Philosophy in the Public Sphere

Présentation

In 2023, the Revue internationale de philosophie issued an open, rolling calling for proposals for special issues that examined, in a series of articles, a single question, problem or aspect of any domain of philosophical reflection, without privileged any single school of thought or philosophical tradition. To encourage wider engagement with contemporary issues of concern to philosophy, in the spring of 2024 the journal launched an essay prize, open to all, for articles written in English or French. Our hope is to renew this essay prize every two years.
The inaugural essay prize took as its theme : « Philosophy in the Public Sphere. » Rather than the somewhat narrower domain of « Public Philosophy, » this topic was chosen for its more encompassing range, the better to solicit as diverse a number of entries as possible. Despite this ambition, the editors recognize that any representativeness of this vast area of philosophical inquiry could only ever be a specious one. How can one begin to provide a representative sample of a category of philosophical discourse that applies just as much to philosophers who volunteer in hospitals or prisons as it does to those who write for newspapers, record podcasts, or whose work carefully probes the very concept of « the public » itself?
This special issue of the Revue internationale de philosophie contains only a very small selection of the rich diversity of the numerous articles submitted for the prize, in French and in English, from a variety of different philosophical traditions and by philosophers from around the world, some with institutional affiliations and some without. Each article selected for publication evokes, in its own way, the heterogeneity of philosophy as it is « done » —or might be done—in the public domain, that is, in contexts that already differ wildly from each other. We hope that the differences in both approach and style of the five articles selected for inclusion in this issue are suggestive of the diversity of this field, with the articles that follow including both traditional philosophical analyses of the very categories of « public » and « public philosophy » as well as reflection on the more tangible challenges of « doing » philosophy in (and sometimes with) the public.