Philosophy Now

• 1. Introduction

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  Philosophy Now arrived on news-stands in May 1991, and it was the first general philosophy magazine of its kind. Rick Lewis, who had been working out of his home town of Ipswich in England, launched it as a quarterly. The very first issue carried an article on free will by Antony Flew, a philosopher then known for his arguments in favour of atheism. That choice of subject and author turned out to be fitting. Years later, the same pages would carry one of the most talked-about reversals in modern philosophy.

  The questions the magazine set out to answer were simple but ambitious: could serious philosophical thinking find an audience beyond universities? Could articles by academics reach people who had never sat in a lecture hall? Thirty years of festivals, awards, and controversies suggest the answer was yes. But getting there required a transatlantic alliance, a Persian translation, and an annual fight against stupidity.

• 2. A Transatlantic Alliance

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  In 1997, a group of American philosophers, including Raymond Pfeiffer and Charles Echelbarger, approached the American Philosophical Association with a proposal: the United States needed its own general philosophy magazine. The APA's executive director, Eric Hoffman, responded by arranging a meeting in Philadelphia. Lewis was invited.

  What emerged from that Philadelphia meeting was not a rival publication but a merger of ambitions. The American group agreed to join forces with Lewis and develop Philosophy Now together. From that point on, the magazine operated with two editorial boards, one in the United Kingdom and one in the United States. Distribution in the US was handled by the Philosophy Documentation Center. In 2000, the quarterly schedule gave way to a bimonthly one, and the editorial structure that exists today took shape: Lewis as editor in chief, Grant Bartley as editor of the print edition, and Bora Dogan overseeing the digital editions.

• 3. The Flew Reversal

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  Antony Flew had built his reputation as one of philosophy's most articulate defenders of atheism. That made the letter he published in the magazine's August/September 2004 issue genuinely startling. In it, Flew indicated for the first time that his position on the existence of God had changed.

  Newspapers around the world picked up the story, and most of them traced it back directly to that Philosophy Now letter. The episode illustrated something about the magazine's standing: it had become a venue where a shift in one philosopher's thinking could become international news. Flew had contributed to the magazine on and off since that very first issue on free will, which gave the moment an added layer of continuity.

• 4. Columns, Cartoons, and Dear Socrates

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  Raymond Tallis writes a regular column called Tallis in Wonderland. Peter Adamson contributes a column titled Philosophy Then. These named columns sit alongside book reviews, fiction, film criticism, cartoons, and readers' letters in each issue.

  For some years the magazine also ran a column called Dear Socrates, framed as an agony-aunt advice section supposedly written by a reincarnation of the Athenian philosopher. The conceit was light-hearted, but it spoke to the magazine's broader strategy: philosophy did not have to be solemn to be serious. Peter Rickman was among the most regular contributors in the early years, giving the publication a recognisable core of voices as it found its readership across the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and Canada.

• 5. The Fight Against Stupidity

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  In 2011, the magazine launched the Philosophy Now Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity. The first winner was the philosopher Mary Midgley. The list that followed reads as a survey of people who had spent careers challenging bad reasoning in public life: Ben Goldacre in 2012, Raymond Tallis in 2013, Noam Chomsky in 2014, and Peter Singer in 2016.

  In October 2015, the award broke with precedent. For the first time, it went to a children's author: Cressida Cowell. James Randi won in 2017, Robert Sapolsky in 2018, Angela Phillips in 2019, and Jon Ronson in 2020. Each year the ceremony took place at Conway Hall in London, with the winner delivering an acceptance speech. The magazine also won recognition from outside: the Bertrand Russell Society presented it with its award for 2016.

• 6. Festivals at Conway Hall

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  Conway Hall in Bloomsbury, central London, became the home of the Philosophy Now Festival beginning in 2011. That first event was held partly to mark the magazine's twentieth anniversary. It drew contributions from more than a dozen philosophy organisations, among them Philosophy For All and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

  The festival ran every two years: 2013-2015, January 2018, and 2020. Each was a single-day event, which kept the format concentrated and accessible to the general public the magazine had always aimed to reach. The 2011 festival also hosted the inaugural Fight Against Stupidity award ceremony, tying the two new ventures together in the same space. A Charles Taylor interview published in 2009 had already shown how the magazine's conversations could land beyond philosophical circles, when Taylor's dismissive remarks about an atheist bus poster campaign generated controversy in Canadian newspapers.