Submissions


Submission Guidelines

Submitted manuscripts should be PDF files prepared for anonymous review, containing no identifying information.

Submissions need not conform to the journal style unless and until accepted for publication.

There is no word limit, but submissions on the lengthier side should have correspondingly more news value.

To submit a paper, please register and login to Ergo’s editorial management system at https://www.ergosubmissions.org.

Accepted Papers

Accepted papers must be adapted to the journal’s house style. The final document should be a Word file (.doc or .docx) or a well-formatted LaTeX file using Ergo's custom class. LaTeX commands should be restricted to those supported by MathJax. The text should be structured consistently. The name and affiliation of the contributor(s) should appear at the top, along with an abstract of 150 to 250 words.

Ergo follows APA Style (6th edition) with the following exceptions:

In-text citations: The author-date system should be used. The author's last name (if not explicitly mentioned in the text) is followed by the year of publication, a colon, and the unabbreviated page numbers. If several works are mentioned within the same in-text reference, they are separated by a semicolon.

Example: (Anscombe 1958: 13; Lewis 1980: 264–270)

Authors who want their in-text citations rendered as hyperlinks to the list of references must, if submitting a .doc/.docx file, color all in-text citations so that they can be identified during production. (Authors submitting .tex files can ignore this step.) Blue, or any color not used for another purpose elsewhere in the text, will do. We strongly encourage authors to make their in-text citations linkable, but it is not required.

References in footnotes and the References list: Authors’ first names are spelled out. Initials are only used for middle names. The order of forename and surname should only be reversed at the very beginning of an entry, whereas all other names in an entry are written with the forename first. If a work has multiple authors or editors, the word and should be written before the last contributor’s name. At the beginning of the entry or in lists with three or more names, the word and is always preceded by a comma.

The place of publication should be omitted in references to books. In references to articles in periodicals, the issue number must be indicated, whether the journal is paginated by issue or not.

Page numbers are never introduced by p. or pp.

Examples:

  • Anscombe, Gertrude E. M. (1958). Modern Moral Philosophy. Philosophy33(124), 1–19.
  • Arendt, Hannah (1977). Public Rights and Private Interests. In Michael Mooney and Florian Stuber (Eds.), Small Comforts for Hard Times: Humanists on Public Policy (103–108). Columbia University Press.
  • Barcan Marcus, Ruth (1993). Modalities: Philosophical Essays. Oxford University Press.
  • Beauvoir, Simone de (1989). Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism (Veronique Zaytzeff and Frederick Morrison, Trans.). International Studies in Philosophy, 21(3), 33–48.
  • Descartes, René (1985–91). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Vols. 1–3). Eds. and trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge University Press.
  • Lewis, David K. (1986). A Subjectivist’s Guide to Objective Chance. In David K. Lewis (Ed.), Philosophical Papers (Vol. 2, 83–113). (Reprinted from Studies in Inductive Logic and Probability, Vol. 2, 263–293, by Richard C. Jeffrey, Ed., 1980, University of Berkeley Press).
  • Whitehead, Alfred N. and Bertrand Russell (1963). Principia Mathematica (2nd ed., reprint, Vol. 2). Cambridge University Press.

Citations for history of philosophy: Citations for papers in the history of philosophy should follow the conventions standard to scholarship of the figure(s) or time-period that is the subject of the paper, rather than APA guidelines; if there is more than one standard convention, please follow the formatting of previously published papers in Ergo on that figure or era.

Capitalization of headlines, titles, and subtitles: In headlines and when citing titles and subtitles of other works in the English language, consistently capitalize as follows:

Capitalize all nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions.

Do not capitalize articles, prepositions, coordinating conjunctions, or the to in infinitives unless they are the first word in a headline, title, or subtitle. Sections should be numbered.

Acknowledgements and figures: Acknowledgments should appear in their own section before the references. Figures should use fonts that match the main text (Palatino for HTML, Sabon for PDF).

Author note: Contrary to APA rules, Ergo does not demand and will not print author notes containing the authors’ contact information.

Endnotes are not accepted and should be replaced by footnotes.

For any further stylistic concerns, consult the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th edition. In particular, see section 4.15 for capitalization in titles and headlines, section 4.21 for the use of italics, as well as pages 70 to 76 for the avoidance of discriminating language.

British English or American English may be used, but either one should be followed consistently throughout the article. If the text is written in American English, spelling should conform to American English as exemplified in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2005) or Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (2002). If the text is written in British English, spelling should conform to the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), and Oxford spelling (-ize instead of -ise) should be used.