While I’m sympathetic to a lot of what you say here, let me stick up for the journal ecosystem.
I totally agree Nietzsche would have a hard time publishing in today’s philosophy journals, and would more likely be writing for a broader and less specialized audience (like on Substack). But that’s not a reason to lament the existence of the journal ecosystem; after all, venues for reaching those broader and less specialized audiences exist, and don’t really compete with journals.
My sense is the sort of stuff that people write for a broader audience would get written whether or not professional academic philosophy existed, but the sort of stuff people write for professional philosophy journals probably doesn’t exist in a world without the journal ecosystem. Maybe not all of it, but especially the more technical stuff. I agree Nietzsche would be writing on Substack rather than in Phil Review, but would Timothy Williamson or David Lewis have ever come to prominence if they had to chase clicks on Substack to get noticed? I suspect not, and that would have been a serious loss.
Maybe it’s Panglossian, and it’s certainly self-serving, so take this with several grains of salt, but I think the existence of a “bureaucratic” track for establishing oneself as someone worth paying attention to on philosophical matters, alongside the more small-d democratic track of just attracting clicks/shares/comments, is a net improvement to the intellectual landscape.
After all, I wouldn’t have subscribed to your Substack in the first place if I didn’t already know you from (excellent!) journal articles. In a world where there’s so much writing, credible signals of what’s worth reading are really important. So even if you think plenty of people do their best writing outside the constraints of the journal system (and while I think that’s sometimes true, I also think there are some great journal articles), you might still be grateful for the journal system for certifying those people as ones to read once they stretch out a bit.
Edit: You basically say all this at the end with complement, not substitute. Should have read closer! Well, I guess I just agree, and am emphasizing that last bit.
Agree with all this. Which leads me to my problem with Substack: I agree with far too much of what the philosophers who I follow write on it. I worry that it is becoming a kind of vaguely heterodox echo chamber.
Frequent cross-pollination for the win! The way each "platform" makes its money, and how they share and promote content is one of the things I think about, FWIW.
Things tend to converge, so I cannot wait until all of them offer better control of feeds, and have standards for moving content around, and good bookkeeping!
Something I've noticed with substack is that occasionally I'll scroll through notes and get transported to an alternate universe of ideas, often an unpleasant one at that (e.g. Nazi substack, tankie substack, etc.). I agree broadly with your concern, but I wonder how much of it is substack as a platform vs algorithmic sorting.
If anything substack's algorithm is worse than other platforms, hence the occasional view through the veil.
Something like “there are all sorts of political problems with universities, institutional science, and so on, but I’ve got my own bespoke analysis of them and it’s much smarter than what the average culture warrior says”. Also “AI is going to be big and all my colleagues are too stupid to see this”. Plus intense love for Scott Alexander and way more interest in and openness to rationalism and rationalist ideas than is normal in academic philosophy (outside of the EAs). More generally, the political valence of philosophy Substack is markedly out of step with at least the public politics of analytic philosophy, which is mostly about very sophisticated ways of articulating and defending progressive stances on all manner of social and cultural issues.
Hmmm... I'm pretty new, too. I was asking because Robin McKenna said they experienced too much agreement, and I haven't had that issue yet. I was wondering what everyone was agreeing about.
If anything, maybe topics like consciousness and AI appear to be particularly prevelent on Substack right now? It's hard to differenciate what is written about frequently from what is simply popular, without data analysis or something.
I think this is due to two things, both related to the nature of the medium. One is the ease of curating who you follow (so you get selection effects), the second is the rapid iteration leads to faster convergence.
I largely agree, but do keep in mind that Nietzsche was largely ignored until well after his death. His books were published by small outfits, and largely ignored initially. That’s because the European intellectual climate he was working in wasn’t really that different from ours. And remember that for every Nietzsche there are thousands of cranks who think they are a misunderstood underrated Nietzsche. And they are wrong.
Very true. On the last point, I think that’s why gatekeeping has its value. But established philosophers (who have already proven themselves in the journal game) can do much with Substack.
Again, I don’t disagree, I just think it’s important to emphasise that if the 2026 Nietzsche is posting on Substack, it is highly likely that we won’t recognise or appreciate what he’s doing. It’s future generations who will have to do that.
In some moods I think I might bite the bullet that some of “best” philosophical writing of the past wouldn’t get published in today’s journals simply because it’s not that good. It’s too shoddy, too quick to conclusions, too reliant on rhetoric instead of arguments.
There’s something to this, but there’s also something to the idea that quick to conclusions rhetoric is sometimes valuable for getting an idea out there that only afterwards starts to get the careful investigation and argumentation.
