Information for Authors
Submission Checklist
As part of the submission process, authors should confirm that their manuscript complies with the following requirements. Submissions that do not adhere to these requirements may be returned to authors for correction or rejected.
The submission is a work of philosophy of interest either to a general audience or to specialists in moral, social, political, or legal philosophy, or cognate fields.
The submission aspires to the highest standards of clarity and insightfulness of argument, uses words with economy, and reflects the appropriate standards for civil and respectful discourse.
The submission is a pdf and has been properly prepared for anonymous review.
The submission includes an abstract (no more than 250 words in length) on the first page.
The submission includes the total word count (including notes and references) on the first page.
The submission includes a bibliography or list of works cited.
The submission is consistent with jesp policies on authorship, originality, and the use of generative ai.
The submission has not been previously published. jesp will consider papers that are simultaneously under submission elsewhere, so long as the editors are informed at the time of submission, but jesp will publish only original material that has not appeared elsewhere, in whole or in part.
Authors may not submit a manuscript that has already been rejected by jesp without an invitation to resubmit, even if that manuscript has been substantially revised.
Manuscript Preparation
jesp allows submissions following any standard citation format, so long as references are consistent and easy to follow and are collected together at the end in a bibliography or list of works cited. There are no additional formatting requirements at the submission stage, although the editorial team encourages authors to prepare manuscripts that are double spaced, have numbered pages, and use footnotes instead of endnotes.
Abstract: All submissions should include an abstract (no more than 250 words in length) between the title and the main text.
Word Count: All submissions should include the total word count of the manuscript (including notes and references) on the first page.
Articles: Although jesp considers (and occasionally publishes) longer pieces, the editorial team prefers articles that do not exceed 12,000 words (including notes and references). Article submissions longer than 12,000 words are evaluated according to a proportionally higher standard.
Discussion Notes: Discussion notes should not exceed 3,000 words (including notes and references). A discussion note may be a reply to previously published work or may offer a concise new defense of a familiar view. It need not engage with work that was published in jesp, although such discussions are especially welcome.
Symposium Proposals: Symposium proposals should not exceed 1,000 words. A proposal should lay out the topic of the symposium, provide a justification for devoting space in the journal to this topic, and include a list of potential contributors. jesp is especially interested in proposals for symposia that depart from the familiar “book author meets critics” format of most other journal symposia—for example, symposia that are organized around a lead essay written for the symposium, symposia that are organized around a previously published essay in jesp, or symposia organized around a previously published essay in another journal, especially if that paper deserves renewed attention (either because it is a classic, because it is not a classic but should be, or because it is about an unjustly neglected topic, etc.). Note that symposium proposals do not need to be anonymized.
Anonymization: All submissions (except symposium proposals) must be fully prepared for anonymous review in accordance with the following requirements. Manuscripts that do not conform to these requirements will be returned to authors so that they can be properly anonymized.
Remove your name from the paper, including any running headers and footers. If the abstract is on a separate page, remove your name from that page as well.
If you are citing your own work, the editorial team prefers that you use the third person rather than replacing those citations with something like ‘[redacted for purposes of anonymous review]’, as this best preserves your anonymity. Redacting your name is also acceptable if you think it is necessary to clarify the contribution of the paper. Bear in mind, though, that if the latter approach unduly interferes with the possibility of anonymous review, your paper may be rejected on that basis.
Clear the file’s metadata (in Acrobat go to File > Document properties > Description) and remove any identifying information from the file name.
Remove any acknowledgments—to individuals or institutions—that appear in the main text or in footnotes. (These can of course be added back if the paper is accepted.)
In addition to those requirements, we recommend the following additional measures to ensure anonymity.
Remove the paper from your personal webpage.
If the title appears elsewhere on the web (such as on a conference site), change the title. Alternatively, remove the title altogether. In this case, enter ‘Title Removed for Anonymous Review’ in the Title field when you submit your paper.
