Current issue: Volume 33 available now
Editors-in-Chief: Carrie-Ann Biondi and Irfan Khawaja
View the Editorial Board
Reason Papers is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal appearing online each fall. It features full-length Articles and Discussion Notes, along with Symposia, Book Reviews, and Review Essays. Our Fall 2011 issue inaugurates a new section of the journal, “Afterwords,” devoted to brief commentaries on contemporary issues, including original translations from non-English sources.
As a “journal of interdisciplinary normative studies,” Reason Papers publishes work whose content is “normative in the philosophical sense.” As an interdisciplinary journal, Reason Papers’s mission is guided by an ideal of disciplinary integration that extends beyond philosophical reflection on normative concepts. We welcome work in any academic field, as long as it meets the relevant standards of rigor for the fields it discusses, and as long as its normative implications are clear or made explicit.
Reason Papers is a forum for inquiry and debate across a wide spectrum of views rather than the instrument of any one ideology, party, or camp. Thus, Reason Papers is not edited for conformity with any particular philosophical or ideological perspective, is neither aligned with nor endorses any other institution or organization, and receives no funding from any outside source. The journal’s expenses are paid out of income from the sale of back issues, and out of the Editors’ pockets. (The links listed below under “Related Sites” are suggestive of journals or institutions with intellectual interests that overlap with those of Reason Papers, but involve no formal endorsement by the Editors, the Advisory Board, or the journal itself.)
Reason Papers 32 (Fall 2010) was the journal’s last issue to be published in a hard-copy/paid subscription format. Starting with Volume 33 (Fall 2011), Reason Papers has gone to a free, fully online format. All issues, including the current one, are now available for download in the Archive section. Reason Papers is an Open Access journal (ISSN: 03631893): readers thus have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of all content in our Archives for free (i.e., without charge either to the user or to his or her institution). This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access. For further information on Open Access journals, consult the Directory of Open Access Journals.
For a detailed discussion of our conception of the journal, read the Fall 2011 Editorial Essay (PDF, 6 pages).
Recent and forthcoming contributions of note include:
- Special Issue: “Imagining Better: Philosophical Issues in Harry Potter” (forthcoming, June 2012), edited by Carrie-Ann Biondi.
- Sari Nusseibeh and critics: What Is a Palestinian State Worth? (forthcoming, Fall 2012).
- Daniel O. Dahlstrom on Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals (forthcoming, Fall 2012).
- Ole Martin Moen on life as ultimate value in Ayn Rand’s ethics (forthcoming, Fall 2012).
- Lamont Rodgers on injustice in initial appropriation (forthcoming, Fall 2012)
- “Property and Progress”: Gordon Barnes queries David Schmidtz’s defense of the right to property (forthcoming, Fall 2012).
- Roger Scruton on Dmitri Tymoczko’s A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (forthcoming, Fall 2012).
- Thomas L. Hogan on Jeffrey Friedman ed., What Caused the Financial Crisis (forthcoming, Fall 2012).
- Irfan Khawaja on Neil J. Kressel’s The Sons of Pigs and Apes: Muslim Antisemitism and the Conspiracy of Silence, and Thomas Leddy’s The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (forthcoming, Fall 2012).
- David Cook on Ibn Warraq’s Virgins? What Virgins? and Other Essays (forthcoming, Fall 2012).
- Letters from Lahore: Khalil Ahmad on “internal sovereignty,” the “black coat” movement, and the death of Osama bin Laden.
- Also forthcoming: reviews of Robert Mayhew’s Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living, 2nd ed., and Gary Weiss’s Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul (forthcoming, June 2013), and more.
For information about recent and forthcoming Symposia, visit our Forthcoming Symposia page, as well as the Call for Papers for our Symposium on the “Epistemology, Ethics, and Politics of Emergencies” (under “News”).
For information on writing a book review, go to our Call for Book Reviews (under “News”).
For information on ordering hard copy back issues of Reason Papers, visit our Ordering page.
For information on submitting a manuscript to Reason Papers, visit our Submissions page.
Highlights from our Archives: Sadek J. al-Azm on the Arab Spring in Syria; Timothy Sandefur’s libertarian defense of the U.S. Civil War; David Keyt on Aristotle as anarchist; Crispin Sartwell’s Thoreau; J.G. Merquior on Ernest Gellner’s Psychoanalytic Moment; Joseph Boyle on Daniel Dennett’s Elbow Room; Chris Sciabarra on Ayn Rand’s critique of ideology; James Lennox vs. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. on the metaphysics and epistemology of health.
Plus: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, 25 years later: Douglas Den Uyl’s 1988 Reason Papers review.
Special thanks to Stephan Kinsella for managing the PDF archives, to IT expert David Veksler, to Israel Curtis for site design and for moving us to WordPress, and to Jeff Tucker of the Mises Institute for volunteering to host the site.
This page modified May 22, 2012 (IK).