New post and features at 'New Work in Philosophy'

This is just a quick note that New Work in Philosophy has a new post up today by Berislav Marušić (University of Edinburgh). Do check it out!

Also, thanks to some helpful feedback that we received on NWP's launch yesterday, we have rolled out a new feature and point of emphasis:

1. In addition to posting contributions by authors on their own work and the work of others (e.g. book/article reviews), we encourage submissions by established (or somewhat established) philosophers that discuss/recommend new work by less/un-established philosophers who aren’t their colleagues or students. We also continue to encourage posts by or about the work of junior philosophers and underrepresented groups in the profession more generally.

2. We encourage readers to draw our attention to other Substack pages with professional philosophical content. Substack has a nifty “recommend” feature, so we will now feature an “Other Philosophy Substacks” button on this site’s top navigation bar. Recommendations will also go out to subscribers in a Substack Recommendation Digest (which can be unsubscribed from if you only want to receive notifications of original NWP posts).

Both new policies are intended to advance NWP’s aim of being an anti-elitist forum that highlights exciting new work by diverse philosophers at a wide variety of institutions, career stages, and employment situations.

So, if you'd like to pitch a piece about your own work, work by someone else that you would like to recommend or discuss, or another philosophy Substack, just let me know!

Comments

[Richard Yetter Chappell]

Looks great! Three more philosophy substacks you might add to your list:

me: https://rychappell.substack.com/
Michael Huemer: https://fakenous.substack.com/
Joe Carlsmith: https://joecarlsmith.substack.com/

[Marcus Arvan]

@Richard: Thanks for the tips- will be happy to include them in our list!

[NK]

Marcus, I just wanted to say that I was *very* happy to see that you and Barry have added feature 1. We'll see how it works out, I guess, but I like the idea of a forum for other-promotion (even if still seems to be *in addition to* self-promotion, which I'd happily do without entirely). The ban on promoting the work of your own colleagues and students also strikes me as a promising way of trying to make good on your claim to be aiming to be anti-elitist. (I assume you received feedback from others to the same effect, but the anti-elitism claim initially seemed to me to be undermined by the fact that the initial posts were self-promoting posts by philosophers at USC, Stanford, Penn, and Cambridge — though, to be fair, three of those four philosophers were new to me, and institutional elitism obviously isn't the only kind. Still, that set of affiliations didn't make the project seem all that radical to me.)

I guess I really just want to register that, while I'm now subscribed, it's feature 1 that drew me in.

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi NK: Thank you so much for the feedback. It's very helpful to hear, and I'm glad that the new point-of-emphasis drew you in.

We have worked (and are continuing to work very hard) to approach less-established philosophers at a diverse variety of institutions to contribute pieces--and we very much hope that more-established philosophers avail themselves of the new feature/point-of-emphasis.

Of course, only time will tell how well we do, but I am working very hard behind the scenes to make good on the anti-elitist mission!

[TD]

Some information of the first four posts of this project confused me a bit too. Unlike NK, I noticed that three of the four papers were published in journals with very low acceptance rate or 'elitist journals', but the project aims to be anti-elitist. I haven't read any of the four papers or posts. But elitist journals generally publish papers that please their elitist editors and reviewers but are often unintelligible and verbose.

I'm an un-established philosopher and I have a publication which I want to promote. But I'm not sure the project is for me. Of course, the project just started a few days ago; it's quite new and will definitely change.

[Marcus Arvan]

@TD: I understand your concerns, but if you have a recent publication you'd like to promote, *please* consider pitching something!

The newsletter can only achieve its anti-elitist ambitions if we receive sufficient submissions from less-established philosophers and about papers in a diverse variety of venues.

Over the past several weeks, I have spent many hours scouring social media and cold-emailing philosophers from diverse walks of life: philosophers at small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, research universities, and some philosophers who currently lack academic employment--and we actually delayed the site launch in the hopes of receiving more submissions of the sort that you are hoping for.

We are currently waiting on a number of submissions--including by authors on papers in little-known journals--and will publish them if/when we receive them.

So, please do consider submitting something. We really do want to realize a forum that features a truly diverse variety of philosophers and work.

[TD]

@Marcus: Thank you very much for your explanation and encouragement! Of course Beri and you are trying to do something good for the profession voluntarily. Is it possible that you put some tags such as "logic", "epistemology", "history of philosophy", "non-Western philosophy", "ancient philosophy", "ethics", "metaphysics", etc. for every post? So that visitors can choose which posts to look at. This may not be a good idea--I just cannot read all the posts but want to read some.