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Author Guidelines - Introduction to Philosophy
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Author Guidelines - Introduction to Philosophy

Last revised date: January 14, 2024

Audience and purpose

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

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.

Licensing

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.

Contents

View the working table of contents for each of the books in the series.

Length of chapters and of books

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.

Content for each chapter

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:

Diverse voices/perspectives

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.

Glossary

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 and current philosophers

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.

Images, Video & Sound Clips

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:

Accessibility

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.

Author Code  

Authors should ensure their contributions are free of libel, plagiarism, copyright violations or factual errors.

Peer Review

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.

Submission

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).

Timeline

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.

Style Sheet for Intro to Philosophy series

 

Last revised:  October 14, 2021

 

Template provided by BCcampus Open Textbook Self Publishing Guide.

Citation Style

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.

General Style

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).  

Gendered language & examples

  1. Use gender-neutral language where possible (e.g., “people,” “humans” instead of “man” or “mankind.”)
  2. When giving examples or cases of fictional persons, balance between assuming them male or female: so that for one you would use male pronouns, and for another female.
  3. The use of “they” and “their” is acceptable and encouraged for non-gendered pronouns, and is preferred to the binary language of he/she or s/he.
  1. E.g., “A person is unlikely to be able to go through their entire life without needing any help at all.”
  2. Recognize that not all examples need to be gendered male or female, particularly since some of the readers of the books will not use specifically male or female pronouns themselves.

Headings and sections

  1. When writing in Google docs, the title of the chapter should be in Heading 1.
  2. The other sections of the chapter should start with Heading 2 (subsections of Heading 2 sections should be in Heading 3).

Tables

  1. Column labels should be centered.
  2. Tables should have column headers and row headers when possible (for accessibility): i.e., the top row should have headers for the columns, and the first column should be headers for the rows.

 

Capitalization

  1. A list of specific words that should be capitalized:
  1. Indigenous

  1. Capitalization of titles of works
  1. In keeping with the Chicago Manual of Style, titles of books should be in italics, titles of articles in quotes, and all are capitalized in “headline” fashion, i.e.:
  1. Capitalize first and last words of the title
  2. Capitalize nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs
  3. Do not capitalize articles: a, an, the
  4. Do not capitalize conjunctions: and, but, for, or, nor
  5. “Lowercase prepositions, regardless of length, except when they are used adverbially or adjectivally (up in Look Up, down in Turn Down, on in The On Button, to in Come To, etc.) or when they compose part of a Latin expression used adjectivally or adverbially (De Facto, In Vitro, etc.).” (Chicago Manual of Style section 8.159).
  6. Do not capitalize “as” or “to” (except as in the previous rule)

  1. Capitalization after colons
  1. According to the Chicago Manual of Style, if a colon is in the middle of a sentence, the word following starts with a lowercase letter, unless it’s a proper noun.
  2. If a colon introduces one of the following, then the first letter of the word following it will be capitalized:
  1. A question
  2. A series of sentences that are all meant to connect to the phrase before the colon
  3. A quotation
  4. Text in a dialogue (e.g., Euthyphro: You are making my words move in circles. Socrates: Your words themselves are moving.)

Indentation/left justification

  1. New paragraphs should not be indented on the left; just use a blank line between paragraphs.
  2. Block quotes: each line of a block quote should be indented ½ inch on the left only.

Punctuation

Commas and semicolons

  1. Use serial (Oxford) comma.
  2. For lists of items, where the items in the list themselves contain commas, use semicolons between the items.
  1. E.g., the authors of this book are from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Chicgao, Illinois, United States; and Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Quotation marks (and their relationship with other punctuation)

  1. Use double quotation marks for quotations from other sources, article titles, and scare quotes. Use single quotation marks only for quotes within quotes.
  2. For words that are referred to as words or concepts, use quotation marks (double): E.g., when using the word “ought,” in this case, we mean ….
  3. Periods and commas should go inside quotation marks if there are no parenthetical citations after the quotation marks: E.g., Mary then said, “Ah, so that is what red looks like.”
  4. In line with the Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed), punctuation before quotations depends on the syntactical relationship of the quotation to the rest of the text. E.g.,
  1. If the quotation is introduced with a word such as said, replied, argued, noted, use a comma before the quotation.
  2. If it is introduced by an independent clause (could be its own sentence), use a colon before the quotation.
  3. If the quotation would fit grammatically into the sentence w/o punctuation if it were not a quotation, use no punctuation. E.g., “The human body here is identified with ‘a mass of perishable rubbish’” (Plato 212a).
  4. The above are also the case for introducing block quotes.

Other punctuation

  1. Ellipses:
  1. When used inside a quotation mark because some text has been removed, only use three dots rather than three dots inside two parentheses. E.g., “all pleasure is good, … but sometimes we must endure pain in order to achieve more pleasure later.”
  2. As in the Chicago Manual of Style, a period is placed before an ellipses if the end of a sentence is taken out, or if the sentence ends at the period and there is material taken out after that sentence. The period comes right at the end of the sentence as usual, and then the ellipsis follows: “Quote quote quote quote. . . . Quote quote quote.”
  1. Dashes—use keyboard shortcuts to make em and en dashes in Pressbooks (do a web search on how to use those shortcuts for the computer you’re using).
  1. Use em dashes for what are commonly called “dashes”—when inserting something in a sentence such as one might use parentheses or commas for, or to replace a colon.
  2. Use en dashes for ranges between numbers and dates (rather than hyphens): e.g., (Camus 1949, 12–16).

 Font styles

  1. Use italics for words in a foreign language (e.g., Rousseau’s word ressentiment).
  2. Use italics for emphasis: e.g., “so that is what red looks like.”
  3. Use bold for specialized terms the first time they are introduced, and, as noted above, provide a glossary at the end of the chapter.

Numbers & years

  1.  Spell out numbers one to nine, and use numerals after that.
  2. Use commas for numbers that are five digits or more: 10,000; 100,000
  3. Use BCE rather than BC, and CE rather than AD when listing years.

Spelling and Abbreviation List

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)