RAIL

An interesting find for me this week was the online philosophy journal American Dialectic.  Unlike most online journals AD doesn’t aspire simply to be the online version of a print journal. It aims, instead, to encourage thoughtful discussion by publishing focused responses to the articles and (ostensibly at least)  having authors respond to readers’ questions and comments about their articles.  Hence this, from the journal’s “About Us” page:

American Dialectic is an online journal committed to enriching scholarly publication, discourse, and intellectual development in Philosophy and related fields.  As an organization, American Dialectic is devoted to publishing intellectually excellent articles and to promoting the dialectical development of ideas among a broad community of readers.  This is accomplished by combining the best aspects of a traditional publication with the best aspects of a scholarly conference: lead articles are published on our website and then are followed throughout the publication cycle by edited responses that are written and submitted by our readers.  Through this unique publishing mechanism, American Dialectic aims to foster the continued intellectual development of contributors, respondents, and readers alike. […] Readers are encouraged to genuinely engage with the articles by asking targeted questions and formulating insightful responses.  Substantial questions and responses, junior submissions themselves, are then actively published following the lead article.  The lead authors, respondents and readers can then, as a community, identify important points, clarify issues, resolve problems, and ultimately find common ground by building toward a more complete philosophic understanding.

It’s a nice idea, and one that hearkens back to the way philosophy journals operated until the explosion of PhDs in the discipline in the 1970s and 80s.  Comments and discussion notes are still formally welcomed by many journals, but the reality is that they are seldom published and even less frequently answered.  This means that there isn’t much incentive to write such things even though they do a great service to the person trying to work the bugs out of his or her ideas.  The community of those interested in the ideas of a particular article or writer are, as a result, also deprived of the chance to see how the ideas in question fare in thoughtful, critical discussion. This, to my mind, is a real loss.

Apart from empirical support (where available or possible) the quality of a philosophical idea (perhaps any theoretical idea) is best measured in terms of its resilience in the face of sustained, intelligent criticism. It would be nice to see academic institutions begin to re-assess the value of participation that kind of high-level dialectic, instead of tacitly assuming that a fixed hierarchy exists in which discussion notes and book reviews “count less” than articles and books.  The pressure to write the latter has often had less than sanguine results: the rehashing or repackaging of old material, the overlong introduction, the fattening of otherwise lean philosophical treatments with unnecessary filler material, bloated examples, etc.  It’s not as if there’s no evidence that the freedom to write shorter, more focused discussion pieces can produce remarkable results. The Gettier paper for instance, which revolutionized epistemology, was less than three pages long. In terms of it’s pages-written to pages-produced-in-response ratio, it’s got to be one of the most powerful and productive pieces of philosophy in the history of the discipline, and yet it’s doubtful that something like that could get published these days. Why? It’s really just a discussion note with no additional proposals and only a few examples marshaled in support of its key points.

So I’m happy to see that American Dialectic seems to be serious about the “dialectic” part of their enterprise. That said, when viewed in the context of “new-media”, where everything has a comments section, it may not seem like all that revolutionary of an idea.  There are lots of excellent philosophy blogs now (see the blogroll here on RAIL, to the right, for some examples). The discussions that take place on those blogs, however, are largely technical and so are impenetrable by those who would be looking to learn something about philosophy. AD, with its stated emphasis on promoting philosophical discussions on broader topics for a larger community, promises something different.  If it gains some purchase among philosophers and other academics, AND if it shows some resistance to being co-opted by the kind of political and religious ideologies that poison so much of our public discourse, it promises to be the kind of model of general, high-level, reasoned discussion that American culture seems so desperately to need.  I wish them all the luck.