Philosophy & Public Affairs, the highly regarded philosophy journal whose future was put in doubt when all of its editors and editorial board resigned en masse this past spring to form a new journal, has a new editorial team.
The new editor-in-chief of Philosophy & Public Affairs is Jason Brennan (McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University). The journal’s associate editors are Christopher Freiman (Chambers College of Business, West Virginia University) and David Lefkowitz (University of Richmond).
The journal’s editorial board (which Brennan expects to grow) is currently: Cristina Bicchieri (University of Pennsylvania), Emanuela Ceva (University of Geneva), Daniel Jacobson (University of Colorado), Matthew Kramer (Cambridge University), Kimberly Krawiec (University of Virginia School of Law), Jeffrey Moriarty (Bentley University), and Christopher Heath Wellman (Washington University in St. Louis).
The previous editorial team at Philosophy & Public Affairs, which is published by Wiley, resigned in May, stating that “scholarly journals—including our own—serve important purposes, and that these purposes are not well-served by commercial publishing.” They then launched Free & Equal: a Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs, a diamond open-access journal published by Open Library of Humanities, and began accepting submissions last month.
Professor Brennan passed along the new mission statement for Philosophy & Public Affairs:
Philosophy & Public Affairs publishes the best philosophical work that engages with matters of public concern. Since 1972, Philosophy & Public Affairs has published pathbreaking scholarship that has reshaped philosophical debates for decades to come. Continuing this tradition, the journal seeks papers that are bold, daring, and risk-taking. Philosophy & Public Affairs prizes papers that seek to change paradigms over papers that make minor moves in long debates. It seeks to avoid esoteric and scholastic papers in favor of accessible and engaging papers about topics that matter to non-specialists.
The journal welcomes submissions from philosophers, legal scholars, political scientists, economists, and sociologists. It welcomes papers on problems requiring empirical or legal analysis, provided those papers also rigorously defend a normative position.
All papers submitted to Philosophy & Public Affairs are blinded to editors. Papers that pass initial inspection undergo triple-blind review. The journal values viewpoint and ideological diversity; no preference will be given to papers that affirm editors’ political or moral commitments. The journal aims to provide a forum in which researchers with different perspectives can bring their distinctive methods to bear on problems that concern everyone.
The editorial staff retains complete autonomy from Wiley in determining which and how many papers to publish. Commercial considerations have no bearing on the decisions of the editorial staff. This editorial autonomy is protected by contract.
That last paragraph about editorial autonomy is of particular interest given that pressure from Wiley on journal editors to increase publication rates was an issue in the publisher’s 2023 firing of Robert Goodin from the Journal of Political Philosophy, whose editorial team subsequently left to found the new journal, Political Philosophy. At the time, Anna Stilz (Berkeley), then editor-in-chief of Philosophy & Public Affairs, noted similar pressure was being applied to her journal. When Wiley fired Goodin, over 1000 scholars working in political philosophy and related areas pledged to not work with or for, or submit to, the Journal of Political Philosophy. The Journal of Political Philosophy has had no editorial team for months and appears moribund.
Many people working in political philosophy and political theory expected a similar fate to befall Philosophy & Public Affairs, and will find this turn of events somewhat surprising.
I asked Professor Brennan about his motivation for taking up the position of editor-in-chief of Philosophy & Public Affairs, noting that it could be seen by some as antagonistic. He said:
This move will upset some people, I presume, but I’m not trying to antagonize anyone. If I were, I would say so proudly. What I saw was an opportunity to rescue a journal in trouble. We have guaranteed autonomy, and we can now help ensure the journal returns to its original form, publishing exciting work on issues of public concern.
To me, this seems analogous to what happens at times in the guitar industry. A legacy company has internal conflicts and disputes between management, shareholders, and staff. People leave. But the brand still has value. When that happens, new people often come in, take over the brand, fix the problems, and then try make the brand even better. Often they succeed. As for the former board’s new journal Free & Equal, I wish it all the best. Philosophy is a field with unusually low acceptance rates. We need more good journals of high status, not fewer. The burden young faculty face to building their careers keeps getting harder.
I know some people believe it would be better if, in the long run, all journals followed the Philosopher’s Imprint [open access] model. Perhaps they’re right. But in the short term, the reality remains that many of the top philosophy journals (such as Noûs and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research) are Wiley journals, while the vast majority of our top journals are with Wiley, Taylor and Francis, Brill, Elsevier, Sage, and other private entities. Anyone with a principled stance against publishing with commercial publishers will thereby have to limit themselves to just a few outlets.
The journal will be adding a new category of paper to the types it already considers: public philosophy. Brennan writes:
We are looking for short, accessible papers, which explain a difficult philosophical concept or defend an interesting philosophical claim, but which are aimed at an intelligent lay audience. While our regular articles aim to make novel moves in existing debates or create new debates, the goal of the public philosophy papers is to engage and educate the public in philosophical topics of public concern. Public philosophy papers will still be reviewed, but will face different standards.
The new editorial team at Philosophy & Public Affairs will begin considering submissions immediately. Regarding previously submitted manuscripts, Brennan says that any papers accepted for publication by the previous editorial team but not yet published will be, and papers that received “revise and resubmit” judgments from the prior editors will be treated as such by the new team. He added: “we have a different vision for the scope and priority of the journal than the previous editors. For that reason, we are willing to take a second look at any recently rejected paper.”
UPDATE (10/7/24): Jonathan Quong (Univ. Southern California) contributes to the discussion at Crooked Timber about this news to “clarify a couple of things about the difficulties we (the previous editors of P&PA) had in working with Wiley.”
This is somewhat analogous to newcomers taking over a legacy company. But it also seems highly analogous to breaking the picket line when workers are striking for better conditions for all, undermining the efficacy of everyone else’s efforts, and without the excuse of needing to provide for one’s family. Other editorial boards who are being pressured unreasonably by publishers are going to have a much harder time making a credible threat of leaving (and having the journal be unable to find suitable replacements) to use as leverage against such pressures, and everyone who wants to move to publishing configurations where publishers don’t make such exorbitant profits will find it harder to co-ordinate and assure one another that such attempts will succeed. It is surprising that so many people who work on the importance stable co-operation seem to have chosen the ‘defect’ option.
Are you committed to never publishing any papers in journals run by Elsevier, Sage, or Springer? Or are you too a defector?
I think there’s an important symbolic difference between publishing in a journal whose editors continue to run it, and taking over editorship of a journal whose editors managed to take the collective action of abandoning. I don’t have a good theory of how best to approach collective action problems, or when individual actions should be thought of as helping or harming collective actions, but there are important differences between the cases because at least one step of action really was collectivized in the one case.
It’s an interesting analogy but it breaks down at a few important junctures. For one thing, it seems the new editorial team was able to successfully negotiate precisely what the previous team(s) resigned over. This success creates in fact leverage that other editorial teams can use to their advantage. Second, both teams (at PPA and JPP) had already left and stopped expecting any bargaining outcomes, so filling in the void does not in any way undermine an ongoing bargaining process. I’ll also add that it is a bit harsh to imply that colleagues undertaking a thankless task are scabs, and it is not very cooperative to do so behind a pseudonym.
But is it surprising that libertarians are willing to break picket lines?
Eric – the expected individual costs / collective benefits of the relevant actions don’t seem at all comparable to me. ‘Never defect’ isn’t a reasonable prescription, but ‘Don’t defect first’ usually is.
Nicholas – Being able to threaten to resign and leave the journal without a comparable editorial board seems like a much better position than merely being able to threaten to resign and mildly inconvenience the publishers with the administrative costs of organising a new reputable and willing team.
I agree the analogy breaks down insofar as editors aren’t negotiating for a higher share of the billions in profits from publishers for themselves. But it does contribute to undermining the process that universities are locked into with publishers, and attempts to make more articles open access without spending a fortune – if no reputable editors sign up, then no-one wants to publish there, and universities can stop needing to pay for that journal.
