Editorial

We have tried to create an ideal journal, or to pursue the ideal of a journal: a clearing in which light may be shed and truth gradually emerge, by way of writing. It is a — more or less public — space for thought. It has to be public, or published, for two reasons: one is that a part of our self-imposed task is to expose, exhibit, and present what might otherwise have remained hidden from view. Truth is, as Heidegger taught us, after Hegel among others, a manner of unveiling.

             At the same time, texts must be published since only by being seen and heard can ideas properly be contested or submitted to the question.

             Our clearing tries to slip the bonds of any form of constraint external to the art of philosophy and its inscription: we do not censor or sift what is said according to any temporarily hegemonic set of norms that impede thought, and institutional thought in particular — it is our belief that we are not here to teach the great philosophers how to think, and indeed to teach them some obscure sort of (usually moral) lesson (as happens more and more in academic philosophy today); but rather we are here to learn from them, to be scrutinised by them, and thus to subject ourselves to their gaze. The first task is always to learn, and only then to seek what has remained obscure and undeveloped in the thinker we are trying to read.

            But it seems likely that no clearing can be infinite; it must have a horizon. Our perimeter is drawn around the peninsula of Italy. Italian philosophy has in recent years been ushered ever more determinedly into the limelight — a number of major academic publishers have book series devoted to Italian thought: SUNY Press, Seagull, MIT, Bloomsbury, and notable work has long been carried out by Stanford University Press, Semiotext(e), and the University of Minnesota Press, among others. A Society for Italian Philosophy has been founded. If we are compelled to limit our scope, it cannot avoid a certain measure of arbitrariness; and yet Italian thought in particular has proved itself to be a genuine original in the context of the philosophy of the last century and to have made a crucial intervention in philosophy in the state in which it found itself in the 1990’s, as the almost immeasurably powerful thrust of the French philosophy of the post-war years and the 1960’s in particular was beginning to ebb.

            If Italian philosophy is a ‘niche’, we are glad to be able to provide a means for having broadened such a niche. And after all, philosophy can rarely do without a certain nationality, bound up more or less tightly with its national natural language, at least in the modern age if not always, and this does not stop it from being the purest Philosophy.

            At the level of the content of the journal, we have tried to removed as many constraints as possible, consistent with the demands placed upon Philosophy as such, and our own and our readers’ various finitudes: we did not choose to be ‘online’, and much prefer the effect of writing on paper to its effect on a screen, but we have made a virtue of necessity: we are not subject to any serious constraints of space; we are autonomous, and bow to no demands for censorship or to any faddish institutional direction or directive (they might call us a ‘cottage industry’, but that is simply good); we make no binding promises of calendrical regularity and frequency. One of our interventions in the ‘marketplace’ of publication is to resist all of those features which make the experience of publishing in academic journals so often frustrating and even unjust: the quite irrational (or bad faith) and needless demand for standardisation, often to an excruciating degree (formatting, punctuation, referencing…) even before the article has been accepted; the constraints of a certain length, style, and easily identifiable genre of text; we have also tried to guard against the stultifying lapse of time it can take editors to respond to submissions, at least for those journals which have been elevated to the level of the ‘prestigious’.

            That said, we are always going to allow ourselves to be constrained by the discipline that forms part of our title, which is no bad thing. And we are intent on protecting the idiom in which the majority of our authors write: we feel an infinite responsibility to language and its capacity to do justice to its topic. And there are other standards and restrictions that it would be unwise to imagine ourselves altogether unaffected by; but we try to allow our authors to devote as much of their attention as it is within our power to guarantee, to philosophy.

Michael Lewis

Saturday 15^th March 2025