Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy is a peer-reviewed philosophy journal that publishes single-theme issues. For a recent issue they tried something new: a collection of articles that don’t have the typical hallmarks of philosophy.

The journal’s editor, Fabio Paglieri, explains:

One of the current collections is dedicated to the topic of “Technology, Nature, and Wellbeing in Contemporary Societies” and it constitutes a deliberate experiment for the journal, with my full endorsement: whereas Topoi, by its very nature, has always been open to all philosophical schools and areas, as well as remaining quite liberal in integrating contributions from other disciplines if deemed philosophically relevant (it’s part of the stated mission of the journal, here), with this collection we have elected to try publishing in a philosophical journal a series of papers that
(i) we believe raise important philosophical points, but
(ii) are authored mostly by non-philosophers,
(iii) do not necessarily match the typical description of a “philosophical paper”, whatever that might be, and
(iv) are selected by a team of guest editors that are not professional philosophers.

Professor Paglieri first brought this special issue of Topoi to our attention in a comment on a previous post in which one of its articles was mistakenly lumped in with some other mysterious publications.

The issue’s guest editors have PhDs not in philosophy but in neuroscience, experimental psychology, neurology, informatics, biomedical engineering, and social neuroscience. The authors come from a variety of fields, too, including some from philosophy. You can check out the issue here.

It’s an interesting experiment.

In an email, Professor Paglieri adds:

I do not want to overstate the extent of our experimentation: for the time being, this was intended as an exception and it will remain so in the foreseeable future. The motivation behind it is that disciplinary boundaries, albeit necessary for some purposes (most notably, in my view, for training future researchers with the adequate levels of specialization, hopefully without turning them into narrow-minded assembly-line academic robots), are not particularly helpful when it comes to understanding real phenomena, and might often hinder rather than improve scholarly work. Hence, I have no great quibble at exposing Topoi‘s readership to non-strictly-philosophical contents, on occasion: I trust they will survive, and might even gain some benefit from it. 

He notes that he’s unsure that “using Topoi for that purpose is the best way to achieve the goal of a more open interdisciplinary debate on topics of philosophical interest, and that is the reason why the journal is being very cautious in this respect.”

Here’s one alternative he is considering:

Springer allows editors to create thematic collections that span across journals: this is something that we have not yet experimented with on Topoi, but it would be a very natural and effective way of fostering interdisciplinary cross-dissemination, with some notable additional benefits—e.g., authors would not be forced to publish their contributions in journals that fall outside those most relevant for their own career, and readers would not be confronted with the puzzlement of a psychological paper on a philosophical journal (or vice versa), while at the same time guaranteeing that the readership of all journals involved is exposed to the whole (or, at least, richer) interdisciplinary picture on the subject matter of that thematic collection. 

Other ideas along these lines are welcome.