New affordances in dynamic modes of digital scholarly communication have enabled authors to tailor the content of our texts to the forms in which they appear in public.
This presentation focuses on two performative publication projects I am currently undertaking: Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing a Politics of Reading to be published by Cambridge University Press, and the Public Philosophy Journal which is in the final stages of being considered for a Mellon Grant.
Enhanced Digital Book
Socratic and Platonic Politics: Practicing a Politics of Reading, argues that Platonic writing is political in the sense that it is designed to cultivate a community of readers committed to integrating the question of the just, the beautiful and the good into their relationships with one another. By writing dramatic dialogues that depict an enigmatic Socrates engaged with idiosyncratic individuals, Platonic writing requires its readers to cultivate a hermeneutic imagination that, when applied to concrete human interactions, has the capacity to open new possibilities of more just and enriching relationships.
By publishing it as an enhanced digital book that encourages its reader to share their annotations and participate with the author of the text in an ongoing conversation, the hope is to put the community of collaborative readers for which the book argues into practice.
Public Philosophy Journal
Philosophy is often mistakenly viewed as distant from public life, secluded in the Ivory Tower away from the public concerns of civil society. However, the affordances of digital scholarly communication have enabled philosophers increasingly to bring the value of their work to bear on matters of public importance from ethics and public policy to cultural criticism.
The Public Philosophy Journal is designed to re-envision the relationship between the academy and everyday life by creating a public space for accessible but rigorous scholarly discourse on challenging contemporary issues of public concern. Our intent is to create a journal that will perform public philosophy as its mode of publication.
I discuss how, by leveraging the open and collaborative capacities endemic to digital communications, the Public Philosophy Journal will cultivate a community of scholars engaged in curating, reviewing, editing, co-writing and modeling rigorous work related to public philosophy broadly construed.
