The 50th issue of The Philosophers’ Magazine is now on its way to readers and bookshops around the world. Regular readers will notice that, in many ways, the special issue is very different from the 49 that preceded it. Celebration and celebrant are somewhat out of sync.

What we’ve done is invited 50 philosophers to each outline one of the most important ideas in philosophy of the 21st century so far. Contributors include Igor Aleksander, Nick Bostrom, John Cottingham, Simon Critchley, John Dupré, Steve Fuller, Frank Furedi, Simon Glendinning, Susan Haack, Alastair Hannay, John Harris, Ted Honderich, Brad Hooker, Joshua Knobe, Ernie Lepore, Genevieve Lloyd, Alexander McCall Smith, Al Martinich, Nicholas Maxwell, Al Mele, Christopher Norris, Michael Ruse, Roger Scruton, Nancy Sherman, Peter Singer, Ray Tallis and Timothy Williamson. (We’ll be publishing these on this website gradually over the coming months, although you can of course read them sooner by buying the issue. You can order online here while phone numbers for ordering are here, and you may want to subscribe for the next four issues while you’re at it! You can also subscribe to a digital edition here, which will grant access to the current issue and most of the archive too)

Where the special issue really differs from the norm is that tpm usually contains a variety of forms of writing. There are plenty of philosophy journals, but where else do you get the spread of news, features, interviews, essays, reviews and columns? But although the format of our 50th issue is different, in more fundamental ways, it reflects the ethos which we think make tpm distinctive. You can sum it up in three words: breadth, accessibility and quality.

The breadth of content is in many ways a product of the breadth of our readership. We are not a “popular philosophy” magazine, if by that is meant something written by the elite for the edification of the masses. tpm is for the experts too, because their expertise is nowadays so specialised that I can guarantee you that almost every academic philosopher who reads through this issue will find they have not even heard of some of the big ideas contained in it, and that is because most ideas in philosophy are big fish in small ponds. tpm is the lake into which all these fish are poured.

Accessibility also matters, because the basic premise we start from is that there is serious philosophical work going on – mainly, but not exclusively, in academic settings – which is of potential interest and importance to people who may be somewhere else. The obstacles to the latter finding out what the former are up to are not in principle serious. All that is needed is for the philosophers to write in ordinary English rather than academese and for there to be some medium to channel such writings. When we started, some other such media did exist, but we thought we could offer something different and distinctive. I think we have done that.

Finally, we want quality. Our writers and interviewees are some of the best around. 90% of the contributors to our special section have either written for the magazine before, been interviewed for it, or both. It’s an impressive list, one that makes me very satisfied about what we have achieved.

On May 2 1997, when he became Prime Minister of Britain for the first time, Tony Blair said “Education is not the privilege of the few but the right of the many.” Similar thoughts about philosophy inspired the creation of this magazine just a few months later. Blair went three years ago, the party he led left office just days before I sat down to write this, but the magazine is still here. Like governments and prime ministers, longevity for magazines is an achievement of some kind, but what really matters is what they do. I hope we have succeeded on those terms, and that we are here to see in the third decade of the millennium too.