My feeling is that philosophy is unusually well-placed for such attempts, given how integrated our networks are, and we were at an *unusually* good time for co-ordinating given what happened with JPP and the attention the PPA board’s resignation received on DN. The failure here is going to be taken as evidence that attempts in other fields (who lack our advantages) to break out of these bad equilibria will fail, and thus self-fulfillingly contribute to it being the case.
When workers strike, you’re not supposed to buy the products. If you think this is like a strike and you publish in any of these companies journals you a hypocrite and your motives aren’t what you say they are.
The expectation to not buy the products is reasonable because in most markets there’s comparable alternatives available at little cost. You’re not a hypocrite if you expect affluent workers to not work while you still buy food there to survive because it’s the only store available. You are if you expect poor workers to forgo pay while you won’t shop at an available competitor. What matters is whether you’re willing to take on costs and comply with norms comparable to what you expect of others and I wouldn’t have joined the board.
It’s not the only store available.
I don’t know what someone is “supposed” to do. But it seems to me that there is a meaningful sort of coordination involved in boycotting a single targeted brand while continuing to buy other brands made by the same company, and there is a different sort of coordination involved in boycotting an entire company. Given that companies aren’t completely atomized individuals in our larger collective project of markets and society, it seems reasonable to me that sometimes one might target a boycott at some level other than the company level. Though I don’t have a clear idea of when that would be the right or wrong move.
It’s Nicolas, not Nicholas.
I’m not even sure I understand what collective action you think is going on—is there an ongoing strike of philosophers against Wiley? I don’t think there is. Is there a collective attempt to have them stop pressuring editors to accept more papers? Sort of. Didn’t the new team at PPA just secure a contractual obligation not to do that? It seems so.
You’re being very general and vague about what the demands are, who the actors are, and what cooperators and defectors are supposed to do. Conveniently, you’ve exempted yourself from an obligation not to submit to those journals even though there are several alternatives.
I’m a strong supporter of open access so I would have preferred the new editors to launch a separate OA journal, but given that the seats were available, I’d rather they be filled by them, with the contract they secured, than by people who would just have continued business as usual.
Because the journal ‘market’ trades in esteem and rankings, publications in prestigious journals are a scarce commodity and relatively non-fungible with other journals. I agree business as usual would be even worse but that’s not the comparison being made. The analogy was simply that strikes are an attempt to co-ordinate which can be undermined and the problem of how to stop these publishers having so much power and profit is also an important and thorny coordination problem. You may not be aware but it is one that has received a lot of attention in recent years, moreso in the sciences (and which launching a different journal would do nothing to solve). There isn’t an ongoing effort in part because it’s so hard to solve so few have tried. This was a very rare opportunity to demonstrably solve such a problem for one high profile journal, maintaining the momentum for future efforts by others, and given the success the old board had with transitioning all it required was having reputable philosophers *not* sign up to be an editor, which is pretty cost-free and likely to be effective. This is not comparable to the costs a junior member would incur permanently forgoing submitting to all journals housed by such publishers, nor would such an effort have any non-negligible effect. If you think that having more journals out of the hands of rent-seeking publishers isn’t an important enough cause to place demands on well-established academics to simply *do nothing* then I’d like to hear an alternative solution.
“There isn’t an ongoing effort in part because it’s so hard to solve so few have tried. This was a very rare opportunity to demonstrably solve such a problem for one high profile journal”
I agree there may have been a superior solution. But the way you’ve just redescribed the situation makes it even less analogous to strike breaking than it was.
“If you think that having more journals out of the hands of rent-seeking publishers isn’t an important enough cause to place demands on well-established academics to simply *do nothing* then I’d like to hear an alternative solution.”
I think it’s important, but your argument seems to imply that the current boards of other Wiley journals should also resign and launch OA journals. In what sense are the editors of Nous and PPR not undermining the collective effort you have in mind? Granted, the opportunity they have to exert some leverage is less, but it’s not zero. Given how sweeping the problem you’re describing seems to be (and I agree it’s a problem), it seems odd to specifically criticize Brennan et al when many other editors are currently undermining the effort by sticking to the status quo.
I feel like you’re still not quite getitng the nature of the problem – the point isn’t to resign and launch a new journal, it’s to resign and launch a new journal that everyone believes will fulfil the role of the old journal in terms of ranking, reputation, prestige, and desirability of publishing.
The reason the publisher market isn’t like other markets is because you can’t just ‘create’ a reputable journal with sheer effort – because journals want to attract good articles from good writers, and good writers want to publish in good journals (i.e. where all the other good articles are), once they’ve coordinated and everyone agrees a pub in X is ‘worth’ Y an equilibrium develops and it’s from there that the publishers can rent-seek. Any academic who unilaterally tries to improve things pays a very significant cost. The only way to get out of the equilbrium (unless you aim for something like Plan S in the EU which was a massive undertaking) is for almost everyone in the community to agree that the old publisher journal is not reputable and the new OA journal is reputable, which is usually impossible (hence why individual academics can’t be expected to take a principled stand themselves) but is much easier to do when you’ve just had a big public mass resignation and are in an unusually integrated discipline like ours. The other journal boards aren’t destroying this particular rare opportunity by failing to resign in the way that the reputable philosophers filling the empty seats did.
Other journals should absolutely resign and start new journals! But part of the reason they won’t is because they’re understandably worried that the effort to maintain functional continuity will fail and the events here give them more reason to worry.
Analogies don’t need to be perfect, it’s an illustrative comment on a blog. In both picket lines and here you had a coordination problem that could have been solved by simply not crossing the line / not signing up to be an editor, in both cases the people who cross first / sign up first undermine the efficacy of others’ who strike / don’t sign up, and in both cases this seems blameworthy. Except in this case the omission was even easier to make because it didn’t involve forgoing an income.
Have the F&E editors discouraged people from moving to P&PA? Usually, striking workers are trying to bargain for a more favorable outcome at their current workplace, so they discourage other workers from undermining their bargaining power. But the F&E editors resigned from P&PA, so new staff at P&PA wouldn’t affect them.
It’s not about the effect on the editors, it’s about the effect on the collective understanding of what journals (Wiley vs Independent OA) carry what reputation or prestige (elaborated on above). There are also some helpful comments on the crooked timber blog.
I think some numbers from the P&PA website might be helpful here:
An institutional subscription to P&PA in 2024 was $292. It will be $304 in 2025. In 2025, an individual can subscribe to P&PA for $72. For students, the cost will be $35.
In 2024, P&PA published 17 Original Articles. It looks like 14 of them are listed as Open Access. In 2023, the Editor’s note says that PPA published 16 and rejected 395 articles.
These numbers are misleading. Individual libaries can subscribe to up to 100 000 journals. They also usually sign up for packages of journals – publishers often pair less desirable journals with more desireable ones – which gives a discount on the per unit cost but still generates more profit. And as I said above, this is less about the individual costs that come from this one journal and more about how this was a rare opportunity to demonstrate what’s possible for others to emulate.
Still thinking of the picket line analogy…Is the idea here that, like striking workers, the F&E editors should discourage people from working with Brennan et al.? So, on this view, untenured scholars should take a material risk in order to stand in solidarity with some of the highest-status tenured professors in the discipline who are, at least in part, trying to defend their entitlement to publish only 15-20 articles per year?
I never said anyone should refrain from working with the new editors. My argument was that there was an opportunity for change which imposed little costs on anyone which has now been lost. If the picket line has already broken you can’t blame the last worker for going back in, but you can definitely blame the persons who (barring a good excuse) broke it first.
That’s a great editorial team! Looking forward to the new Philosophy & Public Affairs.
I do favor the model where public facing philosophy is behind paywall, and scholastic stuff are open access.
A bunch of libertarians willing to work for a for-profit journal? Shocking!
fwiw here are some papers by David Lefkowitz:
Lefkowitz, David (2005). A Contractualist Defense of Democratic Authority. Ratio Juris 18 (3):346-364.
Lefkowitz, David (2007). On a moral right to civil disobedience. Ethics 117 (2):202-233.
