Journal of the History of Philosophy

Journal of the History of Philosophy
Title	Journal of the History of Philosophy
Discipline	History of philosophy
Language	English
Abbreviation	JHP
Publisher	Johns Hopkins University Press
Country	United States
Frequency	Bimonthly
History	1963–present
Issn	0022-5053
Eissn	1538-4586

Journal of the History of Philosophy is a peer-reviewed academic periodical devoted to scholarship on the intellectual, textual, and institutional history of philosophical thought across cultures and eras. It publishes research articles, critical notes, book reviews, and special issues that address figures, movements, and texts from antiquity through the modern period, engaging debates linked to Plato, Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and René Descartes as well as to later thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, John Locke, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

History

The journal was founded in 1963 amid renewed scholarly interest following publications by figures associated with Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, University of Chicago, and University of Oxford. Early contributors included scholars connected to the editorial networks of Richard McKeon, Charles Kahn, Arthur O. Lovejoy, E. H. Gombrich, and Paul Oskar Kristeller, reflecting dialogues with institutions such as Columbia University, University of Cambridge, and University of Paris (Sorbonne). Over successive decades the journal intersected with historiographical shifts influenced by research programs at Brown University, Stanford University, University of Toronto, New York University, and University of California, Berkeley, and it responded to methodological debates sparked by work on scholasticism, Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment, and analytic philosophy.

Scope and Content

The journal covers textual scholarship on canonical authors like Socrates (via Plato and Xenophon), Epicurus, Plotinus, Boethius, William of Ockham, Machiavelli, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and Martin Heidegger. It also publishes work on non-Western traditions involving figures associated with Confucius, Zhuangzi, Nāgārjuna, Nāgārjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn Khaldun, and scholars linked to Tokugawa Japan, Mughal India, and Ottoman Empire archives. Articles analyze primary texts, manuscript transmission, philology, historiography, and intellectual networks tied to libraries such as Bodleian Library, Vatican Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Library of Congress.

Editorial Structure and Publication Details

The editorial board traditionally draws editors and advisory members from departments at Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, and international centers including University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Humboldt University of Berlin, and Università di Bologna. The publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, issues the journal on a bimonthly schedule with online access coordinated through institutional platforms used by archives like JSTOR, Project MUSE, and university consortia centered at Association of Research Libraries. Editorial procedures include double-blind peer review drawing referees affiliated with societies such as the American Philosophical Association, History of Science Society, Renaissance Society of America, and the International Federation of Philosophical Societies.

Abstracting and Indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in major services and bibliographies that support humanities scholarship: databases maintained by Philosopher's Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index (part of Clarivate services), Scopus (Elsevier), MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association), and citation tools integrated with WorldCat and library catalogs of institutions such as Harvard Library, British Library, and National Library of Medicine for cross-disciplinary discoverability. Its metadata conforms to standards used by repositories like CrossRef for DOIs and is included in academic discovery systems operated by EBSCO and ProQuest.

Reception and Impact

The journal has been influential in shaping historiography that reconnects textual scholarship with analytic and continental methodologies debated at conferences organized by American Philosophical Association, Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, British Society for the History of Philosophy, and the Hellenic Society. Its articles have been cited in monographs and edited volumes published by presses such as Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, Routledge, and Bloomsbury Academic, and have informed curricular developments at universities including King's College London, University of Edinburgh, Australian National University, and McGill University. Critical responses have appeared in venue-specific reviews and in historiographical syntheses by scholars tracing influences from Aristotelianism to phenomenology and from early modern natural philosophy to contemporary ethical theory.

Notable Articles and Special Issues

Notable contributions include seminal articles re-evaluating texts by Plotinus, editorial reconstructions of controversial manuscripts associated with Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno, philological studies of Maimonides and Averroes, and contextual essays on the reception of Kant in the work of J. G. Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Søren Kierkegaard. Special issues have focused on themes tied to archival rediscoveries from collections at Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, comparative studies of Islamic philosophy and Jewish philosophy in medieval Iberia, and transnational exchanges documented in correspondences involving Voltaire, Diderot, Samuel Johnson, and Adam Smith. The journal has also devoted issues to methodological debates sparked by work on textual criticism, intellectual history, and intersections with history of science exemplified by studies of Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle.

Category:Academic journals Category:History of philosophy journals