The Philosopher

The Philosopher is the journal of the PSE (Philosophical Society of England), a charitable organisation founded in 1913 to provide an alternative to the formal university-based discipline. You can find out more about the history of the PSE here. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Anthony Morgan and is published twice a year, both in print and digitally.

The aim of The Philosopher is to publish philosophy that is emotionally intelligent, formally innovative, and socially just. Our understanding of what constitutes “philosophy” is broad and extends beyond the narrow confines typically set by the academy. We take seriously the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary philosophy, encouraging contributions from historians, cultural theorists, geographers, psychologists, classicists, activists, artists, and more.

In addition to the journal, we host:

In a 2005 poll carried out by the BBC Radio show “In Our Time”, Karl Marx was voted the greatest philosopher of all time, winning more than double the number of votes of the second place thinker (David Hume). Marx would likely have been bemused – and perhaps even somewhat exasperated – by this, given the recurring aspersions he cast on philosophy and philosophers throughout much of his life. Yet Marx’s relation to philosophy is by no means straightforward, as the contributions to this issue demonstrate. While Marx struggled against it (most emphatically in his earlier writings), denouncing its distortions, parochialism, and impotence, philosophy remained a crucial reference point for him throughout his life, even long after he had apparently left it behind. Philosophy, too, has not been left untouched by this encounter, having irretrievably lost something of its naivety and self-satisfaction as a result of Marx’s famous claim that rather than merely interpreting the world (as philosophers have done), the point is to change it.