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We invite submissions at certain times of the year through open Calls for Papers for general or special issues. Please check our news page for details about the latest CfP.

Articles are invited from postgraduate students and professional philosophers alike. Articles should be roughly 3000-3500 words. Authors are advised to write concise articles, with clearly stated aims and tightly controlled arguments. Authors are also asked to clarify any specific terminology employed and to avoid lengthy footnotes. Book reviews of recently published volumes in relevant fields are also welcomed, as are proposals for interviews. Those interested in writing a book review or conducting an interview are encouraged to contact the editors.

Authors should ensure that their submission adheres to the Submission Preparation Checklist before sending it to the journal.

Submission preparation checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission’s compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • The submission is in Microsoft Word document file format (.docx).
  • Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
  • The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  • Any illustrations used in the article are free from copyright, or permission for their reproduction in the Debates in Aesthetics has been gained from the copyright holder. It is the author’s responsibility to gain permission from the copyright holder, and pay for any copyright fees. Such permissions should be submitted by the author along with the article.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.
  • If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the submission file must be prepared for blind review – it should not contain any identifying information.

Author Guidelines

Essays are meant to be kept short, aiming at roughly 3000-3500 words. They should be written for an intelligent general audience, and so should not require any knowledge of specialist philosophical terminology or ideas in order to be understood. Authors are also asked to clarify specific terminology if such is used and to avoid lengthy footnotes. Authors are also asked to provide a brief abstract at the beginning of their submission. To avoid difficulties with word processing formats we kindly ask authors to save and submit their work in Word Document Format (.docx).

GENERAL LAYOUT AND STYLE GUIDELINES

The basic rule for layout of papers is to keep things simple. We do advise authors to use section divisions. Please use italics for emphasis rather than underlining or bold type. We prefer that cardinal numbers, i.e. not dates or ordinal numbers, up to 100 should be written out rather than in numerals (“ninety-nine red balloons” not “99 Red Balloons”, but “the 3rd Earl Russell died in 1970”).  Lists should be numbered or lettered, not bulleted.  Abbreviations should be used sparingly and should also be spelled out on their first appearance with the abbreviation following in parentheses (“Debates in Aesthetics (DIA)”).

QUOTES

Shorter quotes should be encased in “double quotation marks.” Quotes of three lines or longer should be separated from the main text by a line break before and after the quotation. Single quotation marks can be used when mentioning words such as ‘sloop,’ or the sentence ‘your looks longer than it is’, or as ‘scare-quotes’ to indicate technical, non-standard usage or cases where the word is being referred to as a word (i.e. the term ‘aesthetic’ has an interesting history).

CITATIONS

Authors are asked to pay particular attention to the accuracy and correct presentation of citations. Each citation should be made parenthetically, including the name of the author, year and page number. For example:

(Quine 1960, 12)
Horkheimer and Adorno (2002, 52).

REFERENCES

A reference list should appear at the end of the manuscript headed ‘References’ and should include all and only those references cited in the text. Authors should conform to the following bibliographic style:

Journal Articles:
Irvin, Sherri, ‘Scratching an Itch’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2008) 66:1, 25-35.

Authored Books:
Budd, Malcolm, Aesthetic Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Edited Books
Carolyn, Korsmeyer (ed.), Aesthetics: The Big Questions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

Book Chapters:
Meiland, Jack W., ‘Originals, Copies, and Aesthetic Value’, in Dennis Dutton (ed.), The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 115-130.

Translated Texts:
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, transl. Werner S. Pluhar, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).

Websites:
Origgi, Gloria (ed.), Archives of the Interdisciplines Art and Cognition Work- shops (published online 2004), < http://cognitionandculture.net/wp-content/ uploads/archive_1.pdf> accessed 13 October 2019.

SPELLING

We follow Oxford English spelling and grammar rules. Your manuscript should use British spelling with -ize suffixes. For example: analyse, behaviour, colour, defence, premiss (pl. premisses), sceptic, racialized, emphasize, realized and realization.

COPYRIGHT

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Submit a Manuscript

Once you have checked that your manuscript conforms to the submission preparation checklist and author guidelines, please send you manuscript to: editor “at” debatesinaesthetics “dot” org.