Orphaned And Unpublished Papers

for those interested in reading portions of my earlier work

Over the 30 years since I first started my graduate studies in philosophy, I have written more papers than I can count or recall. Some were assignments in classes I was taking in graduate school. Others were research projects of my own, many of which I eventually presented at various conferences or other academic forums. A good number of them would eventually get sent out to journals, and most of those that I got to that point ended up getting published. But for every article (or book chapter) I did publish, there were several more that I just didn’t end up sending out, or which got rejected, and I instead moved on to the next pieces I wanted to work on.

I also had some papers that can be rightly described as “orphaned” or perhaps “homeless” (in the sense of having lost their home. One book chapter I contributed to a volume commemorating the 900-year anniversary of Saint Anselm’s death didn’t get published because the academic press decided to pass on the entire project after the editor had assembled the entire volume. Another paper was originally accepted by a journal, with the only revision desired being that I should translate the Greek and Latin passages into English. After I did that, they rather uncharacteristically decided to reject it on the basis that it didn’t contain enough discussion of secondary literature. Several others were written for online journals which, as happens from time to time, ended up disappearing from the internet.

I’ve long since decided that I wasn’t going to try to take any of those previously written pieces, generally of decent quality, and work them up into papers I’d send out to academic journals to go into their reviews and publication process. There’s broad-based good reasons not to, which I’ll write about elsewhere, but I have one that applies to me specifically. I have other current research and writing projects that already take up enough of my time, and I’d rather focus on those.

Substack provides a good place for me to publish these previously unpublished or orphaned papers. They often do prove of interest to some readers. And perhaps, down the line, I’ll take them all and bundle them into a book that I’ll also self-publish, for those who would like to read through them in a more organized format.

Here are the pieces I have published so far, organized by chronology of their subject matters:

• Where Rhetoric, Politics and Dialectic Meet: Aristotle’s Methodological Discussions in Rhetoric Book I

• Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Patroness of Christian Philosophers: Inspiration for Contemporary Christian Philosophy

• Divine and Human Rectitude: Meeting Anselm's God through Moral Life

• Thomas Aquinas’ Discussion of Law and the Sapiental Mediation of Reason and Revelation in the Summa Theologiae

• Five States of Nature in Hobbes’ Leviathan

• Von Hildebrand and Christian Philosophy: A Comparative Approach

• By the Content of their Character: Christian Love and Virtue Ethics in Martin Luther King’s Writings

• Should We Be Good Nominalists or Good Rhetoricians? Foucault, Rhetoric, Representation, and Tradition

• Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Theories in Relation to MacIntyre’s Virtue Ethics

• The Breadth of Reason, Christian Philosophy, and Catholic Tradition : Benedict XVI’s Regenburg Address

As I publish more of these unpublished and orphaned papers here in Substack, I’ll add links to them in this resource page.