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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 “pre-eminent world publisher of academic philosophy”?

Brian Leiter

Perusing the Cambridge University Press philosophy section on-line (it is not a user-friendly web site!), I was surprised to come across this embarrassing bit of hyperbole right at the start:

Cambridge University Press is the pre-eminent world publisher of academic philosophy, with contributions from such names as Ian Hacking, Bernard Williams, Hilary Putnam, Jon Elster, Tom Nagel and Richard Rorty. We publish textbooks, monographs, and reference books in all the major sub-disciplines of philosophy.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, the claim to be "pre-eminent" might have been less ridiculous, but these days my impression is that if any press can claim to be pre-eminent in philosophy, it is Oxford University Press, and that the resurgence of strong philosophy catalogues at presses like Princeton University Press and Routledge has also made the market much more competitive than it was not long ago.  Certainly, it now seems like the top young philosophers (call them "the under 50" crowd) publish quite often with Oxford, rarely with Cambridge, except in some areas of history of philosophy.   (And, of course, some of the famous philosophers mentioned, above, in the CUP blurb also publish with presses other than Cambridge, such as Oxford and Princeton.)  I am curious what readers think, both about CUP’s hyperbole (is it hyperbole?) and about whether any other press now dominates philosophy publishing as CUP perhaps once did.

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24 responses to “The “pre-eminent world publisher of academic philosophy”?”

  1. Matt B

    One's judgment may depend a bit on one's areas of expertise, but I'd say that CUP is definitely behind OUP, and perhaps also behind Blackwell, which has become one of the most respected academic presses for philosophy.

    Reply
  2. Matt Lister

    Oxford certainly publishes a lot more than Cambridge, and a lot more in more areas. This means they will have more good stuff, but they publish a fair amount that's more marginal, too. One area where I do think Cambridge is still tops is in books like the Cambridge Companions. To my mind they are still better than the competing anthologies (though of course specific volumes in any series might be better or worse.) There might be some worry about their diluting the band a bit with some of the new volumes coming out, though. Princeton is excellent in many areas but more limited in range of excellent books than is Oxford, I think. The one press that seems to have regressed a fair amount to me in the last few years is Cornell. For a while they were very good but lately they seem to be publishing more questionable stuff. (Of course, particular volumes may still be excellent. I'm just somewhat less likely to see the "Cornell" brand as a high indicator of quality than I was a few years ago.)

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  3. Chris R

    Most books that I own are from Oxford UP or Blackwell, not Cambridge. The stack of books I have checked out right now is mostly Oxford, and most of these are very recent ones, too.

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  4. Alan B

    As Matt B said, it tends to depend upon the area one is working in. Having glanced at the bookcase by my desk, my opinion is that Blackwell and OUP are the primary candidates for 'top press'. I wouldn't think that choosing one press makes much sense though. Harvard, Routledge, and Continuum aren't bad either, although they are not in the OUP-Blackwell Premier League.

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  5. Brian Leiter

    I'm surprised at the reference to Continuum, which, to date, strikes me as extremely weak. Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Harvard, Routledge, to some extent MIT (though MIT is less of a presence than they used to be in the heyday of the Bradford Books imprint), and perhaps Blackwell (more on that in a moment) dominate the philosophy market, and then there is a big drop-off, but even then I wouldn't put Continuum in the next cluster.

    I am also struck by the several references to Blackwell. My impression is that they have gotten out of the monograph market almost entirely, so that while they produce generally good quality textbook/coursebooks (like their Companions), they are no longer a press where work advancing particular subjects appears with great frequency anymore.

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  6. Jason B

    I'd say Oxford gets the top slot, but most of the really exciting things I've read lately have been from Princeton.

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  7. Jur W.

    I'd say OUP for the top spot, and Blackwell, Harvard, Routledge and Continuum after OUP. There are more good academic publishers though (Kluwer and Dover for example). Princeton is one of them, although I don't really see why Princeton is all THAT great.. Could someone tell me the titles of some good analytic philosophy books that Princeton has published lately?

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  8. Matt Lister

    "Could someone tell me the titles of some good analytic philosophy books that Princeton has published lately?"

    The Princeton Monographs in Philosophy series, edited by Harry Frankfurt, is full of excellent philosophy books though I guess many are not easily called "analytic philosophy". Since they are (mostly) all very good to excellent philosophy I suppose that matters more.

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  9. Chris S

    Cambridge is arguably clearly better than Oxford in certain areas, such as philosophy of biology.

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  10. Jason B

    How is Continuum better than Princeton? You must be living in a different world than I.

    Let's see, PUP has published Appiah and Estlund recently, off the top of my head.

    Reply
  11. Alan B

    It's worth making the point that we didn't nail down original work as a criterion for ranking. I think guidebooks etc are often a difficult thing to get just right. Routledge, OUP and Blackwell strike me as being particularly good at them both in terms of range and the quality of writing. Of course, books ostensibly marketed as guidebooks can contain interesting and innovative philosophy as well.
    I take the point about Continuum, I may have become overexcited as the books I have by them are, in my opinion, not half bad; and I shouldn't have overlooked Harvard. I'd still go with OUP as near-top for monographs though.
    (Oh, and Ashgate have an interesting series on Buddhism as/and philosophy. But I may be hounded out at this point).

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  12. Marina

    Most of the books I am working on right now are either from Stanford or Minnesota, but of course my "authors" would be discarded as garbage by a lot of people. Same thing holds for Continuum: it is publishing Badiou and some interesting monographs on Derrida lately (+ some very bad stuff). The only book I own from Princeton is Rorty's "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature."