Lefkowitz, David (2018). International Law, Institutional Moral Reasoning, and Secession. Law and Philosophy 37 (4):385-413.
Professor Brennan’s ‘rescue mission ‘ is to be wished well. Too many tumultuous changes are around in national and global geopolitics that are of decided concern. Different scholarly dimension being added may turn a necessity. Secondly the apparent ‘ conquest by AI ‘ appears overwhelming to many ; a serious exploration may throw more light and insights on related anxieties. Considering ‘ earlier submissions ‘ for review is a notable decision that requires appreciation. Prof Murar E Yeolekar.
philosophy & private affairs
This is an exciting move and I applaud Brennan and the editorial team! Brennan’s comment, “Philosophy is a field with unusually low acceptance rates. We need more good journals of high status, not fewer. The burden young faculty face to building their careers keeps getting harder” is exactly right.
I would like to ask all those legitimately criticizing the choice of this new editorial board: setting aside moral concerns about the profits of certain publishing houses, are you comfortable with what are considered “top journals” that may not generate profits but whose editorial board members effectively control the academic labor market in philosophy, determining what is considered worthy of publication?
> are you comfortable with what are considered “top journals” that may not generate profits but whose editorial board members effectively control the academic labor market in philosophy, determining what is considered worthy of publication?
The main issue is that both jobs and reader’s attention are scarce (not in any absolute sense, just in relation to the number of people that want them). The labor market should somehow allocate those scarce jobs, and readers should somehow allocate those scarce eyeballs. Having editorial boards that represent respected judgment within the community helping everyone else choose how best to allocate these things seems better than alternative models I’ve heard people suggest.
I don’t know whether I’m “comfortable” with this, any more than I’m “comfortable” with living in a country with a democratically-elected representative government (and all the associated pathologies).
I’m very willing to investigate alternative institutions that might achieve these purposes better. But without a concrete alternative, I’m not going to advocate that we get rid of this institution. Trying to expand the number of people involved in the decision of which papers get seen by the most people is likely to have some of the same problems as expanding the number of people involved in the decision of how to allocate trillions of dollars in the budget. Some versions of this are likely good ideas, but just overthrowing the existing system without a clear alternative is likely to make things worse.
What does it mean to say that “commercial considerations [shall] have no bearing on the decisions of the editorial staff,” if the editor-in-chief imagines the journal as a “brand” that “still has value”?
Perhaps my difficulty reconciling these two statements is a weakness of my disciplinary training, for I am not a libertarian political philosopher but merely a marxist political theorist.
It value is non-monetary value which is orthogonal to commercial considerations. A lot of its non-monetary value hinges on its having less monetary value than it might otherwise have. This is why the original editorial staff resigned. If it had published more articles like the publisher wanted, the publisher could’ve made more money. But that would have reduced its non-monetary value because that hinges in part on the journal being seen as selective and as a venue that publishes things on the basis of non-monetary concerns. So the old staff resigned, and I guess the new staff would not have agreed to sign on without assurances that commercial considerations would not be brought to bear on editorial decisions.
“I a…merely a marxist political theorist.”
Mistake number 1.
can’t disagree with you there!
I find this sentence very odd:
“What I saw was an opportunity to rescue a journal in trouble.”
The journal is not in trouble. It has just left Wiley and been reconstituted as Free & Equal. What is left behind is just the old name.
The opportunity here was to rescue a *publisher* in trouble, and to do so by appropriating a name that has meant something to philosophers only because of the work of other philosophers over the past five decades.
And this sentence is telling:
“But the brand still has value.”
Regarding the old journal as a marketable brand is exactly the problem here. Dolce & Gabbana is a brand. Buying a Dolce & Gabbana handbag may make you the envy of your friends, but it just means you had money to spend on glitz. It is not something that warrants respect.
If Jason, Christopher, and David wish to edit a top-quality journal with Wiley, all power to them. But that is something they will need to build from scratch. Presuming to act under the discarded banner of a journal with which they have no connection is not so much upsetting as embarrassing.
This is a bit of an odd claim: “It has just left Wiley and been reconstituted as Free & Equal. All that remains is the old name”.
It seems to identify institutions with their members. Which would be paradoxical – as if the question of the actual persistence of the original identity of an entity whose parts change over time were guaranteed on the condition that all its parts remain the same. Like the paradox of the ship of Theseus. If PPA is no longer PPA, then “Free & Equal” is not PPA either
“It seems to identify institutions with their members.”
My claim does not identify the journal with the set of its members. They might have all resigned and formed a ska appreciation society in their spare time instead. That would not have been the journal in another form. Moreover, many of the members were not born when the journal was founded.
My claim does identify the journal with a continuous practice of many decades constituted (at any one time) by a number of philosophers and organized as a venue for publication in political philosophy. That is what we should care about, not the name.
So if your claim is to ‘identify the journal with a continuous practice of many decades, constituted (at any one time) by a number of philosophers and organized as a venue for publication in political philosophy’, then the new PPA is identical tothe old PPA, isn’t it? The only way to falsify this claim would be to deny that the new editorial board includes not ‘a number of philosophers’ but something else.
No. What continues at Wiley is the name. The name is not a continuous practice. A continuous practice is constituted by people. Those people now continue the practice elsewhere. Hence the journal continues elsewhere, under a new name.
But why can only ‘those’ people (from the old editorial board) and not the new ones constitute the same practice? You may say: because they all left together, emptying the practice. And if they had left one at a time, one month apart? Or a week?
These are all very interesting questions for a class on social metaphysics.
I think the natural answer here would depend on whether there was enough overlap between some of the older people staying on and some of the newer people joining, and having some of their intuitive practices preserved across the gap. If they all left one at a time, a month apart, and were replaced immediately on leaving, whether it counts as a continuous practice would depend on how much activity occurs per month, and how much that causes a continuity between the practice before and after the transition.
I’ve we’re talking about a Christmas Party Committee that does nothing at all, except for one week of flurried e-mails and organizational activity on December 10-17, and the ten members of the committee left and were replaced one-by-one from January to October, then this is basically the same as leaving en masse.
But if we’re talking about an assembly line where we manufacture hundreds of widgets per day, and the different people along the line were replaced at one per month, then this is basically perfect continuity.
Journal editor activities are done at a pace between those two (which makes it hard to determine), and are likely less socially structured than either (so that continuity actually is maybe somewhat less important, while preservation of name is somewhat more important).
very burkian. ironic in context since he eschewed theory and accepted the providence of the continuous effort. and @kenny Easwaran recites a bit Burke’s theory of this empirical embrace: “in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.”
So the WWBD question for me is does the PPA fit that model (for that matter does the breakaway effort).
Since I don’t have institutional access to commercial journals, I enjoy open access but I also see that the historic model, if consolidated under a few banners, served quite well to actually pring until the importance of that became more marginal allowing the push for open access.
I trust I have just missed the major articles in the PPA on the morals of proprietary product software vs the right to repair my automobile which, honestly, seems like a much more important question of philosophy.
also, i’m sure i missed the discussion of philosophers who have career difficulty taking up plumbing. of course a certain subtext here is that difficulty in academic career advancement can have ideological rather than skill based thresholds. In that context I think a couple dozen more articles a year with the approach Jason espouses seems refreshing. (full disclosure, were it not for Jason and his colleague Tomasi at Brown, this plumber wouldn’t have read Burke)
As to the action here and it’s analogy to a strike, I can’t help but close with a link to Stanley Fish’s take on academic unions which favored a narrower ambit of unionism:
“in the ‘60s when I was teaching at Berkeley. . . In the wake of the Free Speech Movement, a faculty union had been formed and I had declined to join it. Some members of the steering committee asked me why and I asked them to tell me about the union’s agenda. They answered that the union would (1) work to change America’s foreign policy by fighting militarism, (2) demand that automobiles be banned from the campus and that parking structures be torn down, and (3) speak out strongly in favor of student rights.In response I said (1) that if I were interested in influencing government policy I would vote for certain candidates and contribute to their campaigns, (2) that I loved automobiles and wanted even more places to park mine, and (3) that I didn’t see the point of paying dues to an organization dedicated to the interests of a group of which I was not a member. How about improvements in faculty salaries, better funding for the library, and a reduction in teaching load? You, sir, I was admonished, do not belong in a university. No, they didn’t know what a university was and a lot of people still don’t.”
https://www.chronicle.com/article/save-the-world-on-your-own-time
best,
brian bishop (my nom de plume is not meant as something to hide behind)
don’t see an edit function. noticed i typoed “pring” where I meant “print”, as in the commercial subscription model provided the resources for acutual printing and distribution when hard copy journals were the coin of the realm. that might be obvious in context but might not.
