19 March, 2026

Philosophers like savage book reviews. The typical milquetoast review offers some criticism leavened with a teaspoon of praise. For example, while the author has “inadvertently demonstrated that his theory of self-knowledge collapses under sustained scrutiny,” the book is nonetheless a “valuable contribution.” Boring.

Quassim Cassam’s review of Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny’s Language and Reality has a more forthright assessment: “This is not a book which students should be advised to consult. It is a book which they should be advised not to consult.” Applied to G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker’s Frege: Logical Excavations, Michael Dummett would have agreed: “This pair of authors might have given us an illuminating comparative study of Frege and Wittgenstein; it is regrettable that they have preferred to attempt a hatchet job on a philosopher they lack the good will to understand.” And who can forget Nina Strohminger’s review of Colin McGinn’s The Meaning of Disgust? It begins: “In disgust research, there is shit, and then there is bullshit. McGinn’s (2011) theory belongs to the latter category.” These three examples are all from academic journals; offered a freer rein in a newspaper, philosophers take the gloves off. According to Galen Strawson, Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression “shows something that has been becoming increasingly obvious to a number of people for quite a long time: that although Derrida is a nice man, he is just not very bright.”

Submit a philosophy paper to a journal and it will likely be rejected; it might even be “desk rejected,” with the hapless author receiving no feedback that could help improve the paper’s chances at another journal. What about an invited book review? I had never heard of a rejection, still less one with no feedback—until recently. To keep vulgar suspense to a minimum, the would-be book reviewer was me.

You may be wondering why the story of a book review rejection deserves telling. I beg your patience for a few paragraphs. First, I need to say something about Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Entirely online, its sole mission is publishing reviews of philosophy books. NDPR churns them out: 145 reviews last year, only 79 in 2024 but a whopping 418 in 2014. All reviews are open access; like PhilPapers and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it is one of those wonderful philosophical resources enabled by the internet.

Philosophy journals that publish reviews have a book review editor, but NDPR’s volume requires more people. There is an editorial board currently comprising 70 professional philosophers, from Ásta at Duke to Jessica Wilson at Toronto. The editor is Christopher Shields, a leading Aristotle scholar, assisted by the managing editor, Kirsten Anderson, a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Baylor University. As NDPR explains:

Reviews are commissioned and vetted by a distinguished international Editorial Board. We do not accept unsolicited reviews, but welcome proposals for reviews from suitably qualified reviewers … In the event that a proposal is received, we will vet it in the normal way with our Editorial Board before determining whether to issue an invitation to write a review. [emphasis in original]

NDPR allows—as of course it should—reviews that trash books. “From my perspective as a philosopher,” John Martin Fischer complains, “it is jarring that a book on free will would not discuss free will.” The book in question is Robert Sapolsky’s 528-page Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, which Fischer spends more than 6,000 words dismantling. Brian Leiter’s verdict on Thomas Stern’s Nietzsche’s Ethics is even more dismissive: “In the end, what is most puzzling about this little volume is not that it is often wrong, relentlessly superficial, and philosophically flat-footed, although it is all of those things.” Louise Antony’s review of Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell’sA Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How it Made us Human gets straight to the point: “I am afraid I found a great deal to criticize in this book, and not much to admire.” Despite, like Fischer, taking more than 6,000 words, Antony laments that “space limitations prevent me from discussing every problem I find in this book.” She finds the third part particularly risible: “I am very sorry to say this section is appallingly superficial.” (Fischer, Leiter, and Antony are all on the NDPR editorial board.)

An example from this year is Timothy Williamson’s review of Amie Thomasson’s Rethinking Metaphysics:

As the book goes on, it encourages the reader to expect much-needed support for its deflationary treatment of metaphysics from functionally oriented linguistics. When it finally arrives, in Chapter 7, in the form of Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), it proves a dampish squib.

The book, Williamson concludes, “left me with a strong sense of a degenerating research programme.” The authors of A Better Ape were so irked by Antony’s review that they composed a lengthy reply (her review “rests on misrepresentations of our ideas and mistakes about the science”). Thomasson instead took to Facebook to produce this apophasis:

NDPR could not have chosen a less charitable reviewer for Rethinking Metaphysics than Tim Williamson … If I were to write in the style of my interlocutor, I might say that it is a ‘dampish squib’ of a review written by someone with a ‘degenerating research program.’ But I won’t. Because I believe in being respectful and kind. Insults come out when arguments run out.

Her allies chimed in. Ásta (as mentioned, on the NDPR editorial board) exclaimed, “What an uncharitable way to engage with the serious work of another philosopher!” The board member Brian Leiter, no friend of metaphysics, commented: “My first thought on reading this was to email Amie to offer congratulations, since obviously TW is unnerved. His research program is under attack, and is soon to pass into history.”

Among the many Facebook comments, however, only one said that letting the review through was a mistake: “This is horrible and I don’t think they even should have published it.” Probably the vast majority of philosophers, including those on Thomasson’s side of the argument, would agree with two commenters who wrote: “He was asked to review a book and gave his opinion without sugar-coating it. The piece isn’t vituperative,” and: “I think it is good to have very bracing reviews written and published.”

Back to my story: last October, I saw that Rach Cosker-Rowland’s Gender Identity: What It Is and Why It Matters had just come out with Oxford University Press. “Philosophically powerful,” “excellent, important, and timely,” and “fascinating, well-argued,” according to blurbs from well-known philosophers who work in this area. Timely, for sure. I thought reviewing Cosker-Rowland’s effort myself would be worthwhile, since I’ve written extensively on gender identity, in my 2023 book Trouble with Gender and other places.

Many readers will be aware that the topic of sex and gender has not showcased philosophers on their best behavior. It is almost ten years since Rebecca Tuvel was dogpiled by colleagues for writing about transracialism, and—incredibly—things went downhill from there. Dissenters from mainstream thought in feminist philosophy have been subjected to name-calling, no-platforming and other extraordinarily unprofessional tactics. As a minor player in this drama, I have had OUP renege on a contracted book and an invited OUP handbook chapter on pronouns rejected. My recent involvement in the Health and Human Services review of treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria has done little for my popularity among some philosophers.

I was not hopeful, then, that an invitation to review Cosker-Rowland’s book would spontaneously arrive. But NDPR welcomes “proposals for reviews from suitably qualified reviewers” (see above), and I had reviewed three times for them before. So, I emailed the managing editor in October. I was pleasantly surprised when Kirsten Anderson wrote back to me in December, “Good news! After consulting with the board about it, we’ve decided to move forward with your review.” OUP and NDPR were keen to get the book to me—I received a hard copy from both, and OUP also sent a digital version.

By mid-January I had finished, and sent the review to Anderson with the following note:

Review attached. It’s a big and complicated book but mindful of your guidelines I tried to keep the main text as short as I could—it’s a little over 2200 words. However, the review is very critical, and (again mindful of your guidelines) I need to give reasons for the negative evaluation, so I put a lot of the supporting evidence in the lengthy endnotes.

To which she replied:

Thanks for the review and the extra explanation! Your review will now go through the standard process, starting with being vetted by a board member covering the relevant area. If the length is a problem, I’ll let the board member weigh in along with any other revision requests that may arise. Otherwise, it’ll go straight to copyediting. After that, it’ll be published.

As I said in the review, the book is nothing short of ambitious. Here’s part of Cosker-Rowland’s summary at the end:

This book has proposed a new account of gender identity in terms of our subjective sense of the gender that it is fitting or not unfitting to treat us as and has proposed a new integrity-based account of trans rights … [O]ur gender identities generate trans rights to freedom of (legal) gender, gender-affirming healthcare, and sporting participation and accommodation grounded in our basic liberal rights to live and act with integrity … [O]ur gender identities establish that we morally ought to be treated as and thought of as the gender that matches our gender identity … [This book] has shown that our gender identity also seems to matter for the gender that we metaphysically are. It has shown that we should understand being trans in terms of gender identity.

Undeniably interesting, which is more than one can say for many philosophy books; and as a trans woman, Cosker-Rowland brings relevant experience. But to borrow Louise Antony’s words, “I am afraid I found a great deal to criticize in this book, and not much to admire.”

I kept it clean and the overall tone was well within the Overton window for philosophy book reviews, which (as noted at the beginning) is wide. Terrible arguments in philosophy are common; more remarkable was Gender Identity’s slapdash scholarship and glaring factual mistakes. Here’s one example (from the review’s lengthy endnotes):

Gender Identity would have greatly benefited from fact checking. One particularly egregious error is the allegation that “in March 2023 there was a rally outside the Victorian Parliament in Melbourne at which neo-Nazis and gender critical feminists campaigned against trans rights and held up banners proclaiming that trans women are perverts and paedophiles” (158). The two groups did not campaign together and the feminists held up no such banners. The feminists’ rally, including banners and placards, can be seen in one of Cosker-Rowland’s own citations, Keen 2023. Cosker-Rowland even manages to misdescribe the neo-Nazis: their sole banner read “Destroy Paedo Freaks” (Deeming v Pesutto 2024: para. 100); although hardly well-disposed towards transgender people, whether the neo-Nazis meant to accuse them of pedophilia is not clear (para. 114).

I documented some other obvious errors and scholarly lapses in the review—by no means all the ones I noticed. “OUP should note,” I wrote, “that quality control in this area of philosophy is not working.”

Let’s reflect on Cosker-Rowland’s claim about the Melbourne rally for a moment. As a footnote in Gender Identity confirms, she knows that the gender-critical philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith was at the event. Cosker-Rowland believes, then, that Lawford-Smith, a philosophy professor employed by Melbourne University and an OUP author, is happy to attend—indeed, speak at—a rally at which fellow-feminists joined forces with neo-Nazis, both holding grotesque banners about trans women and pedophilia. Perhaps Lawford-Smith waved one of these banners herself! No one with a minimal hold on reality would find this remotely credible. Even more astounding is how this managed to get by the OUP editor and multiple referees—it’s not buried in a footnote, but is in the main text.

Here’s another example I didn’t mention in the review. When rashly suggesting that some youth suicides in the UK were the result of restricting access to puberty blockers for gender dysphoria, Cosker-Rowland cites two tweets from the activist lawyer Jolyon Maugham in support (p. 210, fn. 16). These allegations were investigated by a suicide expert, Professor Louis Appleby, and found to be baseless; Cosker-Rowland says that one of Maugham’s tweets provides a “thorough response” to Appleby. There are three problems with her discussion. First, Cosker-Rowland falsely asserts that the National Health Service “ceased providing puberty blockers” (p. 210) after 2020 (instead, there was a pause of six months, with an in-practice ban only after the publication of the Cass Review in 2024). Second, she describes Appleby as “the UK Government’s gender critical adviser” (p. 210, fn. 16; emphasis added), clearly implying bias on Appleby’s part. There is no evidence that Appleby is “gender critical” and Cosker-Rowland appears to have made this up. Third, Maugham’s tweets have been (unsurprisingly) deleted. Thus, in an Oxford University Press book, the citations supporting an extremely serious claim are two deleted tweets. (See also the thorough reporting by the journalist Ben Ryan.)

I was worried that the “board member covering the relevant area” would demand extensive revisions or cuts, and I even speculated (not seriously) about an outright rejection on the grounds that my review perpetrates epistemic violence against the LGBTQ+ community or something equally fantastical. But I kept reassuring myself that too many years in the gender trenches had left me unreasonably paranoid, and that the review would make it through vetting with no more than minor tweaking.

Weeks dragged by, and towards the end of February, Kirsten Anderson emailed again, this time with bad news: NDPR had decided not to “move forward” with publication, based on “consultation with the board.” “Even paranoiacs have real enemies,” as Henry Kissinger is said to have once remarked.

No reason was given, but Anderson did say that I should contact the editor, Christopher Shields, for “further clarification” or if I had any “specific questions,” which I promptly did. I said that I would be very grateful for answers to the following two questions:

The first question was worth asking, I thought, although I suspected I would not receive an answer. After all, the board members assigned to vet reviews can often be identified, or at least drastically narrowed down, based on the subject matter. If the book is about Nietzsche, probably Brian Leiter; if about consciousness, probably David Chalmers, and so on. And with book reviews in regular journals, the only relevant person is the book review editor, whose identity is known to everyone.

