So for much of the last year I’ve been working with Blackwell on a new e-journal called “Philosophy Compass”:http://www.philosophycompass.com/home_philosophy_compass. This is one of a stable of e-journals that Blackwell is publishing across the humanities and the social sciences. The aim of each journal is to publish survey articles about the state of the art in various fields. (Mind used to do this back when I was a grad student, and I was sad that they didn’t continue them.)
The articles are pitched at a moderately high level. They are survey articles, so they aren’t meant to include cutting edge research, though of course it is hard to stop philosophers writing new arguments into review pieces! But the major aim is to introduce people with some background (e.g. talented undergraduates, or interested grad students, or faculty who haven’t been following a field) to what is happening in that area. So if you want to know what has been happening on, say, “truthmaker theory”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00018.x, you can go read “Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra’s article”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00018.x, and you’ll both have a good idea what is happening, and know where to look for more details.
Obviously this will have some overlap with the wonderful “Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy”:http://plato.stanford.edu/, but we think it has a different enough focus to be worthwhile. We aren’t aiming to be as comprehensive as the SEP; we’re just focussing on what is happening now. This doesn’t mean we’re ignoring history of philosophy – indeed we have a lively history of philosophy section – but even there the focus is contemporary historical research. So I hope and think that there is space for both the SEP and Compass.
For now Compass is only commissioning articles, not issuing open calls for papers. And we’ve been somewhat more successful in commissioning papers in some areas than others – indeed some sections haven’t yet got started – though hopefully that will change within the next few months. But we’re always interested in suggestions for what we should be covering. If you have suggestions, leave comments here. We have about 80 articles under commission right now, so there’s some change we’ll be covering the topic you suggest in the near future. But the more suggestions the better!
Compass is a subscription journal, so sadly not everyone will be able to get immediate access to it. Blackwell does have a fairly flexible pricing policy, so if your library doesn’t yet subscribe, it might be quite affordable for them. Obviously I’d like to see as many subscriptions as possible.
From now on I’ll be posting links, such as the post below, to new articles as they appear. There are already a number of articles there, so you should go browse around and leave complaints, compliments or anything between in the comments here.