Author Guidelines - Introduction to Philosophy
Last revised date: January 14, 2024
The books in the Introduction to Philosophy open textbook series are designed for use in Introduction to Philosophy courses at the first-year level, in colleges and universities. The audience for these book is introductory-level students, meaning students who have no prior experience with philosophical texts, concepts or methods. The books are aimed at first-year, survey courses in post-secondary (college and university) institutions--courses that aim to provide a survey of various topics in philosophy as a grounding for further courses. Some students taking such first-year survey courses may have taken a philosophy course before, but the books should be accessible to anyone who has not taken one, or who has not read any philosophy texts.
Chapters will be focused on original content written by authors to provide basic overviews of some of the main schools of thought, approaches, and philosophers in topics often covered in introduction to philosophy courses (e.g., epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, social and political philosophy, and more). Quotes from primary texts may be included in the chapters, but the book will not have primary texts in it.
Read about the purpose of the book series, the book editors and The Rebus Community in the overview document for the book series. See also the discussion threads for the project on the Rebus Community site.
Authors should ideally have a Ph.D. in philosophy and experience teaching first-year philosophy courses. Those with an M.A., or graduate students pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy may also be accepted as authors in some circumstances.
Note that the books are available to students free of cost, and there are no financial payments to authors or editors of the books. This is a volunteer project for all involved.
This text will be published under the CC-BY license, which will keep it remixable and easy to update, with attribution to original authors and contributors.
You can include materials that have more restrictive Creative Commons licenses in the body of the book so long as they are clearly distinguished from the rest of the text. You may also link from within the book to non-openly licensed materials. Let the editors know if you have questions about how to handle such materials.
Read about the Creative Commons licenses choices for books published with the support of the Rebus Community.
View the working table of contents for each of the books in the series.
Each book (e.g., Ethics, Aesthetics, Epistemology) should be approximately 15,000-18,000 words long, with each chapter being approximately 3000 words. There will inevitably be variation in word counts between the different books and the chapters in each book, but we will use these as rough guides to try to ensure that some parts of each book don’t stand out too much as longer or shorter than the rest.
Each book has an editor. Please see here for editor duties. Authors are responsible for one or more chapters within a book.
As noted above, each chapter should be roughly 3000 words long. Given that the book is intended for introductory level Philosophy courses, authors should restrict the use of jargon. Additional material (such as sidebars or boxes with examples, short excerpts of primary sources, further reading lists) are in addition to this. They should also include:
Where possible, please include philosophers from underrepresented groups in philosophy, such as women and people of colour. For example, if you find that all of the authors you are citing in a chapter, or in a “further readings” section are male, please work to find female authors whose work you can also discuss. In addition, if you can, please add discussion of philosophical approaches from beyond the Western canon.
Please highlight all technical terms in bold the first time of use and provide a list of glossary definitions at the end of your submitted chapter.
References to historical figures should include the dates of birth and death in parentheses, such as: Karl Marx (1813-1883). If the philosopher is still living, please do not include the year of birth in parentheses; leave the years out entirely for living philosophers.
Where appropriate, you can choose to include images, video or sound clips along with the written text. Please ensure that these elements are in the public domain or carry a CC-BY, CC-BY-SA or a CC0 license. The following are useful sources of public domain and CC-BY licensed multimedia content:
Authors are responsible for ensuring that their chapters fulfill the accessibility practices in the chapters under “Best Practices” in the BCcampus Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit. Follow the practices there for:
** The BCcampus guide instructs authors to use the heading styles in Pressbooks. If you are writing in Word or Google Docs, please also be sure to use the heading styles menu to structure your content. The title of the chapter should be “Heading 1,” and the sub-headings in the chapter should start with “Heading 2.”
If you are using Google docs to write a chapter, you can use the Grackle extension for Google Docs (free) to check accessibility.
If you are using other word processors (such as MS Word) to write a chapter, you can find information on how to add alt tags to images, and more, in the guides from the Accessible Digital Office Document Project.
If you have any questions or require support in meeting these standards, please contact the series editor, Christina Hendricks: christina.hendricks@ubc.ca.
Authors should ensure their contributions are free of libel, plagiarism, copyright violations or factual errors.
Each book in the series will undergo peer review. You will have an opportunity to review the content following editing and peer review, and make chapter revisions.
Please submit your chapter or contribution as an editable Google doc or a Word document. This can be emailed to or shared with the book editor. Please also CC the series editor (christina.hendricks@ubc.ca).
Please consult with the editor of your book for specific due dates. Authors will generally be asked to complete their chapters in 8-10 weeks, if possible.
Last revised: October 14, 2021
Template provided by BCcampus Open Textbook Self Publishing Guide.
Please credit sources as needed and provide citations where appropriate, using Chicago Style author-date system.
References should be listed at the end of each chapter.
1. As noted above, the books in the series are edited according to the Chicago Manual of Style, and many of the specifics below are taken from that manual.
2. The audience for this text is first-year students with no experience of philosophy. Avoid or explain jargon and specialized terms to make the text more understandable to this audience.
3. Consider that this book could be used by English speaking instructors and students from many parts of the world, so try not to rely on examples that make sense to some audiences but not others (e.g., references to popular culture or cultural practices that are focused on one part of the world may not make sense or resonate in other parts).
Editors may choose whether to use British or American spelling conventions (e.g., colour or color), but this should be consistent throughout all the chapters in each book.
A-B
Artifact (not artefact; unless quoting from a source that uses “artefact”)
Artwork (one word)
Artworld (one word)
C-E
F-H
I-M
Judgment (if using North American spelling throughout the book); Judgment (if using British spelling throughout the book
Metaethics (one word, no hyphen); also metaethical
Multicultural (one word, no hyphen)
N-R
S-T
U-Z
Worldview (one word, no hyphen)