What exactly is “embarrassing”? These objections, such as they are, seem more concerned with prestige and status anxiety (“this guy who wasn’t in the club is now running the club–and using our name!”) than with any substantive objections to the journal’s leadership and vision. Believe it or not, some philosophers care more about publishing great philosophy than petty squabbles about which journal is the *true* PPA and whether the editor is “one of us.”
As I said, I’m very happy for Jason, Chris, and David to form a new journal (even with Wiley, if they wish). And if they were to end up publishing great articles, wonderful.
What is embarrassing is the pretense that what they are now stewarding is already a great journal because it has the same name and publisher as the 1971-2024 venue (i.e., because it is merely a “brand’).
If the motivation here were merely the pure concern for publishing great philosophy, rather than prestige or status anxiety, then why not use a different name? The answer is: “because then people wouldn’t have the mistaken impression that we were continuous with the last five decades of top quality work.”
I’m not seeing what’s “embarrassing” about this. Journals change editors often. PPA itself had three other editors in the last decade. Were those changes embarrassing? (Why didn’t Satz or Stilz change the name?) Sounds like, on your view, what matters is being anointed by the prior editor. If the goal is to preserve status hierarchies and political monoculture, that’s a good rule. If the goal is to publish great and innovative philosophy, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about.
I do not believe that PPA editors ever anointed their successors (and if they did, that would be bad). What is important to me is the continuity of the team over time and its practice of collective decision making.
Your question about Satz and Stilz not changing the name of the journal makes no sense. Satz and Stilz were part of a continuous collective practice that stretches back to 1971. The new group are not.
If the goal had been to publish great philosophy, there would be no need to use the same name. Even as a purely instrumental consideration, I very much expect that many *fewer* people would have turned down the invitation to join the editorial team if a different name had been used instead. That would have clearly signaled that this project was not a vain attempt to appropriate a mantle made significant by the work of other people.
You’ve come up with your own rules for what PPA should and shouldn’t be. That’s fine. I just don’t think it’s embarrassing to disagree with you.
I’m not making rules for anyone—I’m describing something of value about the journal.
Nor am I describing disagreement with me as embarrassing.
This is a misrepresentation. The founders of F&E themselves presented the launch as the creation of a new journal, not the reconstitution of PP&A. Its website states it was created in 2024. Moreover, Justin also presents PP&A under Brennan et al as the continuation of PP&A. The legal entity remains. It makes perfect sense to claim it was ‘in trouble’, where ‘it’ refers to PP&A and not F&E.
I don’t care about the legal entity. I care about the journal as the organized work of philosophers. That practice has moved.
As a new journal.
It is certainly a new journal in many respects. It is not a new journal in the fundamental respect that I regard as valuable.
I think the value of a journal to the community is just as much in the name as in the organized work. The point of a journal is to help us collectively focus our attention on some smaller number of the many thousands of things that people write.
We hope that the name is linked to a good set of practices and organized work that result in the papers that appear under that name being a relatively helpful selection to have made. But breaking the work from the name does make it harder for it to help direct our collective attention. A new practice under the same name, and the old practice under a new name might be able to each collectively create journals that both do this work effectively. But I don’t think one of them has *the* thing that matters.
A journal that changes its name every year while keeping the same editors will have different problems from a journal that keeps its name the same every year while replacing the editors (for instance, a journal of only special issues). The first one will face the problem of getting readers to recognize it as continuing the same practice, while the second one will face the problem of ensuring that there is the same association with quality in each issue so that the name maintains its value.
The considerations you raise are excellent reasons why it is deeply unfortunate for Brennan et al to use the old journal’s name. There is a reason why many of us came to trust (in varying degrees) the old P&PA’s role in collective attention direction. That reason *cannot* transfer to the new team by the magic of nominal continuity. Instead of making things clearer, it just muddies the waters. It is a matter of collective embarrassment that so many of us are pretending otherwise.
I confess I find the determinants of journal prestige to be a bit mysterious. (Editors’ idiosyncratic tastes and judgments exert immense influence over what ends up being published, and yet editorial handovers don’t usually affect perceived prestige at all, let alone prompt declarations that the journal’s reputation will “need to build from scratch”.)
Still, in terms of what I think it makes sense to hope for:
(1) It would be good to have more prestigious journals in the discipline, so that’s some reason to hope that F&E and this new P&PA both prove to be successful and highly-regarded.
(2) I’d love for more journal editorial boards to switch to open access, via mass resignation & reconstitution if necessary, so I hope the continuation of P&PA doesn’t deter or undermine this. I assume that what matters, to that end, is the success of F&A — that in its new form, it proves at least as successful and highly-regarded as it was in its old form. I don’t see why this would rely on the failure of P&PA.
(3) If this pattern ends up repeating elsewhere, and we end up with a doubling of top journals, that seems all to the good? (Though, once we have a sufficient number of good journals to publish all the good work being done, it would be nice if they were all open access. That could eventually require co-ordination against resuscitating for-profit journal brands. But I’m not convinced that we are at that stage yet!)
I don’t think any of this depends upon the metaphysics of journal identity. I think the biggest concern would just be that if prestige is zero-sum, then any commercial journal having it is unfortunate. But I don’t understand prestige well enough to be confident that it is zero-sum in the way that this objection requires.
(If I’m thinking about all this the wrong way, I’d very much welcome polite explanations of how so. It seems an important question for the field to get right.)
Could there be a doubling of top journals? Isn’t “top” relative? At least on some level, prestige would seem to be a zero sum good. I don’t think that creating new journals will mean that it is somehow easier for more people to have top publications or to otherwise build their careers.
I’m sure there are limits, but I don’t know exactly where those limits lie, and I doubt we’re currently at them.
As a thought experiment: suppose that JESP had instead been founded by an exodus of the Ethics editorial board, and the journal Ethics had been reconstituted by the editorial board of our actual JESP. My guess is that that is a world in which the combined prestige of Ethics and JESP is higher than their combined prestige in our world.
If I’m right about that, then this sort of “reconstitution” move could be positive-sum for the discipline. Prestige is weird!
As a utilitarian, do you think we have a duty to /maximise/ prestige 😉 ?
There are no duties, but it would be (in part) best for us to act in such a way that the *best* amount of prestige is realized. (Yes, trivial, I know.)
This is great news! It seems to me just straightforwardly good to have more great journals in these areas rather than fewer, given the publishing/journal crisis and the inadequate number of excellent journals.
And from the contractual provisions with Wiley in this agreement it seems that the walkout of the previous editors and the threat of such walkouts in the future might have provided a useful corrective to some of the troubling tendencies of for-profit publishers.
I usually really like your commentary on issues in the profession (including your critique of the choice of name for the former P&PA).
But on this point I couldn’t disagree more. Journal prestige is a zero-sum game. So is relative publication record. Nobody is helped if we publish more articles, or have more journals that are considered prestigious within the profession. If we somehow tripled the number of articles published in prestigious journals, the expectations for everyone looking to be hired or promoted would simply triple. How would that be better?
(I asked you this question on Twitter a few years ago, and you answered: “why don’t we ask junior folks whether they would like more outlets?”; I don’t know whether they would agree with you or me, but I also don’t think that this affects the quality of either of our arguments)
Incidentally, I think one thing that would help (though only marginally) is if we changed our citation practices to get in line with other disciplines, i.e. if we started citing each other a lot more. Cause that would make us look a bit more impressive in interdisciplinary contexts where deans (in a business school or a PPE department say) will decide for which discipline to approve a new tenure line.
