Monday 21 January 2008

Journal acceptances and rejections #2

I’ve just been sent the most recent issue of Forum Philosophicum, a Polish journal which is ‘focused on the philosophical problems that shed some light upon the philosophical credentials of the theistic interpretation of reality’. Whilst that isn’t a particular interest of mine, it turns out that the journal is only so concerned with religious interpretation and this issue, thus, contains my paper: ‘An aesthetic grounding for the role of concepts in experience in Kant, Wittgenstein and McDowell?’.

I wrote the paper many years ago for a workshop called Crossing the Divide: new perspectives on Continental and Analytic philosophy at Anglia Polytechnic in 1995 and also took to a Canadian aesthetics conference that year. The journal Mind considered the paper it for publication, kept it for 6 months but then narrowly rejected it apparently on the grounds that it was too much about aesthetics. The British Journal of Aesthetics rejected it on the grounds that it was not concerned with aesthetics enough. Kantian Review thought there was not enough Kant in it. Philosophical Investigations thought there was too much Kant. Etc etc. After two years of trying, I put the paper aside and forgot about it. Last year, however, I took it up again and decided I’d send it to the next journal with a call for papers. And lo! Forum Philosophicum.

I must say that the journal is rather nicely printed but the article may find more of an audience via my own university webpage than the printed Polish journal.

Of other recent papers: ‘Why the idea of framework propositions cannot contribute to an understanding of delusion’ is still forthcoming but can be accessed online by those with the right subscription. The same applies to ‘Should comprehensive diagnosis include idiographic understanding?’ forthcoming with Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy and that journal is also looking at a paper on ‘Understanding, testimony and interpretation in psychiatric diagnosis’ which I co-authored with colleagues. Not a bad result since putting book writing aside 6 months ago. But I have not yet gone back to the McDowell paper as yet rejected by Philosophical Investigations. I'm not yet happy enough about the rewrite options.