The Philosophers' Cocoon

Long Journeys into Print, Part 2: Trevor Hedberg

By Trevor Hedberg

If you stay in philosophy long enough, you will eventually have to deal with that paper. It’s a good idea – one that you’re sure deserves to be in print. But for some reason, it keeps getting rejected. You refine your position, clarify ambiguities, respond to new objections – revision, revision, revision – but the rejections only continue. This is the story of my first encounter with that paper and the lessons I learned during the journey that ensued.

Long Journeys into Print, Part 1: Carl B. Sachs

Learning how to publish is one of the more difficult parts of becoming a successful academic philosopher. It can take years, and many rejections, to publish a peer-reviewed article. However, the realities of publishing are rarely discussed. We sometimes hear, obliquely, of how long someone struggled to publish a paper--and yet, for most part, others' experiences of the publishing game are typically unknown to us. We know our own struggles, but it is often unclear how representative our struggles are. Do other people--such as "famous" figures in the field--have an easier time publishing in Mind, or Phil Review? There are (admittedly) anecdotal reasons to think perhaps not. As Jason Stanley (Yale) was quoted a while back at NewAPPS:

My book *Knowledge and Practical Interests* is the fifth most cited work of philosophy since 2000 in Phil Review, Mind, Nous, and the Journal of Philosophy (book or article). Yet the book itself is the result of three revise and resubmits, and finally a rejection from Phil Review. One of those drafts was also rejected from Mind, and also from Nous. All of those journals have accepted papers discussing, in many cases very centrally, a work those very journals have deemed unpublishable.

I also seem to recall hearing stories about how David Chalmers' and Andy Clark's article, "The Extended Mind" (which has since been cited 2,741 times according to Google Scholar) was rejected, and in some cases even desk-rejected, by a number of high-ranking journals before eventually landing at Analysis (if I am misremembering here, please do correct me!).

Anyway, because publishing is such a strange gauntlet, we have decided to begin a new series entitled, "Long Publishing Journeys." This series will feature academic philosophers sharing their publishing experiences, so that we can begin to see more clearly what publishing is like for others--documenting, in each story, the path of an article from its initial genesis to eventual publication. We hope you enjoy the series, which we will now begin with a submission by Carl B. Sachs: