On revision

Five reviews

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 conceptual abstraction relates to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience.

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On 18 April 2025, Isabela Granic and I submitted an academic article. Since then, we have been invited by the journal, Humanities and Social Studies Communications, which is a Nature journal, to revise and resubmit the article. Alongside this rather discouragingly worded invitation — I’m told it’s standard “academese,” and my academic friends had to translate it for me into “good news” — came no fewer than five reviews.

This is unusually high for an academic article, but we have taken it as a sign of interest in our topic.

At the time I was writing about this in April, I thought that they had 50 days to respond to us. While some reviews were received by the end of July, we weren’t able to read any of the reviews until 19 September 2025. Nature wanted us to make the changes suggested by the five reviews by 3 November, though they said the deadline was flexible. We wrote back quite quickly to ask for an extension to the 15 December.

This deadline has required me to temporarily set the main Neither/Nor manuscript aside. As a recap, I wrote 60,000 words between May and July 2025 as a “first draft.” Then I wrote another 30,000 words in July and August, intended to be a “second draft.” Then I began a “third draft” on 1 September 2025. I use quotes because I didn’t effectively build on previous drafts, but instead did rewrites, mostly without looking at the older drafts, so “draft” seems misleading, but I’m not sure what else to call it.

That third draft is now 40,000 words, taking a biographical approach which will cover the lives of people including Charles Darwin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Thomas Kuhn. Only these final 40,000 words are close to what will end up in the book, and even then they will need to be cut down a lot. But I’ve written 130,000 words on the topics which are to be covered in Neither/Nor this year, and the project and its scope are much clearer than they were when I began at the start of May.

A view of my new writing desk.

Over this next week, I’ll be in Canada to work intensively on the revision of the Nature paper with Isabela. The reviews themselves were encouraging; most seemed to want to see the paper published, and some said so explicitly. But they’ve required me to do a deep dive into pragmatism, and especially into the work of John Dewey. I’m just coming out of reading him, and starting to write about him, with gratitude for the great overlap that Dewey’s work has with mine, and also with a sense of the contours of the differences.

This update is intentionally elliptical, leaving out a substantial amount that has been happening in my life. But I hope it gives some insight into the intellectual work, to which I remain committed. I’m grateful to all of you who have supported me through this period.

All best,

Bryan