Digital Transitions

The Ends of Knowledge are Served by the institutions and practices of publication as well as by the fundamental work of research itself. While other former editors have reflected here on what the “history of philosophy” is or ought to be, my focus will be slightly different, on the machinery of editing and publishing, as an expression of and an attempt to attain a set of scholarly ideals that I think we have all shared, even when we have disagreed about how exactly to define the subject.

Of the living former editors, I am the only one other than David Norton who also worked on the JHP as a graduate student.¹ Like him this was at the University of California at San Diego, but my years were 1973–1974. At the time, communications with contributors and referees were conducted by what we now call “snail mail,” and letters were typed (on an electric typewriter, using carbon paper to make copies, which were retained in file folders). The submitted manuscripts were managed via a large cork board at the west end of the office, divided by vertical pieces of blue yarn tied between push pins into sections for manuscripts received but not yet assigned to referees, those sent out to a first referee but report not yet filed, those sent out to a second referee, and those accepted but not yet queued for publication in the next issue. Each submission was represented there by a 3” × 5” card with author’s name, title, and date of receipt typed at the top, followed by handwritten dates when each successive action had been taken. Besides updating the 3” × 5” cards, my job included buttonholing Popkin when he was in the office to say that this or that invited referee had declined or that this or that referee report had come in. Acknowledgements were preprinted postcards. Since it took a minimum of one to two weeks to create and mail a typewritten letter and then receive a written, mailed reply, it could be very time-consuming if multiple invitees declined to referee a submitted manuscript, as sometimes happened, and a good deal of decision time was taken up in this way. Much of the delay in decisions, about which contributors were complaining by the 1990s, was attributable to snail mail. Delays also occurred in university mail systems, and particularly in mail between the United States and other countries, which could often take weeks or be lost—and the loss itself not discovered for more weeks. The result was that we used foreign referees far less than we would have preferred.

As Editorial Assistant for the JHP, there were some givens. Overall office work was guided by the principle that each issue of the JHP was to contain one article in each of four major periods in the history of Western philosophy along with fifteen book reviews, also in historical order and covering all the major periods. It was—and has remained—a necessary condition that a publishable article be based on knowledge of the philosopher or text in question in the original language, and that philosopher or text be interpreted within the framework of philosophical, religious, and scientific theories and debates of its own time, of contemporaneous intellectual, political, and economic institutions and events. This gave an operational definition of the kind of ‘history’ we sought, later described as ‘contextual.’ A publishable article would also necessarily be conversant with and responsive to the secondary literature on its topic, not only in English, but also in the other major scholarly languages. This points to the JHP’s original and continuing aspiration to international reach for submissions, refereeing, and book reviewing. From the beginning, the JHP undertook to publish in three languages rather than English alone, and the standards just mentioned—later codified in a referee report form—were understood to be international standards of scholarship, as illustrated by the work of founding Board members and advisors such as Paul Oskar Kristeller, Richard Popkin, and Herbert Schneider. The most persistent voice on the Board for increased internationalism was Craig Walton.

Besides these positive givens, there were...