I don’t think journal prestige is strictly zero-sum. (I like RYC’s example above.)
For one thing, although not all the journals can be prestigious, philosophy and particularly ethics/political philosophy could easily handle another 4-5 prestigious journals. Other fields have prestigious journals with acceptance rates much more like 10-15%. Our journals used to have rates in that ballpark, if not considerably higher. That is still highly competitive, with getting a paper there both very difficult (particularly given the quality of the pool) and likely to serve as a strong signal.
Our top journals still have acceptance rates more like 3-5%. That’s ridiculous. That’s one reason that I think journals like Ethics and PPA (previous and new) could easily double their acceptances with no loss to either quality or prestige. An alternative to this is to create another 3 or 4 excellent journals. I’ve often thought that just having a journal that automatically published the papers submitted to Ethics that get rejected at the board vote stage would probably do just as well over a 10 year horizon as Ethics itself in terms of things like citation metrics, impact factors, etc. Honestly, that Ethics Reject journal might do even better…
I also think acceptance rates that low cause other problems. They make many end decisions pretty arbitrary, introducing a lot of luck. Those arbitrary decisions start to make biases more powerful, as they start to be not just to involve much more subjective taste elements as we decide what is *really* interesting and important etc. And, frankly, I think they make it unsurprising when more cronyism or at least the perception of cronyism creeps in. We the gatekeepers are distributing an incredibly scarce resource, there are far more qualified papers than spots, and we want our own (or those kind of on our side, or our friends, or whatever) to flourish despite this scarcity. I’m not saying this happens at a conscious level, though it might. But it must play a role.
It’s a harder question of who is ‘helped’ by this, if the total number of jobs remain the same at the end of the day. It’s not clear to me that even that is the case. I think philosophy applicants for jobs, promotion to tenure, fellowships, etc., often look comparatively worse than people from other fields, because it is so hard to publish. It’s harder for us to get our interesting ideas out and into circulation. This might well decrease demand for philosophers over time. People might be denied tenure and that line not filled. Obviously, the academic labor market is affected by many other forces. But it’s not clear to me that this isn’t at all a factor.
I also am not sure that the expectations for us change that much. Those publishing expectations (for hiring, for promotion) at most schools have remained fairly constant for a while. Maybe the bar has been raised for the very fanciest things, but even that isn’t clear to me.
Anyway, seems like there’s something like intrinsic value in having more interesting philosophy ideas published. It seems like a highly inefficient thing to have people spend 5 years and 10 submissions to get their interesting paper into circulation. Lots of things we might do to address that, but one is certainly to have more excellent, well run journals that publish more work…
I think Alex is right. Here’s a simplistic but somewhat informative way of showing how, even if prestige is zero-sum, it would be possible to double the size of the top tier of journals. Assume that prestige is a function of low acceptance rates. Suppose there are three tier-1 journals that accept 5% of papers. In the next tier there are three other journals that accept 10%. And so on, with, let’s say, five tiers.
Now suppose the tier-1 journals start accepting 10%. The tier-2 journals won’t be forced to accept more papers. Papers will just move up the tiers, and the higher acceptance rate will probably only happen for the lowest tier. So the result would be a top tier that’s doubled in size, and publications at the bottom of the tier system now somewhat devalued (here one could also argue that this effect may be dampened by the now flatter shape of the prestige pyramid).
I think that would be good, because it would mean that a single editorial decision in the top tier would have less weight on the job market and on T&P decisions. I think more diffuse power would have good epistemic effects on the field, for hopefully obvious reasons.
Thanks for the thoughtful responses both of you!
Lots in there and I won’t get to everything. Let me note a few points of agreement and disagreement.
Hi, quick replies:
1) Did anyone claim more top journal spots would produce more jobs? I for sure didn’t. What it would do is increase the number of people (editors) with significant influence on who gets jobs.
2) Not sure. I’m lucky enough that my incentives are to publish more in political science journals, where journals are generally better run (faster etc). The top journals here have slightly higher acceptance rates, but then there are fewer of them and the field is huge. I’m not sure how it would compare to philosophy.
3) Glad we agree.
4) But publishing in the top places would now be easier, so your Utilitas papers could be placed in Ethics or wherever.
5) I see no reason to think there would be more material in print overall. There would be more material in top tier journals. That would be good, partly for the reasons we agree on. But also, do you not regularly see papers in second-tier journals that are as good as the modal top-tier paper?
Ironically, wasn’t the original sticking point that Wiley specifically wanted the journal to publish more papers than the original editors wanted? Wiley wanted to double the number of papers that appear in P&PA. Instead, the editorial board left to create F&E publishing the same old number of papers, while a new editorial board reconstituted a journal under the P&PA name publishing the same old number of papers. The end result is two journals, each with roughly the same prestige as the original, collectively publishing twice as many papers.
There are obviously some important differences between this outcome and the one Wiley was pushing for (likely including very important matters about who is deciding on which twice as many papers are being published, and on what schedule), but the result is remarkably similar.
I wonder if this new editorial team of Philosophy & Public Affairs will use outside reviewers like most journals do – or if the editors simply decide themselves what should be published and what not, like the previous editorial team of the PPA did.
My understanding is that they will use external reviewers.
They will be triple blind
So was the old PPA from 2021 but they did not use external reviewers. Only the editors reviewed the submissions.
It will be external reviewers according to JB.
I am deeply disappointed in this development, to say the least. Just last month, I published a call to action in BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, arguing that we should not support Wiley’s predatory and epistemically corrupt publishing model. Those interested in my argument can find it here: https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/2024/09/19/boycott-predatory-journals-now/
One issue with your complaint is that philosophers are able, and very often do, upload their papers to philpapers, where anyone can access them for free.
I think the music analogy is interesting. Another one that we might consider is the move by Radiohead to go independent. The big publishers provide a service to scholars which is similar to what a music label provides to a musician/band. There are costs and there are benefits to signing with a label, just as there are costs and benefits to publishing with a big publishing house. If you are a scholar with enough clout, why not “go independent” by publishing your best stuff on blogs, and then, when you have enough material, in books published by non-academic publishers? Who really cares if your new theory of X was published in a book by some small unheard of publisher? The one bringing the prestige to the product is YOU, not the often unnamed book editor who gave your manuscript a chance, and certainly not the company they work for.
In my own case, as a Canadian, my entire graduate education has been publicly funded, even if not always very well. This confers upon me a duty, I believe, to ensure that my work is accessible to those tax payers who funded that work. Big academic publishers do not make scholar’s work readily accessible to the general tax paying public. Therefore, I have a moral duty to not publish through big academic publishers.
This may mean that I do not get published in the best journals. That may in turn result in my not getting a job at the best institutions. Maybe I’ll end up flipping burgers for your kids. But at least I won’t be unethical. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
Is there evidence that tax payers are wanting to read the work of philosophers? I find that hard to believe! (I suppose a couple are. But probably very few overall.) And if they are, philosophers can put their work up for free, e.g. on PhilPapers.
I suspect that relatively few tax payers require the services of publicly funded neurosurgeons, but those services should still be available to all who pay those taxes.
As for PhilPapers, yes this is one of the few shining beacons of equitable and accessible scholarship. But even here, things aren’t perfect.
What the big publishers and the universities have all figured out how to do is make academia into a business. The logical progression is for scholars to follow suit. What that looks like, I’m not sure, but the present model is unsustainable.
Why think the public is paying for access to the results of scholarship? Surely part of what they are paying for is access to the discipline of philosophy, by way of having the option to enroll in courses and engage with philosophers in any number of venues. Of course only a small number will take advantage of this access, but it’s there for almost anyone who wants it. So too are preprints of the articles we publish. If someone really wants to read my dense and technical epistemology papers, they can just email me.
