ABSTRACT
Teachers in most British universities divide with some composure into Lecturers, Senior Lecturers, Readers, and Professors. This, as you have heard, is the hierarchy of our working lives. We also fall into other categories of a sort, these being a matter of judgements on us by our fellow workers in the world of our particular subject, say philosophy. Except in short and less composed periods of personal preoccupation with the hierarchy, most of us care more about these judgements of our fellow workers, expressed by commission or omission in articles in journals, books, book reviews, letters of reference, ordinary correspondence, and by word of mouth as gossip. It is not just promotion we worry about. This is so despite the fact that the judgements on us in our worlds can hardly be said to make for a second hierarchy.
