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The “Top Ten” Academic Presses in Philosophy

Brian Leiter

So the earlier poll, with more than 500 votes, is now complete.  The results struck me as fairly sensible.  Oxford University Press was the hands-down winner, and Cambridge University Press was a distant, but clear, second.  Blackwell came in third, and Harvard University Press fourth.  Three presses were fairly close to each other in the poll, but distant fifths from Harvard:  MIT Press, Routledge, and Princeton University Press.  Then there was another drop in votes before Cornell University Press and University of Chicago Press, which were very close.  Yale University Press was a somewhat distant 10th, with Kluwer/Springer not far behind.

Some readers pointed out that Oxford may get an advantage from the fact that it publishes more philosophy than any other press–though the fact that OUP publishes leading work in every sub-field of the discipline probably ought to count in OUP's favor.  But Oxford certainly has a much larger catalogue than most of the others.  PUP, which may have the smallest catalogue, also, in my opinion, may have the highest 'per capita' quality.  OUP, CUP, MIT, and Routledge all publish work in Continental philosophy quite regularly.  Harvard is an unusual case, and not just because their catalogue is small, but because, as one friend put it to me, their catalogue actually has "a philosophical position" (roughly anti-naturalist, and whatever is on the agenda at Harvard and Pittsburgh, plus some ethics):  this means Harvard publishes important books within the "party line," but nothing at all in many of the most lively areas of current research.

Thoughts from readers on the results?  Signed comments only, meaning a full name and an e-mail consistent with that.

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11 responses to “The “Top Ten” Academic Presses in Philosophy”

  1. Michael Rosen

    Three thoughts.

    Deliberately or not, the survey is North America oriented. There are presses with strong philosophy publishing records that don't publish independently in the U.S. that could have been included. I'm thinking specifically of Polity Press (declaration of interest: I'm a Polity Press author).

    Yes, H.U.P. seems to have a strong conception of what sort of philosophy it wants to publish — but so do many other presses (the sort of Continental Philosophy books Routledge publishes wouldn't get a look in at many others). Provided that good books don't fail to find decent publishers somewhere else, I tend to think that that can be a good thing (declaration of interest: I'm also an H.U.P. author).

    It's sad that Penguin weren't one of the publishers on your list. Once upon a time they commissioned outstanding works in philosophy (or took them on once they'd been successful for other publishers in hardback — Mackie's Ethics, Hodges' Logic, Williams' Descartes. I can't remember the last Penguin philosophy book I bought.

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  2. Brian Leiter

    I guess I think it a bid odd to describe the survey as "North America"-oriented when the top three presses are UK-based. Polity has only recently entered the philosophy market in a serious way, though it has long had a strong publishing presence in critical theory, of course.

    No other press has the ideological agenda of Harvard University Press. You are thinking of the Routledge of 20 years ago, Michael–Routledge Philosophy under Tony Bruce is an entirely different operation (indeed, at least one of its authors in Continental philosophy has even edited the Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, or so I've heard!).

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  3. Mike Otsuka

    My voting tracked my impression of the quality of the work published in moral and political philosophy in recent years — not because I regard this slice of the catalogue as a good proxy for the overall quality of a press, but rather because this is all I have to go on, as I’m not sufficiently on top of which books are published by which presses outside of my AOSs.

    My sense was that Harvard, Oxford, and Princeton stood out, in roughly that order, as publishers of the best work in moral and political philosophy, and I suspect that this is not an eccentric view. Given my tunnel vision, I was surprised to discover that Harvard and Princeton did so much less well in attracting the votes of philosophers more generally.

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  4. dankaufman!

    For history of early modern philosophy, Oxford and Cambridge are fairly even at the top. Cambridge seems to publish more early modern monographs than Oxford, but Oxford has Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy. Too close to call.

    And Brian is right: Routledge, under Tony Bruce, has definitely changed for the better.

    Reply
  5. Malte Dahlgrün

    A useful poll, thanks. What amazed me is that MIT Press only ended up fifth. I’d still tended to think of it as the number two publisher behind OUP (at least regarding my own AOSs) and I’m surprised that no one else so far seems to be surprised at its ending up where it did. Does this have something to do with the fact that the commentators so far work in practical (moral/political/legal) philosophy, as opposed to theoretical philosophy?

    A leading philosopher of cognitive science once told me that he’d had an offer to publish his first book with OUP but turned it down in favour of MIT Press. And that was only a few years ago (he did go on to publish with OUP after that). The idea didn’t sound outright crazy to me. Considering where the important monographies throughout the 1980s and 1990s got published in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of cognitive science (plus perhaps, philosophy of language), MIT Press clearly was the top press in those regards for a long time. Are they perceived as having lost so much ground since, even in areas like these?

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  6. Michael Rosen

    We could argue whether Polity's huge Critical Theory list (Habermas especially) is or isn't part of the "philosophy market". But that wasn't my point. I wanted to draw attention to the way that many U.K. presses, like Polity, publish in conjunction with U.S. partners. That used to be true even of Oxford (thus my copy of A Theory of Justice is an O.U.P. book, Jerry Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: a Defence is O.U.P. in the U.K. and Princeton in the U.S.) I assumed that you'd deliberately left out publishers like Polity that don't have a major presence in the U.S.

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  7. Brian Leiter

    Michael: certainly publishing in Critical Theory is part of the 'philosophy market,' but it's a rather specialized niche, and would make Polity much more narrow than any of the other presses included.

    Malte: I was surprised MIT Press did as well as it did–probably has something to do with the readership of this blog. The heydey of the very good 'Bradford Books' imprint is long past, it has seemed to me. They no doubt still have a strong cog sci niche, but that is but one niche.

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  8. Richard

    Why was Northwestern not listed as an option? Does it no longer publish philosophy? A lot of the rather-handsome Merleau-Ponty volumes on my shelf were done by Northwestern (and they're new editions too – less than 5 years old; not the older black editions).

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  9. Simon Kirchin

    Thanks for the poll, Brian. I was surprised not to see Palgrave-Macmillan included. (And, yes, a declaration of interest: I'm under contract to write them a book on metaethics.) Yes, they publish textbooks and, yes, they issue editions of classic works. But they have recently been publishing a fair few research books, and many decent ones. Michael Heumer's Intuitionism, say, comes to mind. They publish stand-alone collections of new research papers. They also have series of collected new papers, such as the 'New Waves' series and a planned series of argumentative books (not textbooks) on the 'state of the subject'. And, to switch focus, they do publish continental philosophy, but there is lots of analytic stuff as well.

    We might be in a grey area, similar to that regarding Synthese and your journals poll. But if, say, Continuum and Ashgate are included in this one, I'd also include P-M.

    Cheers,

    Reply
  10. Craig Duncan

    Westview Press might be another publisher to add, if there is ever another version of this poll done.

    Reply
  11. Chris Coughlin

    FYI, there no longer is a Kluwer. It is simply Springer (philosophy) now. However some of the older journals and books in Springer's archive may still have the Kluwer logo on the copyright page, etc., so I see where the confusion might come in.

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