An academic exercise
Would you like to read my article?
I’m Bryan Kam. I endeavour daily to make philosophy accessible and relevant. To that end I write this newsletter and host a podcast called Clerestory. I’m also writing a book called Neither/Nor and I’m a founding member of Liminal Learning. In London, I host a book club, a writing group, and other events. My work looks at how abstract concepts relate to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience.
Yesterday, I submitted my first academic paper.
This was to a journal called Humanities and Social Studies Communications, which is published by Springer Nature. Since I am not an academic, aspects of this ritual have seemed relatively esoteric. An early surprise, for example, was to learn that to publish to an open access journal (i.e., one that is not paywalled), there’s a fee that the author pays to the publisher. I.e., although I’ve written an article for them, for free, and if all goes well, it will be reviewed by unpaid peer reviewers, someone has to pay the journal because they’re not paywalling the article. You can read about their policy here.
Academic publishing turns out to be quite a labour-intensive process. My collaborator Isabela Granic and I came up with the idea for this paper in March 2024. I’ve been working on it most days since September 2024, and we submitted it yesterday, on 18 April 2025.
I did find it difficult to get into the academic tone at times, but I enjoyed it too. At times it felt a bit like being an outsider to my own work, since I couldn’t use as much of my usual tone and Victorian vocabulary weirdness. But that also meant that it had to be more earnest somehow. And I hope some of my excitement still comes through in the academic writing.
When submitting, you have to choose a minimum of two subjects. We submitted under the subjects of Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology, History, and Science, technology, and society, which I found fun to do. I’ll be interested to know whether they think these are appropriate.
Isabela is a developmental psychologist, and we met through the Interintellect. We formed a collective called Bloom, and co-founded Liminal Learning, which puts the principles of Neither/Nor into practice in collaboration with young people. She’s also been a frequent conversation partner on my podcast; those episodes are listed here, where you can also learn more about Neither/Nor. She has been a great and supportive collaborator, both patient and tolerant of my motivational mood swings over the many months.
Why are you doing this?
My intention is ultimately to write a book for laypeople and generalists to understand the principles of Neither/Nor. I don’t want to write an academic book. But I do want it to be rigorously researched, and I want to interest academics in that process. In short I want to collaborate with experts in order to make the book better.
This paper is a step in that process; I hope that, if it’s published, it will make it easier to interest academics to collaborate, critique, and improve the project. At the moment, I’d expect the tone of the book to be somewhere between my writing here and the academic writing in the paper.
What happens next?
Submission is only the first stage. It’s a long process, documented here. After submission, in brief, it will go to an editor at the journal, who can either “desk reject” it or send it on to be “peer reviewed.” I believe they now have 50 days to make this decision.
From what I understand, there are typically three peer reviewers. The process in this case is double-blind, meaning that I’m not allowed to know who is reviewing, and they’re not allowed to know how I am. This meant some textual acrobatics within the paper to prevent anonymity from being compromised.
This made it something of a surprise to learn, then, that the journal not only allows but encourages the “preprint” of the article, i.e., the article in its current submitted form, before peer review, to be posted publicly. You can read the whole policy here.
For that reason, I thought I’d share the abstract with you, and also ask if you’re interested to read the article.
The article is titled “Neither/Nor: A pragmatic philosophy for oscillating between conceptual and experiential knowledge.”
If it annoys you that the title is not capitalised, it annoys me too; this policy applies to the whole references section too. Since I stored my documents in Zotero in title case, and since we cited 135 sources, this was very laborious to fix, and can’t be done automatically without ending up with lowercase proper names.
Abstract
This paper presents "Neither/Nor," a novel philosophy which redefines conceptual and experiential modes of knowing as complementary skills which can be deliberately trained and oscillated. The paper argues that neither theory (concepts) nor practice (experience) alone can suffice for desirable outcomes in personal flourishing or scientific inquiry. Drawing from Western and Eastern philosophical traditions—from ancient skepticism and Buddhism to modern pragmatism and cognitive science—Neither/Nor proposes that “latent Platonism,” the unconscious preference for abstract concepts over direct experience, contributes to both personal suffering and intellectual impasses. The paper begins with a concrete example of Type I diabetes management, demonstrating the constant negotiation between abstract formulas and embodied experience required by the disease, before providing six practical principles: (1) regard concepts and experience as trainable skills; (2) commit to oscillation between skills; (3) prioritize relations and processes over objects and states; (4) embrace trial-and-error learning; (5) recognize the social nature of truth claims; and (6) employ conditional historicism over linear causal thinking. The Neither/Nor framework demonstrates how these principles can reduce personal suffering, enhance scientific inquiry, and provide a methodology for evaluating diverse philosophical positions pragmatically. Neither/Nor points steps towards a way of living rather than merely an abstract theory, contributing to both individual flourishing and more flexible approaches to complex societal challenges.
Interest check
I’m curious who is out there on this mailing list and also your level of interest in the project. Please let me know if you’d like to read a preprint of this article, and I’ll decide where to put it.
I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Best,
Bryan
Coming at this late, but I'd like to read the pre-print.
I'm curious to read the article!