Submit a Piece

Whether you have a point of view to argue for, an area of the philosophical landscape to survey, a short story to tell, or just about anything else philosophy-related, we would love for you to submit your piece with us! We publish pieces in periodic issues, approximately twice a year (for now).

Please note that for the time being, we are restricting submissions to those who have shown up to at least one in-person meetup. Information about these meetings can be reached through our main website: https://www.philosophynyc.org.

We welcome any philosophical topic of likely interest to our members, but for our next issue (expected later this year), we are especially looking for philosophical articles covering any of the following:

Artificial Intelligence
Philosophy and Science
Scientific materialism (pro and con)
Existentialist approaches to love, authenticity and / or sexuality

Submit your revised first draft (or raw ideas) to: philosophytablejournal@gmail.com

Specific Requirements for your Piece

In addition to more academic submission, we do welcome more literary or biographical work, as long as it rather obviously allows a philosophical interpretation. Some of what follows here may not be pertinent to those kinds of submissions.

1) Your piece must be philosophy-related. This journal is not for asserting raw political opinion about current events, documenting non-philosophical minutiae of your personal life, etc. If you want to do this, we'll see you on Facebook or Substack instead... :)

2) Your document should be typed in legible font and submitted preferably as a Word Doc if possible, or as a Google Doc if absolutely necessary (no PDFs!). Google Docs presents some editorial challenges on our side, but we'd rather have your work than not have it. Word limit is 200 word minimum, around 5000 word maximum. These parameters are negotiable, however. If you have more to say than this, we can talk about publishing in installments over multiple issues.

3) Make sure your piece is free of typos and grammatical errors. We would be prefer not have to spellcheck, but we don't want to risk a scandal from ornery Higher Grammarians, so if you don't we will. So please do your part on this.

4) If you are writing a longer-form non-literary piece (a.k.a. an "article"), we suggest you include an introduction or an abstract: a one-paragraph summary of your article at the beginning of the piece. This will give readers a sense of why they should read the piece, and it will make your own writing easier by helping to clarify your own thoughts. However, there are more expert literary ways of introducing even a philosophical article, so this is up to you.

5) More literary pieces – anecdotes, autobiographical episodes, poetry, short stories – might be acceptable, but even literary submission should have a clear philosophical point. If you think your submission has one but you can't quite put your finger on what it is, then send it on and the editors will try to help. We do plan to be somewhat more intentional on this than we were in the first issue – though please don't be shy about giving it a try.

6) You may include citations as needed. These might not be necessary, depending on your content. If they might significantly enhance the quality, your editor could suggest adding them, but feel free to do so yourself. However, please don't add them just to embroider your work. If you do include citations, the following guidelines would greatly help your editors and speed up the process considerably.

· For clarification purposes, consider linking your text to an internet authority. For example, if you make reference to the "An Lushan rebellion" or "neutrinos", you can assume that at least some of your readers may not be entirely clear on what those terms mean. So find an internet source, like a decent Wikipedia or a link to the Britannica. However, please be sure that your link does not hide behind a paywall, which may defeat your purpose in adding them. Your editor will add links if necessary, so don't overthink this.

· Use either endnotes or footnotes for explanatory comments that might break the flow for the reader if included right within the text. These should be illuminating digressions that deserve to be included as long as they are directly relevant and not longer than a small paragraph. These can be either endnotes or footnotes (but for technical reasons they'll end up the same in the final publication, so don't worry). Please be consistent throughout, whichever you decide to use.

Otherwise, citations should follow the following format:

· For simple (non-explanatory) citations, use the standard in-text format, like this: (Barclay, 2015, 682). If you have an additional comment relevant to the citation, you may (but need not) include both comment and citation in a single footnote/endnote, and skip the in-text reference.

· Citations should refer to your bibliography list at the end of your article, which should be labeled as either "Bibliography" or "References", and should look like this:

o Barclay, Kieron. 2015. “A Quantitative Study of Birth Order and Health in Later Life.” American Journal of Epidemiology 182(8), 682–690.

o Beyer, W.N., D.E. Heinz, and A.W. Redmon-Norwood. 1996. Environmental Contaminants in Wildlife: Interpreting Tissue Concentrations. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

o Hofkircher, Wolfgang. 2013. Untitled. https://medium.com/entri/lk43.

7) Limit the length of your quotations. If you are going to critique a longer quotation (that means talking about the words the quoted author is using) then by all means include it but set it off as an indented passage. Otherwise, paraphrase it in your own words.

8) Absolutely no plagiarism. Having ChatGPT (or its impersonators) do your hard thinking for you is plagiarism. Except for purely factual research, let us see what YOU can do. We already know what ChatGPT can do.

9) Our aim is to build a community of philosophical dialogue in this journal, so please keep in mind how to engage others' interests, in terms of both style and content. Imagine you didn't already know all that much about the topic you're writing about. Would you yourself be interested in reading further?

10) Maybe you have an idea sparked by a recent Wednesday night discussion! Consider writing an article in response. (You can also enter comments in the blog under each piece.)

The Submission Process

Once you have something you'd like to submit, you can email it to philosophytablejournal@gmail.com. Make sure the piece fits the requirements listed above. We will get to it as soon as we can and reach out to you with further information. In your submission email, please include:

1) Your name as you'd like it to be shown on the published piece, along with a short 1-2 sentence author bio. If you'd like us to link to a blog/webpage with more of your writing, we'd be happy to do so, but we will not link to businesses/startups.

2) A sentence or two describing what you're submitting, and why it is important to you.

3) If your piece is a response or accompaniment to a previously published piece, whether yours or someone else's, include a link to that piece. (You don't have to decide exactly where to put it. We can help with that.)

4) Here are some stylistic options that might describe what your submission. (Pick more than one if you like.)

•Persuasive: pieces arguing for a specific position or point of view.

•Thematic: pieces exploring a certain area of, or topic within, philosophy.

•Literary (if philosophically relevant): poetry, stories, philosophical dialogues, etc.

•(Auto)biographical: philosophically relevant writing on your own life, or someone else's, which is of philosophical interest.

Any questions and concerns about submission can be sent to our email, philosophytablejournal@gmail.com. We're happy to hear from you even before you submit a draft!