The second question was the one I really wanted answered. We philosophers—and academics in general—are all in this together, stumbling towards the truth as best we can, and that requires honest feedback. That is why referee reports are sent to authors even when their papers are rejected and why graduate students are not merely told that their arguments don’t work. Occasionally authors and students see that a referee’s or a supervisor’s objections are devastating and abandon their projects entirely. Of course, in the case of desk rejection, or those unsolicited emails philosophers receive giving a proof of idealism from logic alone, one cannot fairly expect a written explanation, because that would often be too onerous for the journal or the philosopher. In my case, however, the reasons were (presumably) already set out in an email from the board member, and could easily be transmitted, preserving anonymity if necessary.

In his reply, Shields kindly gave me plenty of detail about the process. The review first went to him for screening, “mainly to establish that there are no obvious problems,” which there weren’t. He then sent it to a board member for “substantive vetting.” That board member declined to vet it, for whatever reason. Shields then “sent it to a second board member, who reviewed it and recommended strongly that it be rejected outright.” Whoever that board member was, he or she was quite adamant, issuing a “clear and unswerving recommendation” against publication.

That was all appreciated, but what Shields did not do was answer either of my questions. A non-answer to the first one I at least expected, but what justification could there be for keeping the reasons behind the “clear and unswerving recommendation” top secret? No one would accept a disrespectful policy of not sending referees’ reports to authors of rejected papers, and my situation was no different. If anything, there were stronger reasons for disclosure, given the earlier implication that “revision requests” were the worst-case scenario.  

Before Shields replied, I already assumed that two board members were involved, since it was most improbable that the member who had approved the invitation was the one who rejected the review. Now I knew that the number might be three: the approver, the (possibly distinct) first member asked to vet, and the member with the “unswerving recommendation.” The topic of gender identity is squarely in the analytic feminist philosophy wheelhouse, and the NDPR board has three members with specialties in that sub-discipline: Sally Haslanger and two I have already mentioned, Louise Antony and Ásta. A couple of other board members could not be excluded, but plausibly at least one of that trio would know something.

Cold emailing a board member I’d never met would have been ticklish, but fortunately I had known all three for years: Sally is my long-time colleague, Louise is an old friend with whom I share many professional interests, and I was on Ásta’s thesis committee when she was a PhD student at MIT. It quickly turned out that Sally and Louise knew nothing about my review; Ásta was sympathetic—“I’m sorry that happened. Unfortunately, I have no information on that.”—and referred me back to the editor.

The identity of the “clear and unswerving” board member remains unknown. More importantly from my point of view, at the time of writing I have not been told anything about the reasons for rejection; neither have I been told anything about the reasons for secrecy.

Given the board member’s view was evidently that that my review was unpublishable in any form, it was slightly jarring when Shields ended his email, “I do hope you will find another outlet for your work.” Perhaps that was just clunky boilerplate. I was now faced with the problem that shopping book reviews around to journals is an uncommon practice with little guarantee of success. NDPR was apparently willing to effectively suppress the news that OUP is publishing books with an activist-level disregard for the facts.

The gender-critical gods have smiled on me before in similar situations: Polity stepped in to publish Trouble with Gender, and the invited-then-rescinded pronouns handbook chapter ended up in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. They did so again, casting their spell on the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, where the review will appear in the summer issue (you can read it here).

Could the “clear and unswerving recommendation” for rejection be unconnected with the pall of censoriousness that has descended over the philosophy of sex and gender? Monkeys might fly. In any case, protecting Cosker-Rowland from criticism (even if misguided) is patronizing—she can look after herself. If my review contains embarrassing blunders, they will soon become known. And controversy helps sales: “Now I must read the book,” one Facebook commenter said in the Thomasson-Williamson thread.

The philosophy profession has shown itself to be an institution of fragile integrity when put to the test. One can only hope spines will eventually stiffen, and academic law and order is restored. Meantime, we cannot solely rely on the fortitude of Philosophy & Public Affairs. I suggest that the Journal of Controversial Ideas starts publishing book reviews.

Alex Byrne is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT. He is the author of Transparency and Self-Knowledge and, more problematically, Trouble with Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions.