journals
APA / BPA Journal Surveys
Last year, the American Philosophical Association (APA) and the British Philosophical Association (BPA) teamed up to conduct a survey of philosophy journals, and the results are now in. 43 journals were surveyed on submission and acceptance rates, review process, and the percentages of papers submitted and accepted that were written by women and members of minority ..
Philosopher’s Annual Suggestions
The nominating editors of Philosopher’s Annual, which takes as its goal “to select the ten best articles published in philosophy each year—an attempt as simple to state as it is admittedly impossible to fulfill”, are busy making their selections for 2014. This is hard work! How many philosophy articles are published in journals and edited collections in a given year..
Does Philosophy Matter? (guest post by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong)
The following guest post* is by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke), and appears here via a special arrangement with Oxford University Press and the OUP Blog, at which it is also posted.
Does Philosophy Matter?
by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Philosophers love to complain about bad reasoning. How can those other people commit such silly fallacies? Don’t they see how..
Philosophers Don’t Read and Cite Enough (guest post by Marcus Arvan)
The following guest post* is by Marcus Arvan (Tampa). Marcus runs The Philosophers’ Cocoon, a helpful blog aimed at early-career philosophers. Last week saw the posting of a report on philosophers’ citation practices by Kieran Healy. Marcus has written on this topic a few times over the years at The Philosophers’ Cocoon (the latest is here), and so I asked him if he..
Can We Save Philosophy? (Guest Post by Robert Kirkman) (updated)
The following is a guest post* by Robert Kirkman, associate professor in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech and director of its Center for Ethics and Technology, in which he takes up the problem of academic philosophy’s seeming irrelevance to others both inside and outside of academia.
Can We Save Philosophy?
by Robert Kirkman
I write this from the ..
Invite-Only and Cliquey Conferences
In the discussion of the “Networking and Merit” post last week there were a number of comments (including a few that did not get approved) about conferences that are invitation-only or appear to be cliquey, accepting mainly friends of the organizers or those closely connected to them.
Our standards for good journals involve anonymous review, as our recent “journ..
Plagiarism Policies
In November of last year, Daily Nous hosted a guest post that exposed the extraordinary plagiarism of Iranian philosopher Mahmoud Khatami (follow-ups here and here). One of the articles alleged to be a work of plagiarism was a 2007 article of his in Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy, entitled “On the illuminationist approach to imaginal power: outline of ..
Networking and Merit in Philosophical Success
Critiquing the Philosophy Tag game, commenter “Aspasia,” a tenure-track professor, worries about it “perpetuating the status quo of getting somewhere by networking rather than on the basis of merit in philosophy.” Leave aside Philosophy Tag. Let’s look at the broader issue about the role of networking in philosophy. It crops up in a lot of places such as publishing ..
Guarding the Guardians (or Editors) (3 updates)
The reason your paper is listed as ‘editor assigned’ is that I’m going to review it myself.
In the wake of the recent discussion here about the editorial practices at philosophy journals, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (UBC) recounts a story, set about five years ago, in which he submitted a paper to a journal with a policy of double-anonymous reviewing—Philosophic..
Philosopher’s Index Upping Its Game
The Philosopher’s Index, an academic philosophy database available through the libraries of many universities and colleges, is rolling out a service that contains not merely abstracts (which it has long featured), but the full text of its indexed articles, according to a recent press release. Called “The Philosopher’s Index with Full Text,” it provides articles from..
APA’s Inaugural Joyce Mitchell Cook Award Winner Announced
Kathryn Gines, assistant professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, has been named the inaugural winner of the American Philosophical Association’s Joyce Mitchell Cook Award, presented by the Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers (CSBP). Professor Gines works on Continental philosophy (especially existentialism and phenomenology), African Amer..
Reasons You Rejected a Paper
The discussion of journal practices is continuing, but, at the suggestion of Tom Dougherty, I am posting this as a place to gather “frequent reasons for rejection” of articles. Here is his comment from the other thread:
If many of the papers getting desk-rejected by journals are rejected for common reasons, then I wonder if it might be in everyone’s interests for..
A Closer Look at Philosophy Journal Practices (two updates)
Considering how important the publication of articles in peer-reviewed journals is to a successful career in philosophy, it is expected that curiosity and questions about the practices at philosophy journals would arise. Additionally, lately it seems as if there has been an increase in concerns about unfairness in access to publication opportunities, including insuf..
A “Nonproblematic” Black Philosopher
Mabogo More, who was recently awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association, is profiled in the Mail & Guardian. More held appointments at University of the North – Turfloop, the University of KwaZulu-Natal – UKZN, and the University of Durban-Westville, as well as fellowships at Birmingham, University of Illinois, an..
