The culture of disgrace, with its attacks on freedom of expression and scholarship, often meets opportunism in the academic world, but it also provokes resistance.
One example of this is the Journal of Controversial Ideas, the first issue of which has now been published.
The journal is edited by Peter Singer from Princeton University, Jeff McMahan from Oxford University and Francesca Minerva from Warwick University.
All three are philosophers, but the publication is open to authors of all subjects.
The journal, which is freely accessible on the Internet and is financed by donations, wants to offer rational argumentation and the unhindered quest for knowledge a shelter from political and religious discourse guardians. Anyone who fears hostility, threats or professional disadvantages because they do not follow their speaking and writing instructions can publish their essay under a pseudonym. Only the stringency of the argumentation, the validity of the statements and the insightful value of the results should count. As is customary with academic journals, a text must be accepted by reviewers before it can be published. Of the 91 works submitted, ten made it into the first issue.
Three of the authors have published under a pseudonym.
The fact that this option even exists is the result of an academic climate in which the openness of research, teaching and discussion has come under the pressure of gender and identity ideologues and entire areas of research have fallen into moral ostracism.
This atmosphere is also spreading in the academic publication landscape, as the journal's editors and authors report.
For example, a contribution published here on the moral evaluation of “blackfacing” had previously been submitted to another journal and had already been accepted by the reviewers.
After the "Black Lives Matter" demonstrations began, the editor rejected the carefully weighing text because it could be "unnecessarily hurtful".
Controversial topics make for heated topics
Even in the planning phase, the journal's editors and supporters were accused of setting up a forum for racists, sexists and authoritarian coercive characters of all kinds. The first edition, whose contributions are mainly to be assigned to practical philosophy and epistemology, refutes this assumption. One can expect some issues to be sensitive and the issues they raise controversial from a magazine with the controversy in the title.
Here are a few samples: Should criminals be put into an artificial coma for a while instead of being locked up for years? In view of global warming, can global despotism save the continued existence of the human species? Why is the violence of militant animal rights activists justified? What distinguishes the contributions, however, are not blatant theses, but the gain in knowledge, which consists in following the logic of arguments to the sometimes bitter or hair-raising end. The reader can also discover the inconsistencies of their own, seemingly self-evident attitudes. However, the controversial potential of some topics is only accessible to those who have previously gone through the labyrinths of trans-queer gender theories. This includes the sentence "Women are adult female persons",whose truth content at least provides material for two opposing essays.