A Special Issue of Res Philosophica
Deadline for Submission: March 1, 2015
Call for Papers
Res Philosophica invites papers on the topic of philosophy of fiction for a special issue of the journal.
Description
Submissions addressing any of the wide range of questions encompassed by the philosophy of fiction are welcome. These issues may be connected to the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics.
For example, one might focus on questions at the intersection of fiction and the philosophy of language, such as the following: Under what conditions is a statement true in a particular fiction? Could a statement that is in fact true according to a fiction have been false according to that same fiction? What, if any things, are the meanings of fictional terms? And what role, if any, do those meanings play in determining the truth value of fictional statements?
One might, on the other hand, focus on more metaphysical questions: Do fictional entities exist and if so, what grounds their existence? Are fictional entities abstract and if so are they created or discovered? What are the identity conditions for fictional entities? Or, more broadly, under what conditions is a fictional entity that appears in one fiction the same as one that appears in another? Can fictions, instead of generating an ontology of fictional entities, help us to avoid an ontology of abstracta and if so, how?
Fictions also raise interesting epistemological and ethical issues: How do fictions help us to come to know facts about the world? How can we come to know what’s true according to a fiction? Can fictions help us to learn moral truths and if so, how? Is it morally impermissible to write fictions that support or convey certain themes?
The questions above represent merely a small sample of the questions that might be addressed in papers related to the theme of this special issue.
Guidelines
Submissions will be triple anonymously reviewed. (First, authors do not know the identity of the referees, second, referees do not know the identity of the authors, and third, editors do not know the identity of the authors.) Please format your submission so that it is suitable for anonymous review. (Instructions are available here.)
Papers may be up to 12,000 words long (including footnotes).
Initial submissions are accepted as pdf or Microsoft Word documents. Papers may be submitted in any standard style, but authors of accepted papers will be required to edit their papers according to the journal’s style, which follows The Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition). Style instructions are available here.
Please use the online submission form for submitting your essay, available here.