journals
Philosopher Calls for Interdisciplinary & Empirically Informed Study of Black Manhood
In an interview at Inside Higher Ed, Texas A&M philosophy professor Tommy Curry (who was the recent target of harassment and death threats, recall) discusses some of the ideas in his recent book, The Man-Not, which calls for a distinctive kind of black male studies he says is rejected by others in the humanities.
Mini-Heap
Here’s the latest Mini-Heap: 10 recent items from the frequently updated Heap of Links, collected and numbered for your convenience. (more…)
Mini-Heap
Here’s the latest Mini-Heap: 10 recent items from the frequently updated Heap of Links, collected and numbered for your convenience. (more…)
Mini-Heap
Here’s the latest Mini-Heap: 10 recent items from the frequently updated Heap of Links, collected and numbered for your convenience. (more…)
The Publication Emergency (guest post by J. David Velleman)
The following is a guest post* by J. David Velleman, professor of philosophy at New York University. It discusses the problems that arise from graduate students publishing more and more, and presents a pair of suggestions for how to improve matters. (more…)
Why A Philosopher of Color Declined To Contribute To A Special Issue On Current Politics
The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (KIEJ) recently published a special issue, Trump and the 2016 Election. In an editorial note, KIEJ editor-in-chief Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown) discusses two things the special issue is missing—articles that present a positive view or are in some way supportive of Trump’s policies or politics, and articles by people of color–..
Hypatia’s Associate Editors Resign
In the wake of the resignation of Hypatia’s Editor and the editor of Hypatia Reviews Online, owing to the controversy over the publication of a paper on transracialism, eight of the journal’s Associate Editors have now resigned, according to a letter circulating among philosophers this weekend. (more…)
Beliefs About Genetic & Environmental Determinism By Discipline
Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, a new journal, has published the results of a survey of academics, sorted by discipline, regarding their views about genetic and environmental determinism and the explanatory power of science. (more…)
Philosophy Journal Relaunches With New Name
The journal formerly known as Philosophy & Theory in Biology has relaunched with a new name, Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology (PTPBio), and has just published its first articles under the new title. (more…)
How Philosophical Work Can Change The World
When I was an undergraduate philosophy student at the University of Pittsburgh, where I was trained in the analytic tradition, it wasn’t clear to me what philosophy meant beyond the clarification of concepts. Yet I have held onto the Marxian position that philosophy can change the world. Any thoughts on the capacity of philosophy to change the world?
So asks Geo..
Quality Control, Methodological Bias, and Persistent Disagreement in Philosophy
Recently, mainstream philosophy journals have tended to implement more and more stringent forms of peer review (e.g., from double-anonymous to triple-anonymous), probably in an attempt to prevent editorial decisions that are based on factors other than quality. Against this trend, we propose that journals should relax their standards of acceptance, as well as be les..
Should Graduate Students Referee?
Should graduate students be called upon to serve as referees for journals? I was stunned a few years back to learn of the growing use of graduate students to serve as referees—stunned until I remembered the (arguably) over-publishing practice of our profession. But now the practice of enlisting grad-student referees—to my limited and aging eyes—appears to be g..
Feminist Philosophy and Its Controversies (guest post by Laurie Shrage)
…I expect there will be deep and lasting tensions going forward among feminist philosophers. Most of the tensions have to do with perceptions of harm: harm to the author, the journal, communities of people who are marginalized and threatened, and to feminist philosophy. I hope feminist philosophers will explore and critically discuss questions about the harms caus..
Gender Studies Won’t Have Them As A Member: The Attempted “Conceptual Penis” Hoax
…the isomorphism between the conceptual penis and what’s referred to throughout discursive feminist literature as “toxic hypermasculinity,” is one defined upon a vector of male cultural machismo braggadocio, with the conceptual penis playing the roles of subject, object, and verb of action.
That’s a line from the intentionally nonsensical “The Conceptual Penis ..
Statement From Hypatia Board Regarding Tuvel Controversy
The following is a guest post* from the Board of Directors of Hypatia, the non-profit corporation that owns Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, in regards to the controversy surrounding the journal’s publication of “In Defense of Transracialism” by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College.
