Recently, the academic journal The Philosopher decided to partner with the company Exact Editions to put their archive online in digital format. Many articles from past decades will be more easily available to researchers because of this move. In order to understand its significance, I talked with Exact Editions co-founder Adam Hodgkin and The Philosopher editor Anthony Morgan.
Adam Hodgkin studied philosophy at Oxford, Calgary and Cambridge and his first job was as a commissioning editor for philosophy at Oxford University Press. He has since worked with startups on the borders between publishing, software and the web; co-founding Exact Editions with two colleagues in 2005. Adam published Following Searle on Twitter with University of Chicago Press in 2017.
Anthony Morgan is a public philosopher based in Newcastle upon Tyne where he runs Bigg Books and edits The Philosopher. In 2017 he edited the collection, The Kantian Catastrophe? Conversations on Finitude and the Limits of Philosophy.
How come The Philosopher is now published on the Exact Editions platform?
Hodgkin: The first point to note is that Exact Editions is indeed a platform, not a publisher or even an aggregator (we do not sell big bundles). It is a digital platform for magazines, rather than scholarly or academic journals and it helps publishers to sell digital access to individual subscribers, to supply free access to society members, or provide institutional access to libraries and universities. Exact Editions is unusual in being able to provide digital solutions for individual subscribers and also sell site licenses to libraries and so we appeal to magazines with strong intellectual or professional content that need to straddle these digital markets. As it happens, Exact Editions already works with one title with a pure philosophy remit: The Philosophers’ Magazine which also bridges the worlds of academic and public philosophy, but we also work with magazines which frequently publish articles by well-known philosophers: The Times Literary Supplement, Prospect, The Point, New Humanist and The Tablet amongst others. These are all magazines that cross the academic and general intellectual market and we are always looking for more!
What types of work has The Philosopher published in the past? How will this work be aided by the publishing of your archives on Exact Editions?
Morgan: The Philosopher has been going for almost one hundred years, and gone through numerous editors with very different goals. For example, in the mid-twentieth century it was closely aligned with the Christian church and the content reflected this. Although this period of alignment with the church was not the most fruitful one in terms of good quality philosophy, the journal has traditionally been characterized by a focus on fundamental metaphysical questions related to truth, god, mind-body, mystery, and so on. For example, the founder of logical positivism Moritz Schlick wrote a 1935 essay called ‘Unanswerable Questions’ which kind of sums up a lot of the direction of the journal at that time. Alongside this, however, there has always been an applied dimension rooted in the fact that the journal was founded by and continues to be run by the PSE (www.philsoceng.uk), a charitable organization set up in 1913 and a great inspiration for many of the public philosophy bodies we see today. So the journal also published essays by thinkers like John Dewey on education and G.K. Chesterton (a former president of the PSE) on the need for philosophy in public life.
None of this earlier material is currently available through Exact Editions due to poor archiving practices by previous editors and the usual things that happen over time. With some diligent work in libraries though, I am confident that all the old issues will be added to the digital archive in time. The issues over the past decade (which are now available through Exact Editions) were heavily shaped by the editor Michael Bavidge (from whom I took over last year). He is a wonderful philosopher with a wide range of interests and an excellent communicator of philosophy across the academic-public divide. The support and contributions of great thinkers like Mary Midgley (a close friend of Michael’s) helped to give the journal a lovely balance of accessibility and depth that remains at the heart of what we try and do to this day.
What research is it most important that scholars unaware of The Philosopher know about? Are there particular examples of research published by The Philosopher in the digital archive which scholars should be aware of?
Morgan: What we often find is that in the same way that academic philosophers often write both for academic and trade markets, they will publish an in-depth academic article on a particular topic and then offer a shorter and more accessible version for The Philosopher. The journal is very much rooted in what is going on in philosophy right now, i.e. featuring contributions from authors of recent books, analyses of emerging trends etc. as well as a strong desire to balance out contributions from well-established academics with exciting up-and-coming scholars and even non-professional philosophers. So, for the scholar I would say that they are likely to come across a wide range of themes and thinkers that may significantly broaden their horizons while at the same time not requiring them to trawl through a dense 10,000 word peer-reviewed paper or a whole book. As an editor I am always exploring new ways to engage with philosophical questions rather than falling back on tried and tested formulae.
Hodgkin: The Philosopher has been published since 1923 and the Exact Editions service picks up a modern archive from 2012. It has always been a magazine for the general public rather than for professional or technical experts. In recent years its new owner (Bigg Books) and its editor (Anthony Morgan) have given it new direction, with more reviews and some big-name philosophers. The current issue has articles by and about Martin Hägglund and a recent issue was largely occupied by reviews and responses to Timothy Williamson’s Doing Philosophy. Other recent contributors include: Linda May Alcott, Justin E H Smith ‘You are not an algorithm’, Jane Heal, Kathleen Stock and Mary Midgley. The editor is keen to hear from philosophers who wish to reach the wide public interest in philosophical issues.
