A Philosophy Magazine for the City

This past summer, the Gotham Philosophical Society (GPS) posted four short essays under the masthead Phi on New York: Philosophy for the City. These pieces constitute the inaugural issue of an online magazine that we at GPS intend as a forum for the philosophical discussion of various aspects of life in New York. Supported by a generous grant from the APA’s Berry Fund for Public Philosophy, Phi on New York provides GPS with a new medium through which to pursue its mission to use “the critical rigor and analytical imagination of philosophical thought to transform the civil, political, and educational institutions of New York City.”

Phi on New York, like GPS itself, arose out of the belief that philosophy is ultimately a parochial activity. Among other things, philosophy helps us figure out how to live, and we must all live at particular times, in particular places, and with particular people. Those of us who have chosen to live, work, and perhaps raise a family in New York City have become New Yorkers. It’s the city’s laws that we are obliged to evaluate and obey; it’s the city’s housing policies and real estate market that partly determine what we call home; it is to the city’s school system that we entrust our children’s formal education. Our aspirations to live good lives must therefore be calibrated with those of our neighbors, and it is to their conceptions of what makes for a just city that our own must be made comprehensible.

It is unfortunate, then, that very few of New York’s prodigious number of philosophers figure in the city’s cultural and political discourse. They live and work in the city, but their philosophical activity is rarely of or for the city. Both the city and philosophers lose something by this lack of association. The city misses out on opportunities to reimagine what life in New York could be. Philosophers risk rendering themselves irrelevant to the wider community—a result that does little to quell the growing sense of job insecurity spreading through the profession.

There are, to be sure, city-based philosophers who have expanded their orbit of engagement beyond the classroom to include pubs, prisons, book stores, farmer’s markets, and subway stations, and they know well the enthusiasm which people bring to these encounters for contemplating timeless questions, reevaluating choices they have made, and thinking critically about those they now face. By launching Phi on New York, we hope to boost these activities by creating a space for philosophically investigating the city and the kinds of lives it makes possible. While philosophers can of course write op-eds and essays for newspapers and other local outlets, we believe that a magazine dedicated to this effort will amplify the voices involved and serve as a destination for those seeking a deeper level of discourse on the problems of the day and on questions few previously thought to ask. We think our first issue, though modest in volume, embodies our vision of a variety of voices addressing such disparate topics as the normative dimension of our failing transportation system, the reasons the city ought to implement a wealth tax, the principles of environmental justice that should inform the city’s ecological policies, and, rather fittingly, an essay on how the impact of a movement like #metoo will depend in large part on which voices—and which messages—will be “echoed.”

New York City is an enormously complex, multi-dimensional, historically extended experiment in living, and we ask philosophers who have participated in this experiment to help us make sense of it. We invite you to join or inspire conversations on any dimension or aspect of the city, its people, and ethos. Through engaging and accessible editorials, essays, proposals, reviews, and discussions on questions of law, finance, education, policing, architecture, the arts, and, indeed, any element or feature of this city’s many ways of life, you can help establish Phi on New York as source of insightful and assumption challenging writing concerned with the well-being of this city we call home.

Joseph S. Biehl

Joseph S. Biehl is the founder and executive director of the Gotham Philosophical Society. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from St. John’s University and a Ph.D. from the Graduate School and University Center, CUNY, and has taught philosophy for more than 20 years. He is the co-editor (with Sharon Meagher and Samantha Noll) of The Routledge Handbook on Philosophy of the City, (Routledge, 2019)