aren’t can more easily lose touch with the course. As I say, I got my own undergraduate degree at Williams College, a small liberal arts school with a very intense relationship between professors and students, which is about as unlike what I just described as one can imagine. So that has been strange for me to get used to.
Another striking difference at the level of teaching is that there is less expectation of students in terms of showing original thinking in undergraduate work. Back at King’s, we used to assign even first semester students to summarize an argument of Plato and then critique it, whereas here students are more likely to be asked just to summarize it and show mastery of a certain body of secondary literature, weaving all this into a compelling narrative. Not that this is easy to do well, of course, but it can be done without bringing in any of the student’s own views. This is changing slowly as the values of English-speaking analytic philosophy find their way into German philosophical culture, but I still find that here I need to do more work pushing the students to think of their own counterarguments and so on, than I did in London. Not because the students are not capable of it, but just because they don’t necessarily think it is part of the task of writing a philosophy essay.
I’m curious to follow up on the overall educational structure in Germany from elementary to postdoc, research groups, and professorial chairing. Do the stages appear to connect and cultivate certain values throughout or are there disconnects?
In academic life there is always a sort of funneling or selection process from one level to the next. Most Philosophy majors or undergraduates do not go on to study it at the graduate level, not all MA students go on to get their PhD, and not all PhD students get a long-term academic position. It can be a pretty brutal process whereby people are winnowed out. We tell ourselves this is a way of letting only the most talented rise through the ranks; but, as should be clear from my own story, a lot of luck is involved. (Before I got the job at King’s College, I was trying without much success to find work, at least as an adjunct for the coming academic year, because I had failed to get a position on the American job market. I often wonder what would have happened if the King’s position hadn’t come along.) While this much is common to the USA, UK, and Germany, there are definitely cultural differences. It no doubt varies from one department to another, but in my experience there was more expectation in the USA that doctoral students, at least in highly regarded departments, were doing their PhD specifically in order to get an academic job. In Europe, there is more of a culture of getting the degree for its own sake. Some doctoral students are really determined to go on in academia, some are not. Which I think is healthy: why not think that it could be an intrinsically worthwhile enterprise and valuable experience to do a piece of original research, before moving on to do something else, rather than thinking of it only as a means towards employment?
On the other hand, the attitude is surely also connected to the forbidding challenges facing anyone who wants to work their way up through the German system. Once you get the PhD, it is very unusual to walk straight into a permanent job. A standard career trajectory would involve having postdoctoral research positions or positions as an Assistent under a full professor, and these jobs are always for a limited number of years. This progression is relatively smooth, at least if you can get a position as Assistent. For example, usually graduate students here do little or no teaching, less than they would in the USA. As Assistenten, they would have teaching duties but with fewer hours than are required for professors. The progression is less smooth for those who get postdoctoral positions on funded research projects. These are great to have in many ways of course, but they typically don’t involve teaching duties which can lead to a gap on the junior person’s CV. As this shows, it’s important for professors to think about the career development of their assistants and postdocs, so as to give them the best chance of moving on in the field and not getting into an unending series of temporary positions (some do find this to their liking and actively pursue it, but most want to have a permanent post, for obvious reasons). This is all such a major issue in Germany that academic committees often have a representative for the Mittelbau, which means staff members between the student level and professorial level, most of whom have temporary posts. As that suggests, this cohort of staff is recognized to have a distinctive and often rather precarious position in the universities. The introduction of Junior Professorships in Germany has been one initiative launched to open career paths for these colleagues, but I would say there is still a lot to do.
Given what you have shared, what has the process been like from securing funding to selecting topics and researchers for your own group of collaborators? How do the constraints upon and categories used in funding applications affect the research and group proposal?