I'm not so sure. If you want philosophical innovation and originality, Substack will win, we're just in the transition.
The modern metric oriented journal system was imported from the natural sciences and a single individual, Robert Maxwell, has shaped the landscape on how it should work from a financial point of view. Thus, we have the pressure to publish as part of the career itself (at a cost detrimental to the philosophers' way of life), which can lead to superficial stuff and taking the number of publications as the criteria for philosophical quality instead of what the author is really trying to say with all this. We all have heard author X has more than 15, 20, 30, 50, 60 publications!
Deep ideas need a long time to mature and that doesn't fit well with the journal system. It can work for some disciplines, but for philosophy, it would mean that the journal system is the definitive format to communicate thinking. Instead of the algorithm you have a small circle of peers acting as a firewall on what counts as philosophy and what doesn't.
However, just as the dialogues, the Summae, the letters, the essay and other means of philosophical communication had their time, the same will happen to the journal. Innovation can hardly come out of a system that is designed to capture incremental work. Author X takes what author Y said, and adds +1, and so on.
Why not accept that it is simply a device with a nice narrative surrounding it that it is there to build authority? If it is there to build authority in a niche, that would mean that it's barely more than Marketing.
I guess it would depend on which thinker you're talking about. But the great philosophers of the past aren't great because they avoided errors. They are great because they originated new and fruitful ways of thinking, even if they then went on to make massive errors. Examples include Aristotle's virtue ethics, Kantian morality centered on autonomy (which greatly influenced later liberalism), and Marx's materialist view of life/history.
I’ll stand up for the signposting! If you consider it tedious, you can skip it. But if you ever want to find the idea you vaguely recall being in here somewhere, that signposting is how you’ll be able to.
I agree with your take, but I think the problem goes deeper. Many of those we now call “philosophers” were not professional philosophers in the modern academic sense, and it is not always obvious how they understood the genre of their own work, or whether they would have recognized it as “philosophy” in today’s disciplinary sense. Spinoza, for example, lived outside the university and worked as a lens grinder; Nietzsche was trained as a philologist; and even Kant, though later a university professor, spent years as a private tutor. Hegel may be closer to the emergence of philosophy as a modern academic profession, but the broader point is that the philosophical canon long predates the contemporary professional form.
Today, we may need to distinguish between two meanings of philosophy. The first is philosophy as engagement with a specific body of literature, concepts, and inherited problems, a practice that in some ways resembles theology or Kalam today. The second is philosophy as the exploration of untrodden paths: a form of reflective judgment that tries not only to understand the world, but also to shape how we live within it. This second kind of philosophy has always changed with its medium. So, as the dominant medium shifts toward the visual, the auditory, and the hybrid forms of digital culture, it may be that what will become the next “philosophy,” in this broader sense, is already flourishing somewhere else.
Why is Substack better than https://philarchive.org/? Substack commentary is fun, but it doesn’t seem structured enough to really improve arguments— academic norms and Substack norms are pretty different. If you want open source publishing plus the status of journals, overlay journals seem the way to go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal.
This reminded me that philosophy has never really belonged to a single format. Whether it's dialogues, aphorisms, books, journals, or newsletters, the common thread seems to be the willingness to keep asking questions that matter.
This is partly why I got into story writing, and then came to find that those gatekeepers are also problematic. Story makes for wider access, but the modern-academic-industrial-complex is in need of disruption. So here we are.
I think an enormous virtue of the Substack ecosystem is that the demand signal keys you into where the *appetite for understanding* is flowing. It’s sort of not especially relevant in the scope of things if points have been technically made before, if their salience is so low that an audience hungry for ideas have never before been able to chew on them. I think Substack is great for helping find where the heartbeat is, even if as you say there is still a vital (or at least important) load-bearing role for the journal ecosystem.
I agree, in principle. However, I disagree that Substack itself is that medium, because Substack engages in shadowbanning and promoting a specific type of discourse. Hence also the convergence of ideas that other people have noticed.
I also agree that if Nietzsche was alive today he would definitely not try publishing in academic journals (he was already disappointed with academia in general in his own time and considered his years in academia somewhat of a waste of time). However, sometimes I think that, for various reasons, Nietzsche would not have been a philosopher at all today. But this is a bit irrelevant to the important topic you raise and has more to do with Nietzsche himself :)
While I’m sympathetic to a lot of what you say here, let me stick up for the journal ecosystem.
I totally agree Nietzsche would have a hard time publishing in today’s philosophy journals, and would more likely be writing for a broader and less specialized audience (like on Substack). But that’s not a reason to lament the existence of the journal ecosystem; after all, venues for reaching those broader and less specialized audiences exist, and don’t really compete with journals.
