What is Film-Philosophy?

It gives me great pleasure to introduce the twentieth volume of Film-Philosophy and to inaugurate our new relationship with Edinburgh University Press. Film-Philosophy will continue to be the Open Access publication that it has always been. Whilst in its early years this made Film-Philosophy something of a rarity, nowadays the increasing movement towards Open Access across so many disciplines has shown it to have been a pioneer. With this in mind, it may be worth reflecting on the history of our journal here. Film-Philosophy began as an email discussion list in 1996 when the internet was still young and this list was rather romantically termed a ‘salon’ by its founder Daniel Frampton. The Film-Philosophy Salon was based around extended book reviews and occasional article-like pieces that were sent out via email and encouraged debate and discussion. Flame wars were still rather rare and these discussions tended to be civil, informed and informative. However, as the membership of the list grew, discussions became more fraught and increasingly full inboxes began to fill with invective, vitriol, misunderstanding and spam (now, of course, common in online comments sections). As the ad hoc community of academics and PhD students matured, the popularity of the list increased and the tone of the discussion at times deteriorated. After a decade of managing the list single-handedly, Daniel invited a number of young (well, relatively speaking) scholars to London to consider the future direction of the list. What they all had in common was that their research investigated the intersection of film and philosophy. At that time this was, if not necessarily unheard of, then certainly far less