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Yeah. I wanted to be a history professor. Then I met history professors and found out basically ever elder millennial academic was casual and subsidised their income with Newstart. So I got an email job instead

what do philosophers do as a job, aside from teaching other philosophers that is?

Officially the job is 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% service. In practice, teaching (including admin and grad student supervision) and service (i.e. all the non-teaching admin, meetings etc - but not refereeing, which doesn’t count) tends to constrain research time, but not research obligations.

If you meant “what other jobs do philosophy grads do,” a lot end up in policy and stuff like that. I know at least one person working outside academia whose job title is “philosopher” but that’s kind of uncommon!

whats the output? aside from teaching new philosophers. i'm really not trolling, i really want to know what it's for.

Philosophise?

It's possible to use the ABS census TableBuilder service to check where those with a master or doctoral degree in philosophy as their highest qualification are (were on census night) working.

OK, I did a rough-cut, 1-digit-level ANZSIC industry code extraction from the 2021 census for people with a master or doctoral level degree in philosophy listed as their highest education qualification.

To the accuracy permitted by TableBuilder perturbations, there were 3828 persons in total. The top ANZSIC codes to the nearest whole percent, in order were: Not applicable (i.e., not working) - 35% Education and training - 30% Health Care and Social Assistance - 9%

What about for the love of the game?

Oh they still apply, I just want them to go in clear-eyed and do it for the right reason (which is precisely that)

Excellent. Hate to think your stopping the next Alain de Botton

It's possible we've never had a greater need for philosophy/ers.