Exploring the Future of Philosophy

About this Initiative

We are a group of academics, mostly philosophers, with nearly a century of collective college and university teaching experience. We’re greatly concerned by cutbacks to institutional philosophy in the US, and began meeting in October 2022 to think about new ways to support the teaching and study of philosophy. 

Our discussions keep pointing in two directions — first to the need to document the problem, and second to the need for an alternative and complementary institutional home for philosophy.

We’re tentatively calling that complementary institutional home an Independent Philosophy Institute (IPI). The core idea of a nonprofit Independent Philosophy Institute is to offer small, online philosophy seminars across a wide range of topics, texts, figures, periods, movements, and cultures. It would be administered primarily by philosophers, and exist outside conventional colleges and universities, not subject to their budgets, curricula, staffing levels, or enrollment expectations. 

Our hope, perhaps after a start-up period, is that faculty could be paid and students could earn transferable credits. (We realize that not all faculty will need to be paid and not all students will need credit.) A related hope is that many or most of its courses would be free of charge, even if it charged tuition for other courses to raise revenue to pay teachers and cover basic operating expenses. The idea is still in the planning stage, and we’re thinking hard about finances, quality control, curriculum, accreditation, governance, and infrastructure, among other central issues.

Planning Committee

• Anthony Beavers (Visiting Associate Researcher and Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science, Indiana University; Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, University of Evansville)

• Catherine Kemp (Associate Professor of Philosophy, John Jay College CUNY)

• Peter Suber (Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Earlham College; Senior Advisor on Open Access, Harvard University)

• Mark Valenzuela (Project Manager, Academic Compliance and Accreditation, Washington University in St. Louis)