Want Your Work To Be Widely Read? Contribute to the Philosophy Teaching Library (Guest post by Wes Siscoe & Paul Blaschko)

This past September, we launched The Philosophy Teaching Library, a new teaching resource for instructors in philosophy, and one that has been covered by the Daily Nous and the American Philosophical Association.

For those who don’t know, the Library is a collection of introductory primary texts, excerpted texts that include commentary, illustrative examples, and detailed argument breakdowns that help boost student comprehension and situate the work in its historical and philosophical context.

The Library is an open educational resource. It’s free to use, and instructors can simply provide their students with a link to their selected reading, making important philosophical texts easily accessible to students and helping the uninitiated break into the philosophical conversation.

The Library is also peer-reviewed. We accept submissions from instructors and graduate students in philosophy and related fields, and we are especially interested in contributions from early career academics who are looking to establish themselves.

Considering that it has only existed for a few months, the Library has been very successful. We currently have 23 pieces up on the site, and those that are in progress will bring us to over 30 entries. We anticipate that, within the next few years, the library will grow past 100+ articles, many of them covering some of the most read texts in philosophy.

To the readers of the Philosophers’ Cocoon, we wanted to offer this window of opportunity. Several of our pieces already have hundreds of readers, and we anticipate that this number will only grow with the popularity of the Library, making this a great chance to publish something that will be read by many, many students. If there is a philosophical text that you work on and teach frequently, now is the time to contribute to make sure that your work is widely assigned and used.

What kinds of pieces are we looking for? Anything that might be read by first- and second-year college students, including works in the traditional Western canon by Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, Epicurus, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, Anselm, Berkeley, Spinoza, Rousseau, Locke, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Hume, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, Heidegger, and many more! We are also interested in works that fall outside the Western canon in areas ranging from Islamic medieval philosophy to Confucian and Neo-Confucian authors to influential texts in Indian philosophy. If early college students or advanced high schoolers should be reading it, then we are interested! 

All those hoping to contribute should email us a proposal at [email protected], detailing which primary text they would like to cover and why it is a good fit for the Library. If the text is available (i.e., we do not have any other similar pieces in progress), then we will invite the author to submit a portion of that text. The submission will then undergo a process that includes an editorial review process (to make sure that each piece meets our unique formatting requirements) and a peer review process (to ensure that they are up to scholarly standards). For more about our submissions process, see our website here.

Please let us know if you would like to submit a piece!

Comments

[Daniel Weltman]

Anyone interested in contributing to a similar project not overrun with AI might check out 1000 Word Philosophy whichis also free to use, peer-reviewed, etc: https://1000wordphilosophy.com

[Wes Siscoe]

@Daniel Weltman: Thanks for the suggestion, Daniel. We see our pieces as complimentary to 1000-word philosophy, as their articles give a summary of a topic and ours attempt to have students spend time reading a bit of primary text (our article word limit is 5,000 words). But we love the work 1000-word philosophy is doing as well and think that these are both great resources that can even be used in tandem, perhaps assigning the 1000-word piece as an overview of a topic and then having them read the Philosophy Teaching Library article, which goes more in depth. So again, thanks for the suggestion!

[what's the deal]

What is the "overrun with AI" slight in reference to?

[Wes Siscoe]

@what's the deal: My guess is that Daniel is referring to the fact that we use Midjourney to create the images that accompany the different pieces (Example here: https://philolibrary.crc.nd.edu/article/the-divided-line/). We would love to have an in-house artist, but that is unfortunately well beyond our budget, so that is what we are currently working with.

[Midjourney Needed?]

Wes, it sounds like you aren't too happy you have to resort to Midjourney. But is it needed to have art at all? 1000 word philosophy has no banner art, and neither does this blog - you seem to have enjoyed both! I mostly ask because I suspect there are more people turned off by AI art than people turned off by a lack of art. So maybe that would be a good idea for the Library.

[Wes Siscoe]

@Midjourney Needed: Yeah I think you’re right that it is a judgment call, and it’s one we have decided to make for the time being. If it is enough of a turn off, then we can always backtrack! Right now we are betting in part on the strong content of the site but also the slick visual appeal, which we hope will draw in those who are looking for something more, especially those who won’t recognize that it is a great site by the content alone. We might be wrong about that, of course. Only time will tell!

[Ned Ludd]

To add one data point as someone who has used some 1000 Word Philosophy in my teaching before and would love it if there were some options for a bit more robust intro open-access texts: this new project initially sounded really cool, but the choice to use generative AI is enough to keep me away. It also makes me slightly suspect of the articles (who'd submit to a site that's so open with it's AI slop?) but I realize that this concern might be unfair.

[my two cents]

I just wanted to chime in anonymously to report that I would be much less likely to assign something in my classes that featured AI art. To be honest, I would be pretty embarrassed if I were to do that, and I strongly suspect many (if not most) of my colleagues would feel the same. If the assumption is that most of the students reading these resources will do so because they're assigned reading in their classes, I think it makes sense to appeal to the sensibilities of philosophy instructors rather than students (the latter of which, let's be honest, are very unlikely to read these sorts of articles if they're not assigned coursework!).

[Three cents]

I must admit that I share the same views on non-AI images. Not only do they look unprofessional, but they also raise moral concerns (authorship issues, environmental issues, etc).

[Hope to help]

I commend this project. Having taught history of philosophy courses yearly for the past 6 years, I struggle to get the students to *do* the reading. A main barrier is that students are not well-prepared to read historical texts, and they struggle to see its application to their lives. I think this manner of chunking out key passages/ideas is helpful, so thank you!

I'm not concerned about your decision to use AI-generated art. I think the images are a thoughtful addition—one that my students will likely appreciate, especially as many are increasingly drawn to comic book-style reading. (I assume the images are reviewed to ensure they are not sourced improperly from other sites.) The few people I have discussed this with agree---students like images that can help bring a text or author to life.

Let us not forget that these articles are authored by subject-matter experts, peer-reviewed, and published by a site with a highly regarded editorial board. They are engaging, help students grasp the relevance of the material, and are appropriately concise—an important factor, as reading completion rates are closely linked to length.

I think there is a broader issue reflected in some of the comments: what is the place of AI in philosophy? If some readers are opposed to AI-generated photos inserted into rigorously written and reviewed articles, would they also be opposed to assigning students an article that utilized AI in the writing process according to ethical guidelines? Indeed, what is so embarrassing about utilizing AI-generated art in this way? My spouse works in a private sector where AI use is now common practice, for better or worse. If the following two links are indicative, academia is increasingly embracing AI in scholarship:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00343-5

https://corp.oup.com/news/how-are-researchers-responding-to-ai/

In sum, THANK YOU and keep up the great work---I appreciate it.

[Wes Siscoe]

Thanks for the feedback and interest everyone! We now have several new pieces in the works, and by a number of early career faculty :) If you are worried about AI-generated images, we would also be glad to produce your article without them.

And remember, if you want to get your name out there for a large audience, especially as our readers grow into the hundred thousands in these next few years (we are already at around 50,000) you should author a piece for The Philosophy Teaching Library!

[CW]

I think the site looks good. I'll definitely see if there's something I can use.

I don't care about the AI images, though they seem fine to me. And I say this as someone who loathes the idea of actually chatting with an AI. I won't be embarrassed to direct students to the site, whether I use the articles in class or not.

[Daniel Weltman]

@Hope to help: AI images cannot be "reviewed to ensure they are not sourced improperly from other sites" because the improper sourcing happens in the "training" stage for the AI, when they steal copyrighted images and extract data from them which is then used to create the output images. The result may look similar to the training images but it won't ever be identical (although it can get extremely close depending on what prompt you give the AI).

I would obviously be opposed to directing my students to writing that used AI. That something is becoming common does not strike me as evidence for it becoming permissible or good. You may struggle to get students to *do* the reading, but I struggle to get students to think about the reading, and AI is my chief opponent in this process. What luck am I going to have getting them to avoid AI if I direct them to material that makes use of it?

[AI art]

Since this is becoming part of the discussion here, I wanted to say that I also feel uncomfortable using this resource due to the major ethical issues with AI-generated "art." Additionally, AI "art" has hyper-realistic, uncanny aesthetics that have been appropriated mainly by extreme right-wing circles online, and that's what the images on the website remind me of. It's an involuntary association and an unfortunate one, but it's there for me, and it might be for others too, as AI "art" is becoming prominent on the right.