What Philosophy Journal Decisions Look Like
Sometimes a picture is worth a million words, or at least a number of numbers. Writer Natasha M. Frost has created a visual representation of publication decisions made at a number of academic philosophy journals, as reported by authors at the Blog of the APA’s new journal survey site: (more…)
Systematic Discrimination in Peer Review: Some Reflections (guest post by by Kyle Powys Whyte)
“As these issues of peer review and editorial review continue to arise every year, I hope people increasingly address the systematic problems—taking into consideration the ongoing history of discrimination and the thorough reforms that need to take place in the world of academic publication.”
The following is a guest post* by Kyle Powys Whyte, Timnick Chair in ..
The Latest Philosophy Papers
A new website has been launched that lists new philosophy articles as they are published. The site, called The Philosophy Paperboy, is the creation of Andrea Raimondi, graduate student in philosophy at the University of Nottingham, with web design by Lorenzo Cataldi. It’s searchable, and currently tracks over 400 journals. (more…)
Focus On The Fire, Not The Spark (guest post by Sally Haslanger)
The following is a guest post* by Sally Haslanger, Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women’s & Gender Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, regarding the recent Hypatia controversy.
A Way To Increase Transparency In Academic Publishing
How can we make journal editing more transparent? That’s the question of a timely article in the recent issue of Metaphilosophy, “Why not Open the Black Box of Journal Editing in Philosophy? Make Peer Reviews of Published Papers Available,” by Caroline Schaffalitzky de Muckadell and Esben Nedenskov Petersen (both of the University of Southern Denmark).
(more…)..
New Philosophy Journal Survey Project
The Blog of the APA is launching a new project to collect and share data on the experiences philosophers have had with academic journals, including information about each journal’s “average review time, time to publication, acceptance rates, comments per submission” and related qualities. (more…)
If and How to Respond to a Review of Your Book
“It is usually a bad idea to respond, rebuttingly, to a review of one’s book.”
— the first line of G.A. Cohen’s response to Brian Barry’s review of his Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality in the TLS. (scroll to the bottom of this post to see Cohen’s full response)
You’ve spent years of hard work writing a book. It’s finally published. Some people buy it. If ..
German Publisher De Gruyter Fires Philosophy Editor, Eliminates Philosophy Dept (Updated)
Walter De Gruyter, the large German academic publishing firm responsible for a variety of philosophical publications, including the Kant and Leibniz Academy editions, the complete works of Nietzsche, and authoritative editions of many other canonical authors, along with many journals, has fired its longtime philosophy editor, Dr. Gertrud Grünkorn, and has eliminated..
2017 PROSE Awards and Philosophy
The 2017 Winners of the American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) have been announced, and among them, in the “Best New Journal in Humanities and Social sciences” category, is Cambridge University Press for the Journal of the American Philosophical Association (see here for more information). (more…)
How Journal Capture Led to the Dominance of Analytic Philosophy in the U.S.
How is it that analytic philosophy came to be the dominant philosophical style in the 20th Century in the United States? From inside the practice, the answer seems to be, “because it is a particularly good way of doing philosophy.” But “that it seemed good to them at the time” is not much of an historical explanation. For any other historical development, we’d want ..
Reconsidering Implicit Bias
At the time of this post, bibliographic philosophy database PhilPapers has 1,975,719 entries. Of these, only 74 works seem to be about “implicit bias”—subconscious bias concerning, for example, race, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexuality. One might think, then, that the idea of implicit bias hasn’t been of much importance in philosophy. Yet, while there is n..
2016 Philosophy News in Review, Part 4
Here’s the last installment in our look back at some of the most-discussed news, issues, and events in the philosophy profession in 2016. (Here are parts one, two, and three.)
2016 Philosophy News in Review, Part 2
Here’s part two of our look back at the philosophy profession’s more widely discussed news, issues, and events of 2016. (Here’s part one.) Only a few items from each month are mentioned, so if you think an important one is missing, feel free to draw attention to it in the comments. (more…)