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  13. Jorge

    From my specialty –Intellectual History– Cambdridge has been more concerned with sales than with ideas during the last years. There are many impressive publishing houses out there, not only Oxford, Routledge, or Blackwell, but Brill, De Gruyter, etc. What I really miss are publishing endeavours like those of the sixties, seventies, and eighties,… But the market has changed, and we are talking about a plain marketing statement, aren't we?

    Congratulations for the blog.

    Reply
  14. Ben C

    Brian —

    Blackwell publishes the Blackwell/Brown Lectures, which so far includes Kit Fine's _Semantic Relationism_ (2007) and Timothy Williamson's _The Philosophy of Philosophy_ (2008).

    Jur W. —

    Princeton has published Scott Soames's _Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century_ (vols. 1-2, 2003) and _Reference and Description_ (2005).

    Reply
  15. Brian Leiter

    I'd forgotten that the Williamson book appeared with Blackwell, and was not aware that this is part of a series. So I guess they are still doing some high quality monographs. Princeton U Press authors of late include Bernard Williams, Jaegwon Kim, Michael Forster, Raymond Geuss, Janet Broughton, John Cooper, David Estlund…that's off the top of my head. It's a small catalogue, but they are recruiting very good authors, and publishing what are important books for specialists.

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  16. Eric

    Blackwell does seem to focus on the textbook/coursebooks these days, and the ones they have a pretty good, but they do still have some pretty nice monographs. Their "Public Philosophy" series has nice monographs on terrorism, torture, creationism, and corporate greed by folks like Seumas Miller, Sahotra Sarkar, and Lisa Newton.

    I would agree that OUP easily outpaces CUP in terms of overall quality, but they also outpace them greatly in volume. Whenever I get emails (from both publishers) on new releases, I usually want to get Oxford books 3-to-1 over Cambridge books.

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  17. Neil

    A philosopher (who may not want to be named) told me that he had pitched a book to CUP, and had had the response "we're not interested in the concerns of analytic philosophy".

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  18. Fritz Allhoff

    What an interesting question! I have lots of things to say, but shall limit myself to a few:

    1. Oxford and Blackwell are the biggest philosophy publishers, so it's not surprising that they're who publish most of the books on our bookshelves. This doesn't necessarily mean that they put out the best books, though they certainly put out good ones.

    2. As people have said, Blackwell does few academic monographs. They put out excellent (and affordable) books for course support (and public consumption).

    3. Cambridge is pretty small compared to Oxford; again, this doesn't make its titles any worse. The problem with Cambridge is the pricing structure wherein they put out a bunch of books in series such that the books cost $80. This is just silly and really a strike against them. (Don't get me started on Springer and some other places that put out–or only put out–books priced for libraries.)

    4. Harvard and Princeton don't accept "unsolicited proposals", which I think strongly counts against them. They also have very small philosophy lines. But to say, as they effectively do, that they'll only publish a small number of titles from very senior people in the field is, in addition to being flat out rude, just cherry picking. I don't think it reflects well on a press–or its editorial staff–to make things that easy. I also don't think it's good for the profession.

    5. Chicago and MIT are very good presses, despite the lack of mention they have above. They're smaller, but the quality of the books is very high; I think that it's as high (on average) as Oxford. Well, it is. There are just fewer titles on your bookshelves from these places because they publish fewer titles. (As an author, there are added advantages to working with an editor who is presiding over a list of 100 books than a list of 1000, too. There are drawbacks to working with very small university presses that won't do a good job at marketing, exposure, etc., but these two hardly fail those criteria.)

    6. As far as I can tell, Continuum and Ashgate are basically terrible. Ashgate closed one of its primary philosophy lines last year, so it's a moot point whether that's even a good philosophy press since it isn't (any more) a philosophy press at all. Continuum effectively put out an "open call for books" last year; any serious publisher wouldn't do anything close to this as they'd otherwise be inundated by proposals. (I wish I still had the language from this email, which was laughable.) I don't think these places are much above vanity presses.

    7. While nobody talked about it, it's an interesting question the extent to which we see philosophy as a book-driven discipline at all. Certainly that's orthogonal to this discussion, but something I was thinking about. I certainly look around my office and see all sorts of books, but most of us are writing journal articles. I'd wonder what people thought about the relationships between books and journals in our field, but that's a separate issue altogether.

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  19. Thom Brooks

    Let me add that other publishers, such as Columbia University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Hart Publishing, and Palgrave have some excellent titles, at least in the areas of political and legal philosophy.

    Reply
  20. Charlie

    I'm sort of surprised no one has mentioned Hackett. Their list of authors, from Abelard and Aquinas to Fichte and Kant to Spinoza and Voltaire, is pretty darned impressive: high ratio of quality to volume.

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  21. Marina

    I think that it's quite an overstatement claiming that Continuum is close to a vanity press. I am not saying it's in the top tier(s), but they are still publishing some important authors (Badiou, Virilo + Heidegger, for example), and some nice monographs.

    Reply
  22. Rob Tempio, Princeton University Press

    I just want to enter the fray not to make a plea on our behalf (though I do appreciate the kind words above) to say that Princeton does accept unsolicited proposals according to our website (I receive dozens a week). The only thing our website specifies is that we don't accept them via e-mail.

    http://press.princeton.edu/faqs.html#ms

    Reply
  23. Kieran

    I'm sort of surprised no one has mentioned Hackett. Their list of authors, from Abelard and Aquinas to Fichte and Kant to Spinoza and Voltaire, is pretty darned impressive: high ratio of quality to volume.

    I think most of those are in the over-70 group and haven't been very productive recently, so even if they are nominally advising students they should probably still be downweighted.

    Reply
  24. Brian Leiter

    Kieran, as you know, Richard Heck has long been concerned about the arbitrary exclusion of dead faculty from the faculty lists to be evaluated, and we are going to revisit that question this year.

    Reply

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