Exact Editions is strongly web-based and we have recently introduced a technique through which our publishers can create timed Reading Rooms for Open Access, via the web, to their publications, either the latest issue or the complete archive. These Reading Rooms are time-limited, but any reader of the APA blog in the next week should be able to sample The Philosopher archive for the next 7 days.
And in a similar way, the complete archive of The Point and The Philosophers Magazine have temporarily open archives for the next week.
LINK to The Point reading room
LINK to The Philosophers’ Magazine reading room
What articles have received the most feedback, or the greatest response, from your readers?
Morgan: Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has definitely been the ones connected with contemporary social and political issues, for example Jason Stanley’s lovely essay ‘The Philosophy of Fascism’ from our spring issue. We also commissioned four non-academic philosophers to write responses to Timothy Williamson’s recent book Doing Philosophy, to which Williamson in turn responded. This kind of dialogue between highly respected academics and public philosophers seemed to appeal to many readers as evidenced by the response. Finally, a young scholar called Mara van der Lugt wrote a wonderful essay on the philosophy of pessimism for our latest issue (one of the longest essays the journal has ever published in fact) and this has received a huge amount of feedback from readers. It’s a fantastic read!
How does Exact Edition relate to other online resources, such as Open Access scholarly resources or search engines like JSTOR?
Hodgkin: Exact Editions is a platform for magazines rather than scholarly journals. We assume that most, if not all, academic and scholarly research publications will be Open Access before too long. But magazines are not usually edited by scholars and most pay their contributors and their (not to be forgotten) illustrators and designers. They are not solely, or at all, produced for an academic or research audience and they are unlikely to become Open Access. Magazines are still largely conceived by their publishers for a print market (though digital revenues are now much more significant) and very few magazine publishers have the scale or expertise to organize and sustain their own digital platform let alone bespoke sales solutions; so we see an ongoing role for Exact Editions. There are other archival solutions, primarily aimed at the university or library market: and JSTOR is perhaps the best known (EBSCO, ProQuest are strong peers), but JSTOR and its rivals are not currently set up to serve the magazine which wishes to provide the same complete archival access to its members, individual subscribers and library customers. Exact Editions may be the best choice for a magazine with a strong brand and a distinct audience, but our terms are not exclusive.
What areas of philosophy would you like to see the journal cover in the future?
Morgan: In terms of what we are actually covering in the future, the next issue will be on ‘Animals’, with contributions from a wide-range of thinkers from a number of different disciplines, e.g. Christine Korsgaard (Philosophy), Cary Wolfe (English), and Maan Barua (Geography). It’s coming together beautifully and we are really excited about putting it out. Next year our U.S. commissioning editor, Chiara Ricciardone, will be guest-editing an issue provisionally called ‘Questioning Power’. Chiara is teaching a module on the nature of questions and questioning, and is asking a wide range of scholars from various fields which questions we should be asking but (for whatever reason) are currently not. Chiara is a brilliant and exciting young scholar and I’m sure her issue will be very vibrant and provocative. Looking further ahead, I am really excited by work going on in the field of philosophy of psychiatry, as well as in the study of the moral psychology that sits at the boundary of empirical and conceptual work in this area. So hopefully these fields will be well represented in future issues.
Does Open Access create new publishing and editorial opportunities?
Hodgkin: Surely it does, and I suspect that it is also generating a renewed demand or interest in magazine-style writing and performance from philosophers. The professionalization of research creates a counter eddy: an interest in explaining its context and exploring its impact. Philosophy is not the only discipline where practitioners and star academics recognize that their discipline needs to retain contact with the engaged public and the cross-disciplinary intellectual currents that are often so fertile and challenging. This APA blog itself and the growing choice of philosophy blogs and podcasts shows that philosophy will not just be done in the confines of the learned journal. Magazines digital and print-based can take advantage of this interest in philosophy that engages its readers, whether or not they are professionals.
Do you have any advice for other journals seeking partnerships to publish their archives online?
Morgan: I am quite new to this so don’t have a whole lot of advice but one of the advantages of magazines in the digital era is that the archive can be easily made available to subscribers. We chose to use the Exact Editions platform as it provides full archival access by default to all subscribers (individual and library) so all should benefit as we gradually recover and digitize our deeper archive.
You can ask Hodgkin and Morgan questions about their partnership and the journal’s work in the comments section below. Comments must conform to our community guidelines and comment policy.