Submission: Submit your manuscript for review at the jesp submissions site. If you do not already have an account there, you can create one from the landing page.
After Acceptance
The following instructions apply only to papers that have already been accepted for publication. For information about how to prepare your manuscript before submitting it for review, please consult the Manuscript Preparation section above.
Accepted papers should be prepared as a single Microsoft Word file (.doc or .docx) and submitted though the jesp Accepted Paper Form. (A unique link to the form will be included in the acceptance email.) We understand that many authors prefer other software and file formats, but Word files make both copyediting and typesetting easier and less expensive for the journal.
Your final submission should include
an abstract no more than 250 words in length,
a set of no more than six keywords or keyphrases (of the sort used on PhilPapers), and
your current institutional affiliation and email address at the end of the paper (before the list of references).
Journal Style
When it comes to matters of layout and style, jesp generally follows the most recent edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (cmos). Listed below are some general guidelines to follow when preparing the final version of your accepted paper.
Use the serial (or Oxford) comma.
Use American-style double quotation marks (“ ”) for quotations and “scare quotes”; periods and commas always precede closing double quotation marks. Use single quotation marks (‘ ’) when mentioning a term instead of using it and for quotations within quotations. Use italics when introducing a technical term or expression (e.g., ‘I will call this sort of value extrinsic value’).
Use American spellings (e.g., ‘behavior’ and ‘criminalize’).
Include only a single space between sentences and after colons.
Avoid contractions.
Use an additional ‘s’ when forming possessives from names ending in ‘s’ (e.g., ‘Williams’s’).
Use ‘percent’ rather than ‘%’.
Spell out whole numbers from zero through one hundred as well as large round numbers (e.g., ‘ten million’), except in percentages (e.g., ‘nearly 10 percent of submissions are improperly anonymized’).
Set off quotations that are sixty words or longer as block quotes; shorter quotations are normally run in to the text.
Set Latin words and phrases—even those familiar to philosophical readers (such as ‘a priori’, ‘sui generis’, ‘qua’, ‘ad infinitum’)—in italics. The phrases ‘ad hoc’ and ‘per se’ should be set in roman, however.
Acknowledgments
Any acknowledgments should appear in a final footnote appended to the last sentence of the paper (before your affiliation and email address).
Citations
jesp citation style is a modified version of the cmos “Notes and Bibliography” system. Citations are generally located in footnotes (rather than in endnotes or in parenthetical references in the main text). If your paper (or a part of your paper) focuses on a single text, page numbers in that text can be cited parenthetically following a footnote that provides the initial citation and indicates that the text will thereafter be cited parenthetically.
Footnotes
Do not place footnotes mid-sentence; all footnotes should follow terminal punctuation marks (and quotation marks).
Citations in footnotes should include only (1) the author’s (or authors’) surname(s), (2) the title of the book or article (omit the subtitle, if there is one), and (3) the relevant page, section, or chapter number(s) (if any); full bibliographic details for cited texts should appear only in the list of references at the end of the paper. Do not use ‘ibid.’, ‘id.’, or ‘op. cit.’ to refer to previously cited texts. When citing multiple pages, please provide a precise range (e.g., ‘36–39’); do not use ‘f’ or ‘ff’ (e.g., ‘36ff’).
Haslanger, “Gender and Race,” 36.
Haslanger, “Gender and Race,” 41–43.
Parfit, On What Matters, 2:117.
Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy.”
Schroeder, “Cudworth and Normative Explanations,” sec. 2.2.
Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, ch. 4.
Setiya, review of On What Matters, 1282.
Multiple citations in a single footnote are separated by semicolons (except when they refer to the same author, in which case they are separated by commas without repeating the author’s surname).
See Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, ch. 2; Millikan, “Biosemantics,” 287–90, Varieties of Meaning, 14, and “In Defense of Proper Functions,” 293; and Castañeda, Thinking and Doing, 90.
