Housekeeping

We’re busy finalising the details for the podcast symposium, which will start next week, for those who have inquired. We’re just sorting out the last couple of people to comment on papers. We’ve got a great bunch of papers coming which you’ll be able to access both on the site and via an iTunes subscription.

We’ll also be holding an Estlund-style reading group on Corey Brettschneider’s Democratic Rights starting in a couple of weeks. More on that in due course. If you’d like to organise a reading group on a book of general interest in political theory/philosophy in 2009, please do not wait for an invitation.

I’ve renewed the site registration for two more years. We now have over 170 full members and 70 participants registered on the site. We’re represented in 20 or so countries around the world. We’ve had over 100 000 page views and we’re approaching 50 000 discrete site visits. For a blog, this is small potatoes. But for an academic blog, it’s not too shabby for the first year. If you’d like to help support the site, you can use the links below to purchase items (not necessarily our members’ books) from Amazon.

Members who would like to initiate any other new projects are very welcome to do so.

I wanted to put up a post where people could make suggestions for further reading groups, after the conclusion of the marvelous “Democratic Authority” discussion we’ve had. If there are many suggestions, I’ll put up a poll to see which are the most popular and likely to attract broad participation. Also, if there is a lot of interest in two quite different books, then nothing stops people from organising those groups separately.

Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I would put up a housekeeping thread to elicit some discussion from members and participants about what you like on the site and what else you would like to see.

First some basic stats: we have ninety-nine members registered, including academics from thirteen different countries, along with a couple of dozen student participants who have signed up over the last month or so. This makes us, as philosophy blogs go, very large. I’d like to build on that strength over the course of this year. We’ve had over 40 000 page views and average somewhere under three hundred a day, which I think is fairly respectable. There’s no reason why those numbers can’t steadily improve.

I’d like to get people’s creative suggestions about a few things: (i) how do we best develop and diversify the kinds of items people post?; (ii) what would be the best way to increase the frequency of substantive posts on different topics?; and (iii) what would be the best way to elicit fuller and more diverse discussion in the comment threads? (One serious question concerns the fact that about 98.5% of the comments so far have come from men.)

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[Update: I’ve added a checkbox on the registration page for academics who would like to join the site as members.]

For security reasons (in particular the glaring ease with which one could post under someone else’s name), I’ve switched the comments settings such that people must now be registered and logged in to comment. As a consequence, I’ve set out two different kinds of user status: participant and member. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve removed the contact form on the About page as it has proved to be too unreliable. If you have tried to use the contact form and have not heard back from me, I did not receive your submission. Please email me with your details either at admin at publicreason dot net or to simonmay at vt dot edu. Sorry for the hassle.

We now have sixty-five eighty-nine contributors, over ten thousand twenty-eight thousand page views, and a couple of hundred visits a day on average. Following on some [robust] discussion over at Crooked Timber, I thought I’d start asking what people have to say about four matters:

1. Decision-making: I’d prefer decisions about policy to be taken out of my hands, but we still need to figure out how an editorial committee can be formed and what it’s scope should be.

2. Membership policy. At the moment we require that contributors be professional academics working in political philosophy, and have completed their doctoral studies. Would a more open policy be better?

3. Comments policy. I’ve restricted comments to people within the academic community, as evidenced by IP or email addresses or homepages. The goal here is to cut down on unproductive and unpleasant comments that may serve to inhibit academics from making use of the site. Would a less cautious policy generate better discussion between political philosophers? Please bear in mind that any policy has to be practical to implement.

[Over at Brian Leiter’s place, David Estlund has recalled Gerald Dworkin’s post about comments at Left2Right.]

[Also to keep in mind is that of the 151 comments at the site so far, 147 bear a particularly salient characteristic in common.]

4. Future projects. At the moment, members are free to post papers, problems, and announcements, etc., when they choose to do so. There may be scope, however, for organising more regular features as a collective, such as reading groups for books, or discussions of the articles in the latest issue of the leading political philosophy journals. These would require groups of people to take the initiative in organising them though.

We’ve been noticed. See Leiter.

Also the Garden. And, of course, Levy and Brooks. And, as Simon notes, Solum.

And now Al’s notepad , Dinner Table Donts, and Balkinization.

We’ve also been added to several other Blogrolls. Pretty good, I think.

Public Reason is a new group blog for political philosophers and theorists. The purpose of the blog is to create an informal but professional online venue where members of the academic political philosophy and theory community can discuss their work. Academic blogging has undergone a remarkable growth lately. A number of group blogs have been created by philosophers and political scientists, but none is specifically dedicated to political philosophy or theory. Public Reason aims to remedy that deficit. Contributors to the blog will have the ability to post a number of items:

• Literature discussions. If you have something to say about a recent article in journals such as Ethics or the Journal of Political Philosophy, you can link to the article and post a discussion of it on the blog.
• Reading groups. Work through a book chapter by chapter with colleagues.
• Working papers. Upload or link to working papers you would like to receive feedback on.
• Conference announcements. Post information about forthcoming conferences or calls for papers.
• Teaching discussions. Unsure about how to best explain sovereign authority in Hobbes’s Leviathan or the constraints of deliberative democracy to students? Post ideas about conveying theoretical concepts in the classroom.
• Podcasts. If you are giving a talk or just want to read a paper for colleagues to listen to on their iPods over lunch, record an mp3 file, upload it here, and subscribe to Public Reason podcasts via iTunes.
• General issues. Raise an issue of academic interest not sufficiently addressed in any literature you can find.

Professional academic political philosophers and theorists, and postdoctoral fellows, should fill out the contact form on the About page. At the moment, completion of graduate studies is required. Membership is free and there are no limits on the number of items one may post.