The friendly folks at PEA Soup announced the following:
As die-hard PEA Soupers already know, for a while now we have enjoyed a partnership with Ethics in which, relatively soon after each issue of that journal is published, we have a discussion of a paper from that issue kicked off by a commissioned précis of that paper, often a commitment from the author to respond to questions, and several commentators lined up to help launch the discussion. Each paper that gets commented on at PEA Soup is made publically available to all without a subscription.
We are pleased to announce that we have now started up a somewhat similar partnership with Philosophy and Public Affairs, Philosophers’ Imprint, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and JESP. We are expecting a few more such partnerships to be firmed up shortly. The result will be that there should soon be significantly more critical discussions of first-rate work in ethics, political philosophy, and related matters on PEA Soup. There will be much less “down time” between discussions.
First, it's great that PEA Soup is looking at ways at staying 'live' more frequently. I always enjoy the discussions. So, congratulations are in order! Second, I bet that later generations will wonder, 'what took philosophers so long to develop such partnerships?' Such partnerships are a clever and obvious move in order to develop a forum for (relatively) high quality and highly visible philosophical discussions.
Even so, I have concerns: I worry about mechanisms in which a relatively narrow group of gate-keepers (however qualified, open-minded, and well-intentioned) will decide for us what is worth our collective attention (a very scarce resource). Given that PEA SOUP Partners (PSPs) are a fantastic group of journals with very high quality 'content,' crowding out of others is quite possible. This is not an idle thought because the post speaks of (a) a 'few more such partnerships' and (b) the web facilitates winner-take-all mechanisms, after all. (Something we have benefited from at NewAPPS!) Anyway, kudos to PEA Soup for being so pro-active. But I do hope some enterprising web-blogs partner with the philosophical alternatives to PSP.
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