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:

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Philosopher, we thought we would look forward rather than back! Since The Philosopher launched in 1923, numerous seismic changes have happened within philosophy. Many of the discipline’s aims and goals (e.g. to generate complete systems of knowledge) have been brought into question. Truth, reality, objectivity – these are all now contested in ways that would have seemed unthinkable a hundred years ago. The disciplinary norms have also radically changed. Philosophy is no longer simply white men engaging in pugilistic intellectual stand-offs, each one vying for the “killer touch”; rather the demographics of philosophy have changed, as well as the range of topics considered “truly philosophical”. With the “New Basics” series that we ran in 2022, we tried to capture something of the shape of philosophy’s present: socially and politically engaged, radical, interdisciplinary, provocative. We now wish to look to the future.