I don’t recall the Miners’ Strike; I was busy in the womb for most of it. So it’s a strange experience when I see people a decade younger than I commenting on Margaret Thatcher’s passing with as much vigour as if they’d been on the picket lines.

I’m too young to remember Thatcherism; I’m young enough to remember, as an adolescent, frustratedly trying to follow political articles in the broadsheets which assumed that every reader had lived through the era in a state of political awareness and had formed passionate opinions accordingly. Time, and mindsets, march on: there’s now a large section of the adult population with no political recollection of the Eighties, or no recollection of the period at all. Presently it’s the Blair premiership that’s entering that peculiar state of being vividly recent for most of the political nation, but an effectively historical era for its youngest members.

One thing I certainly learnt, as a teenager grappling with those articles, is that the dictum that history is written through the lens of the present rings especially true of an aspect of the recent past about which an awful lot of axes continue to be ground. I’m not bothering to scan much of the commentary on Lady Thatcher’s death, because I expect a great deal of it to amount to thinly disguised opinion pieces on David Cameron. Perhaps that’s why there are people rather younger than myself who feel that the matter has been adequately explained to them.

One of the reasons why scholarly self-publication is supposed to be dubious or bad, and self-archiving only a supplementary good, is that material posted to one’s personal website lasts until one stops paying the server bills, having died or vanished in foreign jungles or simply lost interest. One online repository of scholarly articles which seems unlikely to return, however, is that of Philosophical Frontiers: A Journal of Emerging Thought, published by the now-defunct Progressive Frontiers Press. www.philosophicalfrontiers.com has been offline for months (with nothing there but a broken Joomla installation); now the journal’s Wikipedia entry is being considered for deletion.

The most recent Wayback Machine snapshot dates from 2011, and shows that the journal had suspended acceptance of articles during a ‘phase of transition’:

We are currently in a phase of transition at the journal. We are moving from publishing twice a year, to publishing once a year. In light of these changes, and editorial restructuring, we will not be accepting submissions until further notice. This is a short-term suspension and we hope to be in a position to resume reviews in the Summer of 2011. Apologies for any inconvenience that this causes.

If operations ever were resumed, they didn’t last long. Progressive Frontiers Press was dissolved in January 2012.

In some cases, thanks to authors’ self-archiving in other repositories, it remains possible to find articles from Philosophical Frontiers. If you examine such an article, you’ll see that the page footers name Progressive Frontiers Press as the copyright holder. Demanding copyright transfer as a condition of publication is common practice in academic publishing, and not an uncontroversial one. On a good day it simplifies rights clearance, albeit at the cost of often placing greater power in the hands of large, rapacious publishers. (One wonders whether we’d have so much digitised archive material if less control of articles had been vested in publishers.) On a bad day, you find yourself realising that just looking into licensing an article for reuse might involve investigating where the assets went when a company was wound up. No doubt this is why some Open Access publications have opted for Creative Commons licensing.

I wasn’t looking to license an article; I just wanted to locate and read one. Then I found myself wondering what had become of the journal and its vanished Press. I couldn’t find an e-mail address for the former Chief Editor of Philosophical Frontiers (who, from what I can discover, was also Director and Secretary of Progressive Frontiers Press); someone who actually needed to investigate the matter might try LinkedIn or Academia.edu. I did find one for the former Assistant Chief Editor (who lists the title on her professional Web pages), and asked her by e-mail what had happened to the journal. Nine weeks later, I have had no reply.

At a time of widespread discontent with the academic publishing establishment, it would be a shame to have to conclude that small and upstart scholarly presses are too much of a gamble. (Urbanomic, for example, still shows regular signs of life, even if it’s presently unclear whether Collapse will ever reach an eighth volume.) It does seem, however, that such endeavours need to be governed by that old definition of philosophy as preparation for death.

I’m currently reading Appropriating the Past, the second essay collection linked to the Centre for the Ethics of Cultural Heritage. One of the essays, by Cornelius Holtorf (who’ll be one of the editors of the third collection), talks about cases like

the reconstructed Neumarkt area in Dresden. Here an entire city area of eighteenth-century vernacular baroque architecture is in the process of being re-created so that it appears as if these buildings were never destroyed by the bombs of World War II. Archaeologists, historians, art historians, and architects can be quick to dismiss such buildings as resembling Disneyland, meaning that they fake history...

