New Metaphysics

To change the subject back to the news of the hour, the NEW METAPHYSICS series…

All books will be available free of charge in open access format, with nice paperbacks printable upon demand. It seems likely that this is how all academic publishing will operate in the very near future. (It’s simply no longer technologically necessary to have a slow publishing process with high monetary barriers to entry.)

As for the theme of the series, I don’t remember ever seeing a philosophy series that was specifically asking for new systematic philosophical work. There have been a few series claiming to do so, but in my experience what they really wanted were secondary sources that didn’t depart that far from orthodoxy.

Alphonso Lingis was editor of a series at SUNY for awhile, where he also aimed to focus on truly new work. But as he tells the story, he was fired after accepting only 1 manuscript and rejecting “2 or 3 per week.”

We only need a few good manuscripts per year to establish a critical mass and a new style. One possible problem is that in continental philosophy, people just aren’t used to doing writing that isn’t pitched primarily as a “reading” of some known luminary. Those can be original too, as long as the figure being read is not the primary motive for the piece of writing; there needs to be an autonomous philosophical eros at work in the reading.

I think we have our first two books for the series already, but will wait until the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted before discussing them.

If, ten years from now, we have built up a corpus of several dozen new works in metaphysics, then we will have established another possible center of gravity that does not currently exist. I’m optimistic about our chances, and hopeful that the mere existence of the series will generate book ideas that did not pre-exist the series itself.

Early recording companies is the metaphor that keeps returning to mind. I like listening, for example, to all the Sun and Stax collections, including the minor artists. At a certain point, a Sun or Stax “sound” was established, and new artists had an existing style after to which to model themselves. Let’s see how long it takes for the New Metaphysics sound to emerge.