Lessons for Philosophy from Economists on English?
“Over the last 35 years, less than half of graduated Ph.D. students have gotten tenure-track academic jobs upon graduation. The result is a large pool of residual job seekers, which places even more pressure on the job market for existing students.”…
“The data are pretty straightforward,” the paper says. “While students in top-10 programs might have a reasonabl..
Confluence, a New Online Philosophy Journal
Confluence: Online Journal of World Philosophies, is a new bi-annual, peer-reviewed journal of comparative philosophy and thought. From its mission statement:
It seeks to explore common spaces and differences between philosophical traditions in a global context. Without postulating cultures as monolithic, homogenous, or segregated wholes, it aspires to address ke..
The Fragmentation’s Disvalue
Over the summer, Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburgh), in his capacity as executive editor of American Philosophical Quarterly, published a brief editorial entitled “Growing Pains” (vol. 51, no.3) in which he notes the growth of the philosophy profession and laments its bad effects.
He writes:
The scholarly output of the profession has far outstripped its numerical gro..
Open Access and Journal-less Publishing
Recently I was asked by the editors of a journal whose mission and scholarship I support and respect to review a book by a scholar I very much admire. In the past, I would have accepted the invitation without a second thought and proceeded to read the book and develop a review. Over the past few years, however, as my work has focused on questions of public scholarsh..
How Much Should Graduate Students Publish?
A current graduate student writes in with this sense of what is expected nowadays:
I’m under the general impression that I need to get as many publications in top journals as I can before I go on the job market. Considering how slow this process can be, and the fact that you can’t concurrently submit the same paper to more than one journal, it follows that I need t..
Open Letter to Professional Philosophical Associations (Guest Post by Alan Richardson)
Alan Richardson is professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He works mainly in the history of philosophy of science and analytic philosophy. He has written an open letter to the leadership of the American Philosophical Association, the Canadian Philosophical Association, the British Philosophical Association, and the Australian Association of P..
A Philosopher Talks with Psychopaths
“One of the striking features of people on psychiatric wards is how much their conversation is about topics also discussed in philosophy journals.” One thing they have in common is an awareness that “the common-sense interpretation of the world is not the only one”.
That’s Jonathan Glover (King’s College London), quoted in a review at New Scientist of his latest boo..
Heap of Links
1. Why are they so angry? Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) makes the case for anger, arguing that it can be a huge source of strength and power, particularly for the apparently weak and powerless, on the BBC. (via Aidan McGlynn)
2. When people who have been blind their whole life are given the power of sight, what do they see? — on the puzzle William Molyneaux posed to Joh..
Blacks in Philosophy in the US
In “What is the State of Blacks in Philosophy?” a recent article in Critical Philosophy of Race, authors Tina Fernandes Botts (Michigan), Liam Kofi Bright (Carnegie Mellon), Myisha Cherry (John Jay College), Guntur Mallarangeng (San Francisco), and Quayshawn Spencer (San Francisco) “introduce into philosophical discussion the preliminary results of an empiri..
Heap of Links
1. A symposium at Boston Review called “Against Empathy,” featuring Paul Bloom, Peter Singer, Nomy Arpaly, Barbara Fried, Jesse Prinz, and others.
2. “Imagine that women are proportionately represented in the journals we are discussing…. Could there be any reason for ensuring that more papers by women are published in these journals? Possibly, yes, for two reasons..
Heap of Links
1. “Scientists that talk philosophy down are simply superficial: they have a philosophy (usually some ill-digested mixture of Popper and Kuhn) and think that this is the “true” philosophy, and do not realize that this has limitations,” says scientist.
2. The Phaedo may be missing some painful, convulsive, gasping.
3. The Critique is a site that aims to bring philoso..
How to Accelerate Refereeing
People have been experimenting on journal referees and have learned some useful information. First off, whatever you do, don’t ask Professor Procrastinate to referee for you. He cannot be trusted. Second, shorten deadlines. Third, offer cash rewards or publicize how long the referees took to do the work.
We randomly assign referees to four groups: a control group wit..
Publishing? There’s an App for that.
HelpMePublish is an app that “provides databases on 13 major subject areas containing information on more than 6000 reputable academic journals provided by journal editors, subject experts and academic users.” According to a comment on another post here by James Maclaurin (Otago), a philosopher who devised the project, there are 557 philosophy journals in their data..
Heap of Links
1. Vivian Feldblyum may have earlier wooed you with “The Deductive Logic Love Song” but now she is singing the epistemology break-up song, “Do I Have Hands?” Perhaps she is seeing someone else?
2. The new edition of Onora O’Neill’s Acting on Principle, an “incisive and thoughtful defence” of Kant’s moral theory, is reviewed by Michael Rosen in The Times Literary Sup..