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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

The Best Philosophy Papers of 2007?

Brian Leiter

Via Keith DeRose (Yale), I see that the Philosophers’ Annual is coming back to life, and so will try to pick some of the best philosophy papers of 2007.  Their process is a bit opaque (but their track record is pretty good), but I believe that members of the editorial board nominate papers, and then the four lead editors (only two of whom are still at Stony Brook, as Baynes has moved to Syracuse and Ludlow to Toronto) pick the winners from those papers nominated. 

So readers, which papers from 2007 would you pick as among the "best"? The editorial board is a bit thin on scholars of ancient philosophy and post-Kantian Continental philosophy (though fortunately one of the four lead editors, Baynes, is an important scholar of German philosophy), so suggestions in those fields would be particularly welcome.   Signed comments only.  Please be patient, they may take awhile to appear.  I may post my own picks in a couple of days, but will let others weigh in first.

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5 responses to “The Best Philosophy Papers of 2007?”

  1. delan

    I nominate Jeff McMahan for "The Sources and Status of Just War Principles," Journal of Military Ethics 6, no. 2, special issue: "Just and Unjust Wars: Thirty Years On" (2007): 91-106. Professor McMahan continues to do first class work on the ethics of war and the war on terror.

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  2. Keith DeRose

    The selection process seems to be changing a bit, but these basics seem to remain: Members of the nominating board nominate up to the three papers each, and at the end of the process, a group of philosophers reads all of the remaining candidates and decides on 10 winners. What seems to be changing is, first, that a middle stage is being added in which the Nominating Board is used to narrow the candidate papers down from the set of all the nominated papers to a smaller group that will be evaluated at the final stage, and, second, there seems to be a change in who will be doing the evaluation at the final stage.

    As the PA has always admitted, their task is an impossible one — they are extremely unlikely to get the right 10 papers (even supposing there is such a thing as the "right" 10). But it does seem to me a worthwhile project, especially given the way the last stage of the process is executed, with a group of philosophers carefully reading and comparing some excellent papers to pick some as especially noteworthy. Having a paper selected for inclusion seems to be a line on one's CV, that, together with other props, might convince hiring committees, for example, or, more generally, those who dispense the various goodies of our profession, to take a closer look at one's candidacy for whatever it is one is candidate for.

    But an important part of the process is getting a large set of excellent papers suggested to the nominators. Hence, the blegs (is that the right term?) asking for suggestions. Suggesting a paper shouldn't be construed as your saying that you think the paper should be finally chosen. That would be very hard to say, as it would depend on what the competition is. It just means that you think the paper is excellent enough that it should be considered, and perhaps that you think it's good enough that you wouldn't find it very surprising if it were chosen as among the 10 best for the year.

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  3. the hanged man

    Ian Hacking's paper in Analysis, "The contingencies of ambiguity"

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  4. Ali Rizvi

    Charles Travis, "Reason's Reach," European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 15, Number 2, August 2007, pp. 225-248.

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  5. Kalbir Sohi

    John Macfarlane's paper, “Relativism and Disagreement”, Philosophical Studies 132 (2007), 17–31 is excellent

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