References
A list of references should appear at the end of your manuscript (in a section labeled “References”). This list should include the full bibliographic details of every source cited or mentioned in the footnotes. Sort references alphabetically by author (or editor) surname; multiple sources by the same author(s) are sorted alphabetically by title.
References should follow the “Notes and Bibliography” style detailed in the “Source Citations” chapters of the most recent edition of cmos.
Journal Articles
Audi, Robert. “Intending.” Journal of Philosophy 70, no. 13 (1973): 387–403.
Radzik, Linda. “Incorrigible Norms: Foundationalist Theories of Normative Authority.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 38, no. 4 (2000): 633–49.
Books
Anscombe, G. E. M. Intention. 2nd ed. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton University Press, 2005.
Bratman, Michael. Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Harvard University Press, 1987.
Korsgaard, Christine M. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Clarendon Press, 1984.
Wilson, George M. The Intentionality of Human Action. Rev. ed. Stanford University Press, 1989.
Books with Editors or Translators
Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Edited by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart. Clarendon Press, 1996.
Goodman, Michael, and Robert Snyder, eds. Contemporary Readings in Epistemology. Prentice Hall, 1993.
Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, ed. Essays on Moral Realism. Cornell University Press, 1988.
Chapters in Single-Author Collections
Foot, Philippa. “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.” In Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Clarendon Press, 2002.
Korsgaard, Christine M. “Morality and Freedom.” In Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Mill, Charles W. “The Racial Polity.” In Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Cornell University Press, 2015.
Williams, Bernard. “Internal and External Reasons.” In Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980. Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Chapters in Multiauthor Collections
Dancy, Jonathan. “Action, Content, and Inference.” In Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy, edited by Hans-Johann Glock and John Hyman. Oxford University Press, 2009.
McGrath, Sarah. “Moral Disagreement and Moral Expertise.” In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 3, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Stratton-Lake, Philip, and Brad Hooker. “Scanlon Versus Moore on Goodness.” In Metaethics After Moore, edited by Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons. Clarendon Press, 2006.
Book Reviews
Darwall, Stephen L. Review of Ought, Reasons, and Morality, by W. D. Falk. Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 4 (1989): 208–14.
Setiya, Kieran. Review of On What Matters, vols. 1–2, by Derek Parfit. Mind 120, no. 480 (2011): 1281–88.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bicchieri, Cristina, Ryan Muldoon, and Alessandro Sontuoso. “Social Norms.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-norms/.
Goodman, Charles. “Śāntideva.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/shantideva/.
Publication
Papers are published in pdf format at https://www.jesp.org. jesp does not follow a set publication schedule; instead, issues are published on a rolling basis when a sufficient number of papers have been copyedited and typeset. All published papers receive a permanent doi and are both backed up internally and archived externally (through Portico). There are no publication fees for authors, and public access to papers is free of charge. Authors retain copyright in their work, and papers are typically published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license, though authors can request a different Creative Commons license if one is required for funding purposes.
After Publication
Once papers are published in jesp, the published version of record is fixed and cannot be altered. (In exceptional cases, corrections or retractions may be issued.)
As the copyright holders, authors are free to share their jesp papers widely by, for example, posting the published versions on personal or institutional websites, uploading them to repositories like PhilArchive and ssrn, or sharing them via email or social media. Authors are also free to reuse parts or all of their papers in future work (for example, in a book or edited volume) and may authorize reprints elsewhere.
Assuming that the standard Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license is chosen, readers are permitted to share papers freely as well, provided they are unmodified, properly attributed, and not used for commercial purposes. If a paper is published under a different Creative Commons license, some of these restrictions (especially regarding commercial use or adaptations) may not apply.
Note that the Creative Commons license specifies what others may do with a paper without further permission. The author(s) may always authorize additional uses—including commercial uses—even if the chosen license does not allow them. The permissions granted by the original license cannot be revoked, however.
Privacy Statement
The names and email addresses entered in the jesp publication and submissions sites will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.
