The ten best philosophy papers of the year are chosen — and the choosing is disputed

Thousands of philosophy papers are published around the world every year. Nobody can read them all.

Since 1978 the Philosopher's Annual has offered one answer to that impossibility: pick the ten best papers of the year. By its own description this is an aim "as simple to state as it is impossible to fulfil".

The forty-fifth volume has now been announced. It covers the literature of 2025.

The ten#

Evan Behrle (Harvard), "Desert and Economic Interdependence" — Journal of Philosophy. Outside philosophy, the idea that workers deserve wages in proportion to what they contribute to production is very widely held. Behrle argues that it collapses on its own terms: if the size of one worker's contribution depends on what other workers do only in concert, then rewarding by contribution cannot register that dependence.

Sam Berstler (MIT), "The Structure of Open Secrets" — Philosophical Review. In conversation we routinely leave unspoken the things we all know to be true. Berstler shows that the norms governing open secrets have a structure of their own: they iterate — that the secret is open is itself an open secret. Drawing on Goffman's account of social interaction, she analyses how speakers put that structure to strategic use.

Kyle Blumberg (Melbourne) and Ben Holguín (Johns Hopkins), "Fictional Reality" — Philosophical Review. Is there a right answer to the question of how many hairs there are on Sherlock Holmes's head? The authors say there is — and that there is one for every meaningful question about a fiction. They set themselves against David Lewis's dominant treatment. The paper belongs to the same family as Kit Fine's work in metaphysics, which we covered earlier this season.

Liam Kofi Bright (LSE), Nathan Gabriel (UC Merced), Cailin O'Connor (UC Irvine) and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown), "On the Stability of Racial Capitalism" — Ergo. The authors model the tie between capitalism and racial hierarchy with the tools of evolutionary game theory. Their thesis: race, as a social construction, has just the properties that facilitate the stable and unequal distributions which arise in capitalist systems.

Colin Chamberlain (UCL), "How to Eat a Peach: The Function of the Passions in Malebranche" — Mind. For Malebranche the senses, the imagination and the passions all serve the needs of the body. Chamberlain explains how the passions keep us alive: they close the gap between inclination and action by producing the agent's consent.

Dai Heide (Simon Fraser), "The Transcendental Aesthetic and the Leibnizian Theory of Space" — Journal of the History of Philosophy. Kant's commentators have concentrated on relationism in his reply to Leibniz and passed over the metaphysically realist side of Leibniz's theory. Heide extracts a powerful argument resting on Kant's claim that space is monistic — that the whole precedes its parts.

Elselijn Kingma (KCL) and Fiona Woollard (Southampton), "Can You Harm Your Fetus?" — Ethics. When pregnant people behave in ways deemed less than optimal for the foetus, the behaviour is generally framed as doing harm. The authors argue that this framing is a short cut used to avoid the real questions about what, if anything, pregnancy specifically obliges.

Alexander Meehan (Wisconsin) and Snow Zhang (UC Berkeley), "Bayes Is Back" — Philosophical Review. Bayesian updating does not universally maximise expected accuracy in cases where learning is not transparent. The authors propose that a rule should be assessed not by its performance in a single learning situation but by its total expected accuracy across all of them — and by that criterion Bayes wins again.

Paulina Sliwa (Vienna), "Changing Minds and Hearts" — Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 20. If you are undecided on a moral question, does relying on somebody else's testimony leave you morally deficient? The common view is that moral testimony can alter belief but not feeling. Sliwa disagrees: hermeneutic counsel — testimony that helps a person make sense of their own moral situation — can change both mind and heart.

Quinn White (Harvard), "Love First" — Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. How should we answer to the humanity of others? By attending to their welfare, or by respecting their autonomy? White defends a third answer, found in Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism: love everyone. He then reaches a surprising conclusion — for ordinary agents like us, the most minimal way of loving everyone is respect; and the basic structures of deontological ethics can be derived from it.

Who does the choosing?#

The editors of the Philosopher's Annual are Daniel J. Singer (Pennsylvania), Lila Graham, Lorenzo Manuali and Brett Thompson (Michigan). Patrick Grim is the managing editor.

The list of nominating editors runs to more than sixty names: Ned Block, Tyler Burge, Cian Dorr, Adam Elga, Alan Hájek, Brian Leiter, Jeff McMahan, Derk Pereboom, Duncan Pritchard, Ted Sider, Scott Soames, Johan van Benthem and others.

The size of that crowd is meant to keep the selection from turning on any one person's taste.

The objections#

The discussion beneath the announcement is more instructive than the list itself.

Concentration among journals. One commenter marvels at the Philosophical Review's "hit rate": the journal publishes comparatively few papers a year, yet three of them are on the list. Is that evidence of an excellent refereeing process, or evidence that the attention of the nominators is already locked on to those journals?

The arbitrariness of the cut. Some of the nominators note that the move from the shortlist to the final ten can be fairly arbitrary. One commenter accordingly proposes publishing ten runners-up as well.

Language. The sharpest comment is the briefest: "Another year of dominance for the English-language team." The list does not contain a single paper written in any language other than English.

That last objection points to a structural problem in the discipline. The chance that a paper written in Turkish, German, French, Japanese or Arabic will reach such a list is effectively nil. The work visible in our map of Turkey's philosophy journals, published this month, falls outside this system of measurement altogether.

What a list is for#

The objection put to selections of this kind — who decides? — is a fair one. But handing down verdicts is not what the list is really for.

In a field that produces thousands of papers a year, a slice of ten establishes a shared basis for reading. It raises the chance that philosophers working in different subfields will have read the same texts.

Look at this year's list and you can see where that common ground lies: desert and inequality, the tacit norms of conversation, the ontology of fiction, race and economics, early modern theories of mind, the interpretation of Kant, the ethics of reproduction, Bayesian epistemology, moral testimony, and the place of love in morality.

Not a narrow patch of ground.

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The full list, with summaries of the papers, is at philosophersannual.org.