Funding bodies have a lot of impact on the kind of research that is being done around universities in Germany, and Europe more generally. The search for funding pushes people towards working on projects that are likely to secure it. This means, for instance, gravitating toward projects that involve teamwork, especially across disciplinary boundaries. Also, one is well advised to conceive a project that can pass muster with both expert referees and the general panel of academics that awards the funding, since you need to satisfy both groups. Actually, that is built directly into funding applications for the European Research Council: the application has two parts, one for the general academic reader and one for experts (who are only called in to comment if the general readers like the sound of the idea). There is also an emphasis on things like innovation in research methods and what they call “risk,” meaning that one is pushing at the boundaries of the field in a way that may or may not bear fruit. So it is, by design, hard to get European funding for more traditional, individually-based research projects. A good example (though not one that would really affect me personally) might be a single scholar doing a critical edition of a historical text. This would clearly be a valuable thing to do but doesn’t look particularly risky, innovative, or interdisciplinary. Having said that, there are other funding bodies that are more favorably inclined toward such traditional research, the most impressive example I know of being the “Academies” in Germany that support fundamental, long-term projects that can run for more than a decade.
One downside of the whole research funding system is that academics spend a lot of time preparing and evaluating applications. If the application is unsuccessful (as some of mine have been, inevitably) then the applicant can’t help thinking that the time and energy could have been put into teaching, or indeed into research. Writing a good funding application is as much work as writing an article that could be published in a top blind review journal. Thus, chasing the prize of research money can distract academics from doing research, which is an unfortunate irony, especially when one winds up with nothing to show for it. And, given that the large majority of applications are unsuccessful, we’re talking about a lot of sunk costs here in terms of time and energy. Since this problem is not going away, I think applicants should approach the writing of a grant application as being organically related to their research projects. By catching up on the state of the art, thinking about gaps in the literature they could fill, and so on, they may be preparing themselves for research that could be done even without the funding, if on a smaller scale.
How do you feel, given the experience and structures you’ve described, that you were inspired and supported to pursue your “History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps” podcast, and related books?
Here the most explicit link I could mention would, again, have to do with funding. In the UK there is something called the REF (Research Excellence Framework) which, to make a long story short, is a government-led assessment of research done at British universities, with financial rewards for good performance. One (fairly controversial) aspect of the REF is that departments should show that their work has had “impact” beyond the academic world. For this reason, I always got, and continue to get, support for my podcast project from King’s. Having said that, I certainly did not start my podcast with impact and the REF in mind! It was more like a welcome side-effect. Really the podcast came more out of a personal feeling that I wanted to reach a wider audience and to try to change, if only a little, the way people see the history of philosophy. Typically it is presented as the story of some famous European men who had great ideas, and the story skips over huge chronological periods as it passes from, say, Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas and then Descartes. By contrast, I see the history of philosophy as a rich, more or less continuous narrative that features many more fascinating figures, in many more cultures, than even most academic specialists realize. Hence the podcast’s slogan, “without any gaps,” which I actually stole from my King’s colleague Richard Sorabji. This is not an easy message to get across in specialized research, given that by its nature specialized research is looking at only one part of the history of philosophy. Nor is it easy to get across in university teaching: a semester is only so long, so it is hard to cover more than the supposed “highlights.” So the podcast, with its lack of time constraints, seemed like an ideal vehicle for presenting the history of philosophy as I see it.
Peter Adamson
Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. He is the author of "Al-Kindi" and "Al-Razi" in the series "Great Medieval Thinkers" and has edited or co-edited many books, including "The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy" and “Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays." He is also the host of the History of Philosophy podcast, which appears as a series of books with Oxford University Press.
alicehank winham studied BA Philosophy and Theology at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, where ze is now pursuing an MPhil Buddhist Studies at Lady Margaret Hall through the Faculty of Oriental Studies soon to be renamed the ‘Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.’ Ze focuses on philosophy of logic and language and social epistemology across traditions, including classical Buddhist philosophy and its modern interpreters, feminist philosophy, and the Black Radical Tradition. alicehank is also dedicated to critical pedagogy, philosophies of transformation and liberation, and social and environmental activism, such as through mentoring programmes, publishing journals, and direct action. In philosophy, ze works on expanding our disciplinary and interpretative horizons for a more caring and considered world through oxfordpublicphilosophy.com and Philiminality Oxford. Ze also works to reflect and act upon zer values through Biblionasium, environmental activism, and Lift Economy’s Next Economy MBA.
