PEA Soup 3.0: The Launch

We are excited to welcome you to the revamped, retooled, rebooted, and revitalized PEA Soup, now on the WordPress platform and supported by the Prindle Institute of Ethics, out of DePauw University, directed by Andrew Cullison. When last we spoke with you in December 2015, we (the Daves Shoemaker and Sobel) had announced we were stepping down from PEA Soup and had invited folks to write us with ideas for moving the blog forward, rather than just shutting it down. Andy Cullison offered many excellent ideas for the blog that the Prindle Institute could support, and the number of exciting new possibilities persuaded us to stay on board as co-editors for the foreseeable future. We think with Prindle’s support, PEA Soup will be better than ever. We expect and encourage a serious increase in content without any loss of quality.

Our aim is to provide much more regular content, without compromising PEA Soup’s ongoing commitment to serious, informed discussion of matters in Philosophy, Ethics, and Academia (the PEA in PEA Soup). Of course, our specialty has long been moral philosophy, broadly construed to include metaethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, moral psychology, moral responsibility, political philosophy, legal philosophy, and more. We intend to be the place on the web for discussions of these topics. More announcements will follow concerning directions of expansion for Soup. We will not rest until all philosophers working in the relevant areas are in the Soup.

We also aim to broaden our reach, and here is where the Prindle Institute will be especially helpful, as they have the resources to bring attention to our discussions across the spectrum of social media and online discourse.

We bring with us most of our previous stellar contributors, and they bring with them commitments to post more regularly. To encourage this, we will have regular awards for excellent posts, ones that present original ideas and/or generate a healthy discussion. We also have the option of giving awards to excellent commentators in order to encourage high quality and regular commenting from our readers (to get them to move from lurking to speaking).

We also bring with us our partnerships with all of the world’s leading moral and political philosophy journals, and we have a mix of old and new faces heading up these liaisons. Chike Jeffers and Daniel Star are in charge of our partnership with Ethics. Hille Paakkunainen and Kathryn Lindeman are in charge of our partnership with the Oxford Studies series in normative ethics, metaethics, political philosophy, and agency and responsibility. Ryan Muldoon and Chad Van Schoelandt are in charge of our partnership with Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. And Derek Bowman and Julie L. Rose are in charge of our partnership with Philosophy & Public Affairs. We’re really grateful that they are here, and we’re excited about the energy they bring to these partnerships. You can thus expect there to be discussions from the most recent editions of these journals on a regular basis. (And we should add: If you have an interest in being a liaison to the on-line journals Philosopher’s Imprint, the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, and the Journal of Moral Philosophy, please let us know.)

We will also be providing once more a regular forum for some of the leading figures in moral philosophy, under the rubric of Featured Philosophers. Brad Cokelet will continue to be in charge of this feature. But we will also be featuring work by younger scholars, e.g., grad students doing exciting new work, or junior philosophers with an original research program worth talking about.

As always, we at the PEA are indebted to its original 2004 founders: Dan Boisvert, Josh Glasgow, Doug Portmore, and Dave Shoemaker. Without whom not.

There are many exciting opportunities in the works that we will let you know about in the weeks and months to come. But for now, let me encourage our contributors to get posting and our commentators to get commenting. As we tend to say when running into one another, “What are you working on?” So let’s hear it!