The line about journals being "morally and intellectually lacking" is going to age very well, I think. Academic philosophy has been quietly suffering from a structural problem: the venues that confer prestige are also the venues that punish exploratory writing, the long argument, and the willingness to revise in public. Substack, for all its noise, restores something philosophy (and other human sciences too!) actually needs: a place where ideas can develop across posts, where readers can follow a mind over years, and where the response from interlocutors arrives in days rather than the 18 to 24 months a journal takes.
Whether the result will be "better philosophy", I don't know. But it will at least be philosophy that more closely resembles how philosophy was actually done before journals: in correspondence, in essays, in argument with contemporaries
I think my philosophical journey started when I was quite young, I don’t think I realised it at that time but began by always asking “why”. And strangely enough in my early forties I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, another book called The Minds Eye and one on Complexity
20th Century analytic philosophy could mean Rorty, it could mean Searle. Do you have any heroes?
The line about journals being "morally and intellectually lacking" is going to age very well, I think. Academic philosophy has been quietly suffering from a structural problem: the venues that confer prestige are also the venues that punish exploratory writing, the long argument, and the willingness to revise in public. Substack, for all its noise, restores something philosophy (and other human sciences too!) actually needs: a place where ideas can develop across posts, where readers can follow a mind over years, and where the response from interlocutors arrives in days rather than the 18 to 24 months a journal takes.
Whether the result will be "better philosophy", I don't know. But it will at least be philosophy that more closely resembles how philosophy was actually done before journals: in correspondence, in essays, in argument with contemporaries
:)
I think my philosophical journey started when I was quite young, I don’t think I realised it at that time but began by always asking “why”. And strangely enough in my early forties I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, another book called The Minds Eye and one on Complexity