Our Activities

In addition to our research projects and the editorial work for the OA publication of the international philosophy journal Dialectica, the team members are mostly busy with running, improving, remaking and rehauling the portal. This work falls into seven broad categories: 

• maintenance of the portal
• gathering of information
• network for philosophers
• philosophy magazine
• marketing philosophy
• service to the profession/discipline
• IT infrastructure

Our work presupposes and depends on a stable, flexible and powerful IT infrastructure, a convenient content management system and the provision of interactive tools, allowing the philosophical community to cooperate in the maintenance of their portal. 

To live up to our ideal of sustainability, we are forced to constantly remake our portal. Our portal rehaul taskforce is checking the actuality of our information pages, fixing broken links, updating logos and lists. If you find inaccurate information, please tell us. 

The philosophical microcosm of Switzerland is vast and diverse. Even after years of close acquaintance, we discover captivating activities, research groups, philosophical projects and philosophically interesting people every day! Our gathering of information is never completed and we cannot do it all by ourselves - so please please help us and tell us what you know. 

Philosophy and networking do not naturally go together: philosophers are very good at not noticing what happens around them, are quick to forget and prone to ignore even (or perhaps even particularly) the things "closest to home", people working on similar topics, participating in similar groups, interested in similar questions... Our community pages are designed to address this, but rely, of course, on voluntary engagement. You may help us a little bit in this difficult endeavour by telling people to subscribe to the newsletter...

For many years, Philosophie.ch has published articles (formerly called "blog posts") of philosophical interest and likely to catch the attention of a wider, non-specialist public both in- and outside the discipline. We seek to continue this tradition and to pro-actively procure high-quality content, in particular articles that are likely to lead to (philosophical, political, societal, ethical, ...) debate. 

Universities, increasingly even in Switzerland, have an interest in attracting students. We aim to help them in that endeavour, not just by increasing enrolment numbers, but by providing information that helps potential philosophy students making an informed and reasonable choice, not just about whether they should study philosophy, but about where and why as well. 

Marketing philosophy, however, has a broader remit than student recruitment. We believe that, by and large, the world were a better place if philosophy played a larger role, not necessarily by leading to better decisions (though that may occasionally also be very relevant), but by making the decision process more democratic, more transparent, more understandable and more rational (four times the same thing). 

In the course of our cooperation with the international philosophy journal Dialectica, Philosophie.ch has become a publishing house, specialised in the Open Access publication of philosophy journals and books. As part of the philosophers' workbench project we have made our entire workflow publicly available and we are interested in receiving declarations of interest from other publication venues. Depending on additional financial support, we would glady publish, Open Access and in some customised, flexible and sustainable form, other philosophy journals and philosophical monographs, within or outside our Dialectica Library series. 

While we are at it, we gladly provide services to the profession, most eagerly in the "help people to help themselves" mode, by providing space, opportunity and incentive to make the work philosophers do for the profession more visible, more useful, more productive. If you have an idea, please let us know.

In addition to the help we provide others to make their educational efforts more visible and more fruitful, we aim at establishing an educational plattform ourselves. We have developped a number of low-entry-threshold online courses and aim to make educational material for high-school and university students more widely available.