I just happened to notice that the announcement of a new book series explicitly states, “Research book proposals exploring non-Western traditions are also welcome.” A moment’s investigation reveals that the journal affiliated with the series, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, makes a similar claim in its mission statement. Terrific! So far, though, the publishing evidence is a bit scanty. I looked through the JMP‘s eight years of publishing history, and found one essay that is obviously related to non-Western philosophy: Eric Hutton’s “Han Feizi’s Criticism of Confucianism and its Implications for Virtue Ethics,” from vol. 5 (2008). This leads me to wonder:
- Does anyone have experience that speaks to the degree that this journal is in fact open to non-Western topics?
- Any thoughts about experiences with other journals, book series, or philosophy lists at publishers?
- Do any other journals (etc.) make similar statements to that of the JMP? (I can say right away that Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews and the journal Philosophy Compass both consistently devote attention to non-Western topics. Others?)
I certainly applaud the openness announced by the JMP and the new series, and wonder what more we might learn on this general subject.
Thom Brooks, the editor of the journal, had an early interest in Indian philosophy*, and this no doubt reflects his open-mindedness in this regard, so perhaps the number of articles (not) published in this area is more a reflection of the number and quality of submissions than anything else. In any case, I wrote to Thom and asked him to chime in on this.
* See, for instance, Thom Brooks, “In Search of Shiva: Mahadeviyakka’s Virasaivism,” Asian Philosophy 12(1) (2002): 21-34.
I am glad this caught your attention. Indeed, I have had a long interest in teaching and writing about Indian philosophy in particular. While we have attracted a few submissions, submissions have been rare in Asian philosophy and those we’ve received haven’t passed our review process. The great exception is Eric Hutton’s (in my view) genuinely outstanding contribution. I would strongly recommend anyone with an interest in non-Western philosophy to seriously consider submitting work to the JMP or its sister series, Studies in Moral Philosophy book series: I am very keen to find a mainstream home for non-Western philosophy.
Thinking of other philosophy journals with interest in publishing non-Western philosophy, from my own experience, I just published an article on Zhu Xi and the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics in the most recent issue of American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly; and I have a paper on Zhu Xi the two dilemmas of virtue ethics accepted by and forthcoming in the next issue of Journal of Philosophical Research. Neither of these two journals clearly say that they also publish non-Western philosophy. I submitted my articles to them simply because, unlike most other journals, they don’t clearly state the length limit of the papers, as both my papers are close to 20,000 words. So I think there must be other journals that are interested in publishing non-Western materials.
I recently had a paper on the Later Mohists published in History and Philosophy of Logic (“The Later Mohists and Logic,” 2010), and they explicitly welcome submissions about non-western philosophy. The only other article I know they’ve published on Chinese philosophy is Xinyan Jiang’s “The Law of Non-Contradiction and Chinese Philosophy” (1992).
One journal that deserves notice in this regard is the History of Philosophy Quarterly. Over the last five or six years, David Wong, May Sim, Jiyuan Yu, Xiaomei Yang, Jinmei Yuan, Eric Schwitzgebel, Donald Blakeley and I have all published articles on topics in Chinese philosophy in the journal. They have no explicit mandate to cover non-Western philosophy (so far as I know), but their publication record certainly demonstrates a willingness and desire to publish on topics in the history of Chinese philosophy. (I should note that nearly all of these articles have had a strong comparative component.)
I somehow stumbled on this site in an internet search. I would second hagop sarkissan’s comment. I have also published in HPQ, and the editor expressed much satisfaction in having a deserving piece on Indian philosophy.
Hi Matthew,
Amod Lele at Stonehill College is working on forming a blog much like this one, for Indian Philosophy. You should contact Amod if you are interested in helping/contributing to the effort.
Sorry–my first sentence lacked the word “wonderful” between “this” and “site”!