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Every time I am approached by a potential MA or PhD student I take it as part of my responsibility to tell them there is no functioning academic job market in Australian philosophy and there hasn’t been one in more than a decade.

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.

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

No, fair question! Peer-reviewed research papers, mostly, though I also produce a lot of media stuff plus submissions to government etc.

thanks. i really hope it doesn't seem like i'm being an arse... i really want to know what does a modern Philosopher actually do

Trust me you’re not the first person to ask :) One way to think of it is that other disciplines open up a bunch of questions they can’t answer themselves. Ethical questions are an obvious one, but also conceptual ones. How do we know the scientific method works for instance? That’s not a scientific

question, because using the scientific method to determine if the scientific method works would be circular. Or computer science can tell us how to make an AI pass a Turing Test, but “is it conscious, then? And what is consciousness?” are philosophical questions.