I support open access for many of the obvious reasons, but this idea that one has a duty to the public to make the end results of the scholarship free seems dubious.
Unfortunately, graduate level education in Canada, especially in philosophy programs, is decidedly not equitable. Unless one receives a substantive scholarship, such as SSHRC, or significant funding from one’s supervisor (both of which relatively rare), the only way that one can afford to attend such a program is to be independently wealthy. This is because we do not even receive enough funding to meet the most conservative estimates of the cost of living in the cities we must live in.
Going the other way, though, it seems to me that the burden of proof is actually upon those who deny that the tax payer ought to have reasonable access to the end results of those processes which they have bankrolled. I can maybe see how the average citizen ought not to be able to see a security report generated by a publicly funded intelligence agency. But why should the public not be able to have ready access to a dense epistemic paper if they have essentially already paid for it?
When a big reputable journal, managed by a hugely profitable publishing company, just had its entire editorial staff resign, who then built an alternative journal, it seems like a good time to negotiate with that company a different economic model, for instance pay for the editor, editorial staff, and stipends for reviewers. What a great opportunity for changing the financial relationship between academics and the publishing companies they work for. I have no idea whether Jason did or did not do or consider this, but I think it might be a good path in the future.
One justification is to increase the numbers of good platforms for early careers to publish. But early careers, like myself, may worry that publishing here would be perceived as crossing the picket line, and then adversely affecting one’s prospects of getting jobs at certain desirable places. (The perception is not wholly determined by whether it is indeed crossing the picket line.)
I think some people will think of it as crossing a picket line, or at least expressing a lack of solidarity with the former editorial team. Others will think of it as unwitting participation in a vanity project or a grotesque attempt to reanimate a corpse. I would regard it as reflective of either a poor understanding of what makes a journal a top place to publish or ignorance about the abrupt discontinuity between the 1971-2024 journal and the entity that has the legal right to use its name.
How about we take it for what it is – as a publication by someone who is trying to do their best as an early career philosopher; and who, most likely, published there because this was the only journal that did not reject them? Wild, I know.
Oh sure. A publication is a publication, and if it’s good, that’s good. The question was about how one would regard publishing in Brennan’s P&PA in particular. That aspect of it would reflect only what I said.
It’s triple-blind, remember? To characterize that as “Brennan’s” as if it will become a personal fiefdom is bizarre.
triple blind doesn’t mean anything about how heavy a hand an editor has in, well, editing. It should mean he mostly doesn’t know whose paper is whose, but that’s very different from editorial control over content etc. (fwiw I think editorial control is good, but I don’t think “triple blind” does much to avoid “fiefdom”–the issues seem orthogonal to me, mostly).
Is this how you will read the CVs of candidates who apply to your department with post 2024 PP&A pubs? If so maybe prospective candidates would benefit from knowing who SCM stands for (some of us know; I suppose most don’t). It seems unfair to penalize ECRs who don’t share your conception of a good journal.
This is a tendentious response to what I wrote.
I will not penalize anyone for publishing in Brennan’s P&PA, if that is what they see fit to do, much as I will regard the desire to publish there *in particular* as reflective of the poor understanding or ignorance I mention. Lots of people—especially juniors—have mistaken beliefs about where, what, and how to publish, I don’t hold that against them at all. What I will not do, however, is regard a publication in Brennan’s P&PA as prestigious simply in virtue of the prior history of the journal by that name. That would be absurd. But this entire enterprise is predicated on exactly that absurdity.
(I’ve linked to my department website in case anyone feels the need to know who I am.)
“I will regard the desire to publish there *in particular* as reflective of the poor understanding or ignorance I mention”
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You shouldn’t do that.
If the desire to publish there *in particular* is predicated on the assumption that it is a top journal, then it surely does reflect either the poor understanding or ignorance I mention, and it is nonsense to suggest one should pretend otherwise.
You shouldn’t try to decipher people’s mental states and make judgments based on your interpretation when reading a CV.
You seem *really* keen on the idea that I will be unfair to candidates in my department’s hiring practices.
What I have said is that I will regard the desire to publish in Brennan’s P&PA in particular as reflective of poor understanding or ignorance. What if a candidate publishes there because they randomly selected a list of journals and it was the first -place the paper was accepted? Well then … that wouldn’t reflect the desire in question, would it?
For some reason, you seem to be imagining me petulantly tossing out the CVs of people who disagree with me about this matter. I have no idea why.
You should re-read the comment to which you’re responding to understand where one might get the profoundly mistaken impression that you will think less well of someone for publishing there. The question was in fact about how ECR’s CVs would be perceived. Not desires, which no one should care about either by the way.
The issue the comment raised about people’s perceptions of publications in the new P&PA is obviously not confined to how people might interpret CVs when hiring.
Surely not. But the comment said:
“early careers, like myself, may worry that publishing here would be perceived as crossing the picket line, and then adversely affecting one’s prospects of getting jobs at certain desirable places”
One can be forgiven for interpreting this as worrying about how CVs are read.
Since we’re talking about CVs now, do you have any concern that people with post-2024 P&PA publications on their CVs might be unfairly *benefitted* relative to those junior candidates who do not?
Because I will say this about junior candidates with publications in Ethics, J. Phil, Phil Review, etc.: I take them *very* seriously, and see what they have done in publishing there as an important achievement — albeit as just one consideration among a number of others, including the quality of the paper in itself as the most important consideration, and so on. I will also have this attitude toward candidates with publications in Political Philosophy and Free & Equal. In all these cases, I believe I can justify that attitude as warranted and fair to other candidates.
Would it also be warranted and fair to have the same special regard for post-2024 P&PA publications? I do not think it would be *at all*. But I very much suspect that a number of people would like to pretend that it is—and that perpetuating this illusion is the point of the exercise.
I strongly disagree, but I feel like this conversation has run its course.
> It seems unfair to penalize ECRs who don’t share your conception of a good journal.
For better or worse, this is the policy of every academic employer. We judge people on the quality of their work, including on the quality of their attempts to get other people to pay attention to it.
There’s only so many hours of the day, and most of us have decided that some of those hours will be spent reading papers published in Nous, and few if any of those hours will be spent reading papers published in The Southern New Jersey Journal of Kant Studies or whatever. So if an applicant comes in with a bunch of papers in journals like the latter, and none in journals like the former, we are unlikely to move to the phase of reading a bunch of the work carefully, unless the applicant pool is small, or the number of people on the committee is large.
If we look at the work and it seems good, that can often overcome our judgments of journal quality. But we often end up accidentally ruling some people out because they didn’t pay attention to which journals to publish in, or because they got the bad advice to not worry about publishing.
That is not the sort of — justified — heuristic I had in mind. In the context of the conversation, my point referred to Simon’s idiosyncratic determination of how choosing to publish in that specific journal should be regarded.
I should have said: that is not the sort of heuristics I had in mind — this one seems justified.
I can guarantee you that my understanding is not at all idiosyncratic (whether or not it is mistaken, unjustified, etc.).
I have no idea how you can guarantee this, but I suppose we have different standards of evidence:
“I think some people will think of it as crossing a picket line, or at least expressing a lack of solidarity with the former editorial team. Others will think of it as unwitting participation in a vanity project or a grotesque attempt to reanimate a corpse. I would regard it as reflective of either a poor understanding of what makes a journal a top place to publish or ignorance about the abrupt discontinuity between the 1971-2024 journal and the entity that has the legal right to use its name.”
Nevermind that many people obviously think it should be regarded very positively.
Because I know my view is shared by many other people. Thus, whatever else it is, it is not idiosyncratic.
That’s not a guarantee but granted. It is just one view among several other competing views though, as you acknowledge yourself, though you omitted the positive views from your sample.
That there are people clapping for Tinker Bell in the audience is obvious. What may be less obvious to people on the market is that a great many other people in the profession won’t be going along with that fantasy.
I agree Rawlsian ideal theory is full of fairies.
Ha! (Btw, I’m happy you’re not still in Sarasota this week—hope all friends and former colleagues are safe.)
Thanks! Sadly it seems likely that area and yours will keep getting hammered in the foreseeable future. O Florida!
Hi ‘not sure how this will help early careers’! FWIW, I will count publishing there as publishing in a great journal in political/ethics/legal philosophy. It’s an impressive editorial board, they will get a ton of submissions, and it will be hard to get anything but excellent work published there. I think most of us know how hard it is to get anything published anywhere!
The picket line analogy is silly and inapt, as discussed above.
A few people (Simon Căbulea May, for example) might have issues with it, but I predict the vast majority of people will not, and that will become increasingly true over time as PPA post 2024 shows itself to run just like any other excellent journal.
I think everyone, including SCM, is very aware how hard it is out there, and I think even he will just look at the work and assume something like ignorance or necessity or whatever.
I think people will feel similarly unsure about the standing of Free & Equal, which I am sure will have fewer submissions than pre-2024 PPA, and which will probably be somewhat less selective in the first year or two as people sort out its standing in the field.
So, in the short time, I’d expect both PPA and Free & Equal to be only absurdly selective rather than absurdly absurdly selective, but I also expect that everyone will have some grace about it all, particularly regarding early career people just trying to get their stuff out there.
I am very well aware of how hard it is for junior candidate and certainly think grace and charity is in order.
If Jason, Chris, and David can build a journal with a reputation for publishing great articles, all power to them. But they will have to build that reputation from scratch. Using the name “Philosophy & Public Affairs” for their journal conveys the message that their journal possesses (and is entitled to possess) the reputation of the 1971-2024 journal. That claim to continuity is essential to the current enterprise. But it is not warranted, nor do I think it will be accepted as warranted by very many people. On what basis would it be?
Not because some journal has to carry the old journal’s torch, because that is already happening at Free & Equal.
Not because of the name, because that is arbitrary.
Not because of the quality of the people on the editorial board (almost all of whom I know and respect a great deal), because a great many other journals have boards with similarly accomplished members.
Not because of the publisher, because … well … recent history.
And not because of the desire that there be more venues with less demanding acceptance rates, because that has nothing to do with continuity of reputation.
My view is that both PPA and Free & Equal will have to do some work to build their reputations given the events of the last year. Both start in a good place, for different reasons.
PPA’s new board is a higher profile group of editors, with much higher citation counts, etc. It is also a much more diverse group of editors, coming from a broader range of approaches, traditions, and institutions. The name matters, because reputations attach, among other things, to names. Also many of us are happy to see PPA and its legacy live on under its historical banner. I am happy that the journal that I published in twice is not going out of existence. I am sure many others feel similarly.
F&E has the open access and hopeful journal future on its side, and Arash Abizadeh and others have made the compelling case that we should all work toward that future. F&E has a great group of brilliant editors.
I think we should wish both of them well (and affect their reputations in positive ways when we can), for the many reasons that I and others have articulated here and elsewhere.
Re: the editors and editorial board members of the two journals, I do not think it is a good idea to invite comparison of people’s profiles. (And, again, I know and respect almost everyone involved mentioned above.) But here is a link to F&E’s editorial team and board if anyone does want to get a sense of who they are.
Jason does mention that he expects the new P&PA group to grow though. (I would say I’m a little surprised you’re not part of it, given what you’ve said here and elsewhere, were it not unsurprising that someone might already have too much on their plate to join an editorial team/board.)
I think you’re a bit too dismissive of the importance of the name and the quality of people on the editorial board. A great many other journals have boards with similarly accomplished members, but those journals are nearly all equally prestigious. The ones that aren’t are the ones that are new, and thus don’t have the social practice around their name. It took some time for Ergo and Phil Imprint to establish their names, and the fact that their names now have mindshare in the communities of authors and readers is a real accomplishment that is at least part of the value of creating a journal. It’s a non-arbitrary fact about a name that it has the history that it has. Without the quality of editorial board, the name can’t sustain that value. But it does have value.
Do we know what the members of the editorial board will be doing? If they are going to be very hands-on, involved in the day to-day deliberation about papers and reports (as “quasi-associate editors”) that would be one thing. But if they are there merely to lend their names to this project, to be consulted every so often on general policy matters and occasionally asked to review a submission, that would be quite another. Because in this case almost the entire burden of credibility now rests on just three people: Chris, David, and Jason (in particular). The prestige of the board members does very little work to persuade me that I should think of the reanimated P&PA as a top journal in the field. I don’t need the prestige of the board members as a reason for me to trust their selection of an editorial team, and hence the editorial decisions made by this team—in part because I’m already reasonably familiar with at least some of their work, but primarily because the current situation seems to be (and I may be wrong here) a matter of the new editor selecting the board rather than the other way around. That’s not nothing, exactly, but it’s not all that much.
The relevant comparison, then, is between the new editorial team of three people and the one they have replaced. (I.e., qua the old P&PA team up to 2024, not the same group of people qua new F&E team.) Here we have fifteen of the best people in the field all doing an immense amount of hands-on work in selecting the best papers to publish (as they see it), with established practices that have developed and evolved since the journal’s origin. It’s no disrespect to Jason, Chris, and David to say that there is simply no credible equivalence here whatsoever.
Perhaps the editorial team will grow in the next few months. I’d be much more optimistic about the journal’s prospects if a bunch of great people joined—e.g., if Alex were part of it, as I had thought he would be (not to say that he should be). I would still have a number of objections to what has happened but the claim that P&PA lives on as a top journal in the field would be significantly less risible.
I do not think any early career scholars should think of it in this way because I can’t imagine that anyone would criticize them just for publishing their work in a Wiley journal. I hope there aren’t any early career scholars who are afraid of retaliation for publishing in P&PA, but if there are, then maybe the senior scholars who they are worried about should publically assure everyone that they would never criticize or disadvantage someone who published in P&PA.
Since I’ve been outspoken here in thinking this development is regrettable, I am in complete agreement that any type of retaliation against anyone who sees fit to publish in the new P&PA would be completely unacceptable.
That is quite compatible with thinking that it is a mistake to submit to the journal on the understanding that it retains the prestige, reputation, and standing of the 1971-2024. We should not pretend that people will see the new incarnation in the same way as the old.
Before deciding how much prestige P&PA should have after 2024, why not wait to see what kind of work they publish?
Sure. They might very well build their own reputation as a top journal. I am more sceptical than others about the prospects of this, but we should all be open-minded about how the future will play out.
What is a mistake is the belief that the new incarnation *retains* the reputation as one of the top venues to publish political philosophy from the outset. I see the pretense that it does as essential to the enterprise.
Here are two things that can affect prestige:
Both factors matter, but I think it would be better if people judged journals by the quality of the articles.
SCM – it will be enough that people believe other people will believe there was enough continuity for there to in fact be enough continuity. If enough good writers submit there as before, then the quality of the articles and reputation gets maintained, even if every author personally believes as you do that there should be something of a reset in our evaluations. Journals aren’t just filters which achieve quality through good judgement, they’re also Schelling points which attract quality submissions in the first place.
Certainly they might fake it till they make it. What we are being asked to do now—with the portrayal of this development as the rescue of a *top journal* in crisis—is pretend that they’re not faking it from the get-go.
A Potemkin village might become a Schelling point for urban development in the future. But it’s still a Potemkin village now, and it’s silly for us to pretend otherwise (even if it would be good to have some urban development).
I wonder how easily (if at all) can the new editors make good on their promise to offer a journal that is broader in scope – I read this as “not so much about Rawlsian issues.” On paper, that sounds good to me. As an animal ethicist, I’ve never found P&PA the most welcoming outlet, to put it midly. But I suspect there will be a correlation between ideology/substantive philosophical positions and willingness to submit papers to the new P&PA – think, for instance, of Rawlsians, Marxists, etc. If that is true, the final output might end up being, regardless of the editors’ intentions, biased in its scope and substantive orientation.
