Philosophy News is looking for qualified writers to author single pieces and/or a regular column for the site. Each type of contribution is described below. This can be an opportunity to exercise your writing skills, get your name and ideas into the public square and contribute to a popular and growing news site. While we are not in a position to compensate writers for their submission at this time (that may change in the future), writing for Philosophy News gives you an opportunity to grow an audience and your personal brand, work out ideas with other philosophers, and participate in a growing community.

Here’s a little about philosophynews.com:

• We’ve been in existence for 21 years
• We have over 32,000 page views per month with over 20,000 users hitting the site from all over the world
• We have over 28,000 followers on Twitter
• We publish news items daily on topics across philosophy and the humanities

By publishing with us, your articles will get read and you’ll have an opportunity to reach tens of thousands of readers each month.

Qualifications

Philosophy News focuses largely on Western analytic philosophy. While we’re open to other areas of philosophical contemplation, we’re primarily looking for writers who have been trained in this tradition. Specifically, you might be qualified if you:

• Have formal training in analytic philosophy or equivalent experience writing or teaching in philosophy. You don’t necessarily have to have a degree in philosophy (though having a degree is preferred). However, we are looking for people that have taken more than a couple of philosophy classes in college.
• Have a passion for philosophy and writing.
• Have the time to devote to research and article construction.
• Are able to consider a broad set of reasonable viewpoints that may differ from your own and give equal time to those viewpoints (we’re not looking for people that need a forum only to voice personal views or to grind a particular axe).
• Have papers or articles you have written that are 1000 words or more and that you can use to demonstrate your writing skill. We need to see at least 3 samples. These can be college-level papers but they must have been written entirely by you—no group projects please. Your submissions do not need to be on philosophical topics only (though this is preferred) but they should demonstrate your ability to explain complex ideas in a simple, accessible way.
• Your submissions entirely authored by you, show demonstrated ability to do research and adequately cite sources, must not be plagiarized, and must be well-written. At this time we’re creating articles in English only so while you don’t need to be a native English speaker, you should be able to write well in English.

Types of Articles

We’re looking for writers who are interested in contributing to either or both of the following two content areas of Philosophy News:

“What is” Series

These are single articles on a variety of topics for our “What Is” series. You can see a sample of this type of article here. These articles will need to be 3000-4000 words in length and written so they are accessible to a broad audience. You will need to write for a target audience that may have little to no knowledge of philosophy.

Here are the “what is” topics for which we currently need authors:

1. What is Metaphysics?
2. What is Ethics?
3. What is Political Philosophy?
4. What is Philosophy of Religion?
5. What is Theology?
6. What is Time?
7. What is the Mind-Body Problem?
8. What is Free Will?
9. What is Skepticism?
10. What is Language [Linguistics]?
11. What is Cognitive Science?
12. What is Artificial Intelligence?
13. Who is [Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Descartes, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Bentham . . . ]

What’s Happening in Philosophy (WHiP)

This series is published on a regular cadence (every 2 to 4 weeks depending on the topic area). As a writer for WHiP, you would be responsible for a feature area (see below) and will need to do research and write regular articles on that feature area. You will need to write articles on new books, conferences, professorships, open jobs, popular stores related to, movies containing material on the topic area, other popular media on the topic and anything else related to your topic area. The articles could be single-topic (like a movie review) or a roll up news items for your topic area during the time cadence of your publication. Example of this type of article are here and here. WHiP articles will need to be 1000-1500 word articles. Here are some topics areas (if you would like to suggest other topic areas, include them in your letter of interest):

1. Philosophy of Science
2. Metaphysics
3. Ethics
4. Continental Philosophy
5. American Philosophy
6. Cognitive Science and Psychology
7. Sociology
8. Philosophy of Religion
9. Atheism

One-off articles

As a rule, we don’t solicit single articles outside of the above two topic areas for publication. However, if you’ve written a careful paper on philosophy that exhibits rigor, attempts to illuminate an accepted discipline in analytic philosophy, and your qualifications fit within the guidelines listed above under “Qualifications”, please send an abstract only of the paper along with your qualifications per the guidance below under “How to apply”. Any papers you submit will be peer-reviewed by trained philosophers so please consider the qualifications carefully before you submit work of this type.

Other Information

Any article you write for philosophynews.com should be authored as a new article (that is, not published anywhere else), be a product of your own research and creativity, and will be edited for quality and checked for accuracy. Final approval for articles will be made solely on the discretion of Philosophy News and all published submissions become the property of philosophynews.com. Articles will be published under your name and, if appropriate, we will provide links to your own blog or website. (Links of this type will need to provide value to readers of Philosophy News. We will not link to general blogs that have no philosophical interest.) You also will get an author page that has a list of all the articles you’ve published (example here). You will need to be able to submit articles in DOCX format (Microsoft Word or Google Docs).

How to apply

If you’re interested and think you may be qualified, please send a letter of interest and a single example of your writing in PDF or DOCX format to paulp@philosophynews.com. Please include “Call for writers” in the subject line. In addition to your writing sample, please include your credentials, which content type you’re interested in (“What Is” series or “WHiP” or both), and, if you know, which topic area on which you’re interested in writing. Serious inquiries only please.

Thank you for your consideration!