Dresden’s rebuilding of its eighteenth-century architecture is a response to the destructiveness of warfare. How different is it, one might wonder, from rebuilding eighteenth-century architecture in response to some builders’ stupid mistake...?

Polish builders have demolished an 18th Century chateau in Bordeaux belonging to a Russian businessman, apparently by mistake. Owner Dmitry Stroskin said he was shocked and had only ordered them to knock down an adjacent outhouse... Chateau de Bellevue had been due to be renovated to its former glory - Mr Stroskin has said he will rebuild it exactly as it was.

Of course, there are senses in which this is tragically impossible. If you want to see eighteenth-century architecture, then a recreation will typically not do; it just lacks the property of having been built in the eighteenth century, which is, presumably, an important consideration if eighteenth-century architecture is what you desire to see (even though ‘nothing miraculously survives... without a bit of help’). Having said that... it’s not a philosophically trivial question where the distinction lies between renovation (presumably okay, or at any rate better than decay) and rebuilding (presumably problematic). Perhaps we should think a little differently about the distinction between real and fake architecture if our buildings were made out of less durable materials.

Rebuilding is not a simple act, though. It’s possible to see something Phoenix-like in the decision of the people of Dresden to rebuild their city much as it was after the War ended. The Chateau de Bellevue lacks such a story of high drama, and it remains to be seen whether a Phoenix can rise out of a tragic farce.

There were only a couple of times when I spotted plagiarism during teaching/marking stints, though no doubt there were others I missed. Both students had been apparently optimistic that so long as a source was listed in the bibliography, lifting from it would be given the benefit of the doubt; one even found an essay answering the very same question which a former student had put on his blog a few years before, and used it apparently without realising that that on its own would result in raised eyebrows. (Close scrutiny also revealed a sentence weakly adapted from the S.E.P.) The other plagiarist came up with prose which had apparently been stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster; even the very first sentence contained snippets directly lifted from a book which I had personally recommended to the group. I was not impressed; I was less impressed still when he tried it again the next term. He was called in for questioning by the Department, but I think he escaped the ultimate penalty.

I am not, then, a friend of plagiarists. All the same...

5.9.28.25 - - [05/Dec/2012:12:33:34 +0000] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 1153 "-" "Docoloc Crawler"
5.9.28.25 - - [05/Dec/2012:12:33:34 +0000] "GET /phil/RFJSeddon__Fernando_Pessoa_As_Philosophers.pdf HTTP/1.1" 200 616318 "-" "Docoloc Crawler"

It checks robots.txt, at least, but there seems to be no available information on this robot and what it does with the items it crawls. Docoloc is apparently a German anti-plagiarism tool, so presumably it’s building a database of copies against which to check items for textual originality. I’m not sure the nobility of its calling makes me happy about having my data and bandwidth co-opted for its business purposes without explanation. This is something Turnitin definitely does better.

An exciting discovery: a forthcoming publication of the Philosophical Essays of Fernando Pessoa.¹ I don’t know offhand how many of the essays were written in Portuguese and whether any were in Pessoa’s sort-of-native English (no translator being named), but judging by the publisher’s self-description this should be a fully English edition.

Pessoa’s forays into philosophy tend to be considered to lack intrinsic interest and to be derivative of already existing secondary literature: as Mendo Castro Henriques puts it, ‘the philosophical notes of young Fernando Pessoa... illustrate his debt to the history of Philosophy more through commentators than through a first-hand protracted reading of the Classics,’ and ‘if we evaluate such texts through a philosophical standard, we must acknowledge their conceptual content as frustrating’. It’s their place within his heteronymic life that mainly lends them interest, and it’s that life and literature that has tended to make people (myself included) philosophically interested in him. It’s for that reason that I’m greatly hoping for illuminating critical apparatus.

1. After last year’s Metaphysical Courier (another book still to get hold of), perhaps it seemed timely. ↩