Of course, this might not be true. After all, the work of Rawlsians, Marxists & co. routinely appears in journals published by Wiley, Springer, Elsevier… But I see a couple of potentially relevant differences. First, the previous editorial board had already resigned en massse, which will lead many (e.g. the comment above) to see publishing here as akin to crossing a picket line, and turn to other journals, especially when there are many available alternatives – whether the analogy is apt or not I don’t judge. Second, it is unclear whether P&PA’s prestige will survive, which I expect to lower everyone’s prestige-based incentives to submit there in the first place.
This is, of course, an empirical question, and I just mean to voice some worries. Will be interesting to see how this whole thing unfolds.
The journal welcomes submissions from philosophers, legal scholars, political scientists, economists, and sociologists. It welcomes papers on problems requiring empirical or legal analysis, provided those papers also rigorously defend a normative position.
The second sentence in this excerpt from the journal’s mission statement suggests that the journal will, like its predecessor, be limited to a certain narrow conception of what counts as philosophical analysis, method, and style, who counts as a noteworthy political thinker, as well as what the aims of a philosophical argument or study should be. For example, ‘rigorous defense of a normative position’ was never one of the aims of Foucault’s work. Although the question of whether, and the extent to which, Foucault’s genealogies, for example, implicitly advance a normative position remains a contested matter in scholarship on Foucault, Foucault’s own status as one of the most important political and social philosophers of the 20th century is not widely contested. Thus the appeal to terms like ‘bold, ‘daring,’ and ‘risk-taking’ in the mission statement may be misleading, especially to the interdisciplinary cohort from which the journal (allegedly?) seeks submissions.
I also want to draw attention to the ableist language that is used in this sentence of the mission statement:
All papers submitted to Philosophy & Public Affairs are blinded to editors. Papers that pass initial inspection undergo triple-blind review.
An increasing number of theorists and researchers recognize that this use of the term ‘blind’ — which equates not seeing with lack of knowledge — is outdated and harmful (see, for instance, Tremain 2017). I hope that Brennan and co-editors will revise their mission statement in ways that make it and the journal itself more acceptable and more conducive to participation of a broad authorship and readership.
They don’t recognize it, they claim it. (And they’re wrong!)
An increasing number of philosophy journals also recognize it as indicated by their replacement of this ableist language with terms such as ‘anonymous review’ like here, for instance: Submissions | Feminist Philosophy Quarterly (uwo.ca)
or here: manuscript preparation guidelines – hypatia (hypatiaphilosophy.org)
“An increasing number of theorists and researchers recognizes that this use of the term ‘blind’…is outdated and harmful.”
If so, an increasing number of theorists and researchers are clowns.
There is nothing ableist about using the word “blind” to express that something is “hidden from view,” which is what happens in blind review. We use “blind” in this way all the time, like in driving (“blind intersection,” “blind corner,” etc.).
In some cases, such as in the uses of “blind” above, not seeing literally equates to lack of knowledge. That is the point.
If you want to push for us to stop associating the term “blind” with people who are unable to see (since just because they can’t see doesn’t mean they don’t know what’s there), have at it. But going the other direction with that word is foolish.
Please forgive my anti-clown language in the response above. I mean no offense to literal clowns and respect the entire clown community.
This defense of the ableist language used in this context is incorrect. Consider this passage:
There is nothing ableist about using the word “blind” to express that something is “hidden from view,” which is what happens in blind review. We use “blind” in this way all the time, like in driving (“blind intersection,” “blind corner,” etc.).
In particular, the claim that the use of the term ‘blind’ in this context is intended to express “hidden from view” rather than not known fails to capture the function and purpose of this kind of peer review. For it inadvertently suggests that it would, for example, be acceptable for someone to relay an author’s identity by (say) speech, that is, for a reviewer to be told in speech of an author’s identity.
That a word has historically been used in everyday language is no defense for its continued use if parties indicate that it demeans them. This claim shouldn’t require examples for support or justification.
By coincidence, in the space of a very brief email exchange this morning, I convinced an editor at Oxford University Press to stop using the term ‘blind’ in the reviewer questionnaires that they and their staff send out to reviewers of manuscripts in the division that this editor supervises. As the OUP editor put it, “We are certainly on a journey of improving out accessibility and inclusivity, and feedback such as this helps us to learn and adapt.”
Yes, a point well taken, thank you.
What term did you propose that they adapt instead?
I agree that there are good reasons to use “triple anonymized” rather than “triple blind”.
But on the other point:
“The second sentence in this excerpt from the journal’s mission statement suggests that the journal will, like its predecessor, be limited to a certain narrow conception of what counts as philosophical analysis, method, and style, who counts as a noteworthy political thinker, as well as what the aims of a philosophical argument or study should be.”
I don’t see this as an essential problem. The journal is already wedded to a narrow conception, in that it wants philosophy papers about normative issues, rather than dialogues about metaphysical issues, or monographs about the nature of language, or any number of other valuable philosophical contributions.
It’s important that there be good venues for good work on all topics. But not every venue needs to be for good work on all topics.
Kenny, I acknowledged that the journal has a narrow purview. I think that you have missed my point. I was pointing out that the stipulation according to which submissions provide defenses of a normative stance precludes work like Foucault’s genealogies (only one example) that are *political” works, focusing on what come to be recognized as *political* matters precisely because of the genealogical approach that he used. This work by Foucault did not provide explicit normative positions or defenses but was not about different “topics,” was not first and foremost about “metaphysical issues,” nor “about the nature of language” (though it often made important claims about these matters). It was however written in a different formula or style. To reiterate, many of the “topics” that philosophers and political theorists (among others) spend a great deal of time with gained recognition as political in character because of the political character of Foucault’s genealogies. Sexuality is only one example.
The point of the stipulation that work offer rigorous normative defenses seems to be a veiled way of limiting submissions to a subset of papers in political and social philosophy, namely, papers in (narrowly-defined) analytic social and political philosophy.
I agree that the Foucault stuff is broadly a ‘political work’ but it’s clearly not analytic philosophy, and as such, the methodology here isn’t going to be the right sort of fit. There are plenty of comparative literature journals and perhaps also continental political theory journals for submitting things on Foucoult but I don’t think stretching PPA as an analytic philosophy journal so wide that it woudl include something like that is the best approach.
I think if Judith Butler can use ‘ableist language’ (‘blindly accept’ in Who’s Afraid of Gender, 2024, p. 20), then it is safe for us to do so.
https://cdn.penguin.co.uk/dam-assets/books/9780241595824/9780241595824-sample.pdf
I posted a comment about the journal’s mission statement that appeared momentarily but then disappeared. I hope that the comment will be restored.
There is some discussion in this thread about whether junior scholars should worry about the prospect of retaliation if they publish in the new PPA. I can’t speak for others, but this particular early career member of the profession is eagerly awaiting the opportunity to submit to both the new PPA and Free & Equal, and I look forward to receiving many desk rejections from both.
It would be good to hear Brennan respond also to Quong’s comments. In particular, I think a lot of philosophers care about journals producing PDFs. (Less important, but nevertheless interesting, might be if the layout will change.)
He said on Facebook that the PDF thing was fake news.
Calling it fake news seems very strange to me, as I have a hard time believing that this was a manufactured lie. However, I’m happy to hear that it’s not happening, and I hope this extends to all philosophy journals currently being published by Wiley.
Sorry, my words, not his. All I meant is he seemed to be saying this was unfounded rumors or speculation. Stranger things have happened at sea.
I think it is fairer to ask the old PPA’s editorial board (most of whom, if not all, are full professors) to stop sending their articles to for-profit journals than blaming Brennan et al. for their decision. If the former (as well as all their supporters) are so concerned about the evils of the publishing industry, they should have put their money were their mouth is, that is, they should have stopped sending articles to these for-profit journals in favor of open access journals, even if they are less prestigious. At the end of the day, if their work is so good (which I honestly believe), why do they feel this need to publish in the most prestigious venues, most of which happen to be run by for-profit companies?
What a great way to celebrate the 50 year anniversary of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia! Long live the new regime!