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 nine broad categories: 

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

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. In addition to the portal, we also maintain a large bibliographical database, an e-course portal and the "fishpond", a tool for triple-blind refereeing.

The philosophical microcosm of Switzerland is vast and diverse. Even after years, sometimes decades, of close acquaintance, we continue to 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. We aim to have "presentation pages" for all institutions and organisations that organise or host philosophical activities and to have a calendar of philosophical events in Switzerland that is as complete as possible. 

To live up to our ideal of sustainability, we are forced to constantly remake our portal. This is why we spent so much time reworking our vast repertory of articles, which we want to re-typeset in markdown and register for DOIs, as proper publications. 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. 

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 deplorable ineptitude, but rely, of course, on voluntary engagement (note the catch-22). Nevertheless, you may help us a little 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 academia. We seek to continue this tradition and try to pro-actively procure high-quality content, in particular articles that are likely to lead to (philosophical, political, societal, ethical, ...) debate. We publish this content under a CC-license, which protects it from plagiarism but makes it freely available. By encouraging philosophers to speak out and position themselves, we hope not only to improve philosophy, but also to improve the world.

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- about whether they should study philosophy, and about where and why as well.  Marketing philosophy has a broader remit than student recruitment. We believe that, by and large, the world would be 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 (from accepted manuscript to publication in both .pdf and .html format) 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. We would like to encourage people

• to share material, e.g. their own academic works, their teaching supports, their experiences, at university, in high-school, and abroad;
• to collaborate on the "definitive" philosophy bibliography, which is fully indexed and scholarly correct;
• to share information about themselves and their interests (on their profiles), their research projects (in the form of articles) and their projects and initiatives (by posting on the notice-board).

If you have any further or different 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 on the portal itself. 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. If you have usable material, e.g. videos from pandemic times, detailled syllabi, reading lists etc. we will gladly make them available. Just let us know.