Why This Journal?

By Evan Lundstrom and D. Seiple, Co-editors

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Towards the end of the summer weather in 2024, the New York City Philosophy Club began meeting twice a month, and by mid-autumn our attendance on the Lower East Side was close to a hundred bodies, dispersed into huddled discussions of three or four.  At the outset of each meeting, each of our random clusters was handed some very short quotes and some very gentle options for expanding the discussion within our little circle – on topics like “Justice,” or “Harmony” or “Consciousness” (and so forth). The result has been a lively expression of individual points of view and a fruitful opportunity for networking. 

There is no expectation of sticking to anyone’s particular agenda in these sessions, for our diversity is our strength, certainly.  And for a number of us, doing philosophy amounts to just this --  offering our latest musings, which fly forth like sparks off a bonfire.  Very often what gets uttered in the moment gets dimmed in the memory — which can feel like a great loss for some of us. Still, the personal connections often linger beyond the heat of the evening. And that’s all to the good.

For many of us however, doing philosophy presents a rather different opportunity as well – a chance to sustain a conversation over time and to pay closer attention to the form those conversations take.  In fact quite a few of us began using WhatsApp to experiment with a General Chat format, which for a while produced a useful record of the ideas we raised with each other. There we took logical argumentation rather seriously, and we began to see how much remained hidden from view until logic had its way with us.  Nevertheless, we could also see that despite the written record, once again many of our best thoughts were lost just because we couldn’t recover them from the long haystack of past entries.  And even if we could, by then the original spark that lit that particular topic would have already turned its brightness elsewhere.

So maybe conversation is not enough. If we had memories like Socrates, maybe like him we might deplore the invention of writing as a weakening of the mind. But it’s late in the cultural day to turn those sails around.  Today, if we want to explain our ideas to others (and even to ourselves), perhaps we’d better take the time and thought to pin them down, just to formulate them well enough for others to take them seriously. For that reason, writing philosophy might be a necessary complement to simply talking it all out.

So, with wind in our sails, we’ll venture forth into the vast ocean of ideas. Hop aboard!