Perilous times have always called for resort to philosophy, or more so, resort to reflections upon ourselves and our culture and society. Exactly a hundred years ago, the world was raging with communal and ideological hatred and it was the onset of what Niall Ferguson called “history’s age of hatred.” A hundred years later today, we can’t submit to the pessimist’s claim that “we haven’t changed”. We certainly have changed, and had it not been for philosophy, we don’t know how worse off we would be today. But societal anger and hatred still lurk as a brooding omnipresence, and we cannot expect to annihilate it. But with philosophy, it can obviously be mitigated and caressed.
Many philosophers have already concluded that if the governments of the world are not careful enough, 21st Century might have its ‘great war’ soon as well. They are not entirely wrong, in light of the staggering growth of right-wing radicalism around the world and the failure of ‘illiberal democracies’. However, the political philosopher must question if our given circumstances of existence and politics would even allow for a war. After all, the philosopher must attempt at answering the fundamental questions of ‘why’ and ‘how’. Philosophy has a place only in a world where there is a conflict- a “contradiction” between the claims of reason and the realities of social life.
The Journal of Political Theory and Philosophy (JPTP) aims at providing a forum of discussion and debate for political philosophy and a public discourse on world politics. We invite academicians, scholars, Ph.D. students, lawyers, jurists and civil servants to come forward for discussion on this online forum for philosophical discourse.
JPTP is an online open-access journal to foster growth in philosophical debates indiscriminately because we believe that money shouldn’t be an obstacle in the quest for knowledge, and also to attempt to bridge the existing gap between the public intellectuals and the public, to remove all ‘ivory towers’. JPTP seeks to encourage path-breaking work in the fields of political theory and philosophy. The Journal being a bi-annual review, will publish one issue in May and another in October.
The founders of JPTP also publish another journal on Constitutional Law, called the Indian Journal of Constitutional & Administrative Law (IJCAL), which can be accessed by clicking here.
The Journal is also affiliated with the online, fortnightly magazine Catharsis which publishes blog posts on its behalf. Procedure for submissions for the same can be found by clicking here.