My sense is the sort of stuff that people write for a broader audience would get written whether or not professional academic philosophy existed, but the sort of stuff people write for professional philosophy journals probably doesn’t exist in a world without the journal ecosystem. Maybe not all of it, but especially the more technical stuff. I agree Nietzsche would be writing on Substack rather than in Phil Review, but would Timothy Williamson or David Lewis have ever come to prominence if they had to chase clicks on Substack to get noticed? I suspect not, and that would have been a serious loss.
Maybe it’s Panglossian, and it’s certainly self-serving, so take this with several grains of salt, but I think the existence of a “bureaucratic” track for establishing oneself as someone worth paying attention to on philosophical matters, alongside the more small-d democratic track of just attracting clicks/shares/comments, is a net improvement to the intellectual landscape.
After all, I wouldn’t have subscribed to your Substack in the first place if I didn’t already know you from (excellent!) journal articles. In a world where there’s so much writing, credible signals of what’s worth reading are really important. So even if you think plenty of people do their best writing outside the constraints of the journal system (and while I think that’s sometimes true, I also think there are some great journal articles), you might still be grateful for the journal system for certifying those people as ones to read once they stretch out a bit.
Edit: You basically say all this at the end with complement, not substitute. Should have read closer! Well, I guess I just agree, and am emphasizing that last bit.
I agree 100%. The journal system is indispensable for current philosophy as an institutional discipline.
And this "In a world where there’s so much writing, credible signals of what’s worth reading are really important." is right on.
Agree with all this. Which leads me to my problem with Substack: I agree with far too much of what the philosophers who I follow write on it. I worry that it is becoming a kind of vaguely heterodox echo chamber.
Interesting, hadn’t thought of that. There does seem to be a kind of self-selection going on doesn’t it?
Maybe philosophers on Substack should try to publish interviews/dialogues with the kinds of colleagues who aren’t on Substack?
Frequent cross-pollination for the win! The way each "platform" makes its money, and how they share and promote content is one of the things I think about, FWIW.
Things tend to converge, so I cannot wait until all of them offer better control of feeds, and have standards for moving content around, and good bookkeeping!
We're getting there!
Something I've noticed with substack is that occasionally I'll scroll through notes and get transported to an alternate universe of ideas, often an unpleasant one at that (e.g. Nazi substack, tankie substack, etc.). I agree broadly with your concern, but I wonder how much of it is substack as a platform vs algorithmic sorting.
If anything substack's algorithm is worse than other platforms, hence the occasional view through the veil.
Are there views you deem archetypical of a Substack philosophy writer?
Something like “there are all sorts of political problems with universities, institutional science, and so on, but I’ve got my own bespoke analysis of them and it’s much smarter than what the average culture warrior says”. Also “AI is going to be big and all my colleagues are too stupid to see this”. Plus intense love for Scott Alexander and way more interest in and openness to rationalism and rationalist ideas than is normal in academic philosophy (outside of the EAs). More generally, the political valence of philosophy Substack is markedly out of step with at least the public politics of analytic philosophy, which is mostly about very sophisticated ways of articulating and defending progressive stances on all manner of social and cultural issues.
I’m not sure, I have read some great stuff but I’m still new to the platform. Do you have thoughts on this?
Hmmm... I'm pretty new, too. I was asking because Robin McKenna said they experienced too much agreement, and I haven't had that issue yet. I was wondering what everyone was agreeing about.
If anything, maybe topics like consciousness and AI appear to be particularly prevelent on Substack right now? It's hard to differenciate what is written about frequently from what is simply popular, without data analysis or something.
I think this is due to two things, both related to the nature of the medium. One is the ease of curating who you follow (so you get selection effects), the second is the rapid iteration leads to faster convergence.
I largely agree, but do keep in mind that Nietzsche was largely ignored until well after his death. His books were published by small outfits, and largely ignored initially. That’s because the European intellectual climate he was working in wasn’t really that different from ours. And remember that for every Nietzsche there are thousands of cranks who think they are a misunderstood underrated Nietzsche. And they are wrong.
Very true. On the last point, I think that’s why gatekeeping has its value. But established philosophers (who have already proven themselves in the journal game) can do much with Substack.
Again, I don’t disagree, I just think it’s important to emphasise that if the 2026 Nietzsche is posting on Substack, it is highly likely that we won’t recognise or appreciate what he’s doing. It’s future generations who will have to do that.
In some moods I think I might bite the bullet that some of “best” philosophical writing of the past wouldn’t get published in today’s journals simply because it’s not that good. It’s too shoddy, too quick to conclusions, too reliant on rhetoric instead of arguments.
