Building Your Fantasy Philosophy Department Team

It is that time of year again. Ice the beer, call your friends, and set up your big board because fantasy season is beginning. Yes, philosophy fans, it is time to build your department.

To create your fantasy philosophy league, you will need ten colleagues. Before the start of the academic year, arrange a time and a place for your draft. Each player, called a “provost,” begins by coming up with a clever joke name for their department—The Clean Platonists, The Synthetic A Priori Buttkickers, The Heideggerian Brownshirts, The Illogical Positivists, Hegels and Lockes, The Quinean Undetached Rabbit Parts, Buridan’s Asses, etc. Once fully populated with philosophers, these ten departments will form a consortium.

Establish the draft order by having each participant select a unique integer between 1 and 10, then open Walter Kaufmann’s translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to a random page, taking the first ten words on that page and finding for each player the word corresponding to their number. The place in the alphabetic ordering of those words determines each player’s draft position. In case of a tie—say, if two provosts both have the word “the”—then refer to the original German with “das” coming before “der” coming before “die.”

One by one, each provost selects the members of their department, which is comprised of ten philosophers: the tenure-track positions must include an ethicist, an epistemologist, a phenomenologist, a social-political philosopher, an aesthetician, a philosopher of mind/language, a logician, and then three other philosophers of any area of concentration who are listed on their roster as visiting lecturers. (Provosts who are academic philosophers may not draft themselves, even if they try to make a process metaphysics argument that they exist not as a unified object but as a series of time-slices that may be arbitrarily assembled.) The draft order reverses in each subsequent round until every provost has a complete department.

Advanced leagues implement a salary cap, where each provost must remain within the departmental budget when hiring faculty. A philosopher’s draft price is determined by the ranking of their home department in the Philosophical Gourmet’s list multiplied by the number of years the philosopher has been in rank. That salary is multiplied by a factor of 1.5 if the philosopher is in an endowed or named professorship. For emerita, the institution to determine the salary is the higher ranking of the university from which the philosopher retired, or the institution where they spent the most semesters.

These rankings have the advantage of quieting the standard continental objections about this list because they make highly valuable thinkers in the French and German traditions affordable in later rounds for those who know the appropriate names at institutions underappreciated by Analytics.

Once all of the departments in the consortium are filled, the competition begins. Throughout the academic year, provosts collect points for each publication by a member of their department. The value of an article is two times the journal’s impact factor. Points for a book are determined by taking twenty and dividing it by the place of the press on the Leiter Report list of the most prestigious publishers. Papers delivered at an APA, SPEP, PSA, or similar national conference count for a single point. If a provost’s faculty member is the focus of an author-meets-critics panel or is the subject of a Festschrift, that counts for two points.

Before each semester begins, provosts designate one philosopher on their faculty as the “department chair.” Any publication during a chair’s term is worth double points. However, if a philosopher is coming off a sabbatical, their publications count for half the points that would otherwise be awarded.

During the academic year, provosts may alter the membership of their departments, removing a philosopher by “denying them tenure.” In doing so, the released philosopher is then offered to each provost based on the number of points they have at the time, starting with the lowest and moving to the highest. The provost who denied their faculty member tenure selects another thinker from among those not yet in a department within the consortium. Points are awarded only for publications that appear while the philosopher is in the provost’s department.

Provosts may trade faculty members between departments, but in doing so, the acquired faculty member must occupy one of the three visiting positions for four weeks before being able to be moved into one of the standard tenure-track slots fitting their understood areas of concentration.

At the end of the academic year, points are totaled up, and the provost whose department has the most points (the winner) and the fewest points (the loser) are determined. The winning provost then selects their own publication that the losing provost most disagrees with. As a punishment, the loser must then write a guest post for Daily Nous praising its cogency.