This special anniversary issue of IJPS is my last editorial involvement with the journal, and it has been a pleasure to work with the new editors, Lisa Foran and Daniel Deasy, on this celebratory project. In 1993, the International Journal of Philosophical Studies was born with two issues that year and two in the following year. Dermot Moran had taken over as editor of a journal called Philosophical Studies in 1990 with the aim of transforming what had perhaps been a slightly parochial journal into an ‘international philosophical journal of the highest standards, based in Ireland’ (Moran Citation1990, xiii).
To reflect this ambition and also to distinguish the journal from its more familiar namesake coming out of the States, he relaunched the journal with the new title of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies (IJPS) and with the new publisher of Routledge. This journal was ‘committed to publishing articles that develop the scholarly and critical understanding of aspects of the entire history of western philosophy from the Greeks to the contemporary period … and to promote mutual comprehension and discussion between the main contemporary currents in philosophy’ (Moran Citation1993, vii). This ambition continues to this day and is reflected in the phrase the new editors have hit upon as a sort of sub-title for the journal: ‘Philosophy across Traditions’.
Thirty years later and to mark the start of this new editorial team, we have asked those authors from the first four issues of the journal whom we could contact to reflect on how their thinking about the issues they were writing about in 1993 and 1994 has developed in the intervening years and in the light of the development of philosophy across those years. We have also asked for editorial reflections from Dermot Moran himself and from Maria Baghramian who was the editor of the journal from 2004 until 2013, when I took over. (Each of us has been editor for about a decade).
These articles give us a fascinating insight into the different ways philosophers think about their philosophical challenges across the years. Many of the authors have continued to work on the themes they were working on 30 years ago. Some point out that they haven’t been continuing such work, and instead provide really interesting personal views on their approach to doing philosophy and how that has developed – what is sometimes described these days as metaphilosophy.
Karsten Harries’ original paper was the very first article in the new journal in 1993. This laid out Heidegger’s apparently contradictory relationships with the poet Hölderlin and also with Hitler – on the one hand, with Hölderlin, considering the root of all evil to be putting some finite being in the place of an unfathomable God and, on the other, doing just that with Hitler. Movingly he now writes that given his age and failing health, this return to what he wrote thirty years ago may well be the final philosophical article he writes. We are very grateful to him and to all these contributors for all they contributed to the discipline of philosophy between 1993 and 2024 and for allowing us to publish some of this work.