There’s something to this, but there’s also something to the idea that quick to conclusions rhetoric is sometimes valuable for getting an idea out there that only afterwards starts to get the careful investigation and argumentation.
I'm not so sure. If you want philosophical innovation and originality, Substack will win, we're just in the transition.
The modern metric oriented journal system was imported from the natural sciences and a single individual, Robert Maxwell, has shaped the landscape on how it should work from a financial point of view. Thus, we have the pressure to publish as part of the career itself (at a cost detrimental to the philosophers' way of life), which can lead to superficial stuff and taking the number of publications as the criteria for philosophical quality instead of what the author is really trying to say with all this. We all have heard author X has more than 15, 20, 30, 50, 60 publications!
Deep ideas need a long time to mature and that doesn't fit well with the journal system. It can work for some disciplines, but for philosophy, it would mean that the journal system is the definitive format to communicate thinking. Instead of the algorithm you have a small circle of peers acting as a firewall on what counts as philosophy and what doesn't.
However, just as the dialogues, the Summae, the letters, the essay and other means of philosophical communication had their time, the same will happen to the journal. Innovation can hardly come out of a system that is designed to capture incremental work. Author X takes what author Y said, and adds +1, and so on.
Why not accept that it is simply a device with a nice narrative surrounding it that it is there to build authority? If it is there to build authority in a niche, that would mean that it's barely more than Marketing.
I guess it would depend on which thinker you're talking about. But the great philosophers of the past aren't great because they avoided errors. They are great because they originated new and fruitful ways of thinking, even if they then went on to make massive errors. Examples include Aristotle's virtue ethics, Kantian morality centered on autonomy (which greatly influenced later liberalism), and Marx's materialist view of life/history.
agree with the thesis and find substack a refreshingly open and untedious experience
100%
I’ll stand up for the signposting! If you consider it tedious, you can skip it. But if you ever want to find the idea you vaguely recall being in here somewhere, that signposting is how you’ll be able to.
I agree with your take, but I think the problem goes deeper. Many of those we now call “philosophers” were not professional philosophers in the modern academic sense, and it is not always obvious how they understood the genre of their own work, or whether they would have recognized it as “philosophy” in today’s disciplinary sense. Spinoza, for example, lived outside the university and worked as a lens grinder; Nietzsche was trained as a philologist; and even Kant, though later a university professor, spent years as a private tutor. Hegel may be closer to the emergence of philosophy as a modern academic profession, but the broader point is that the philosophical canon long predates the contemporary professional form.
Today, we may need to distinguish between two meanings of philosophy. The first is philosophy as engagement with a specific body of literature, concepts, and inherited problems, a practice that in some ways resembles theology or Kalam today. The second is philosophy as the exploration of untrodden paths: a form of reflective judgment that tries not only to understand the world, but also to shape how we live within it. This second kind of philosophy has always changed with its medium. So, as the dominant medium shifts toward the visual, the auditory, and the hybrid forms of digital culture, it may be that what will become the next “philosophy,” in this broader sense, is already flourishing somewhere else.
Great article. Just what I needed. Subscribed n added to RSS feed. Be looking out for what you actually post.
Why is Substack better than https://philarchive.org/? Substack commentary is fun, but it doesn’t seem structured enough to really improve arguments— academic norms and Substack norms are pretty different. If you want open source publishing plus the status of journals, overlay journals seem the way to go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal.
This reminded me that philosophy has never really belonged to a single format. Whether it's dialogues, aphorisms, books, journals, or newsletters, the common thread seems to be the willingness to keep asking questions that matter.
This is partly why I got into story writing, and then came to find that those gatekeepers are also problematic. Story makes for wider access, but the modern-academic-industrial-complex is in need of disruption. So here we are.
I think an enormous virtue of the Substack ecosystem is that the demand signal keys you into where the *appetite for understanding* is flowing. It’s sort of not especially relevant in the scope of things if points have been technically made before, if their salience is so low that an audience hungry for ideas have never before been able to chew on them. I think Substack is great for helping find where the heartbeat is, even if as you say there is still a vital (or at least important) load-bearing role for the journal ecosystem.
I agree, in principle. However, I disagree that Substack itself is that medium, because Substack engages in shadowbanning and promoting a specific type of discourse. Hence also the convergence of ideas that other people have noticed.
I also agree that if Nietzsche was alive today he would definitely not try publishing in academic journals (he was already disappointed with academia in general in his own time and considered his years in academia somewhat of a waste of time). However, sometimes I think that, for various reasons, Nietzsche would not have been a philosopher at all today. But this is a bit irrelevant to the important topic you raise and has more to do with Nietzsche himself :)