Submissions

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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.
  • You are currently a student at Stellenbosch University, or this article was written while you were a student at Stellenbosch University.
  • You are a postgraduate (Honours or higher degree level) student, or, if you are currently an undergraduate student (i.e., not enrolled for an Honours or higher degree), this article is an adaptation of an essay or assignment submitted for assessment for a third-year module, and received a final mark of at least 80% (please indicate in your additional submission comments to which module and which lecturer this article was submitted).
  • The submission has not been previously published (other than in the form of a preprint or as part of a thesis), nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in the additional submission comments).
  • Your article is no shorter than 1500 and no longer than 5000 words.
  • The submission includes an abstract of 150 to 250 words.
  • The submission file is in OpenDocument Format (.odt), Microsoft Word (.docx), Markdown (.md), Typst (.typ), TeX (.tex), or other common markup or document format.
  • The document uses markup correctly: headings, body paragraphs, blockquotes, etc. are indicated with the format's markup or built-in styles, rather than manually changing the text properties (such as increasing font size and setting text to bold to imitate a heading).
  • You have provided your references in a format such as BibLaTeX, Hayagriva, or other export from a reference manager such as Zotero (this enables us to auto-generate your bibliography instead of requiring you to format it manually). Where available, identifiers such as ISBNs, DOIs, or URLs have been provided for the references (this enables easier verification of your citations). You may leave the bibliography or reference list out of your article document.
  • The article uses the Stellenbosch University variation of the Harvard citation style, i.e., references are in-text, there is a comma after the author's surname, and no space before the page numbers, e.g., (Author, 2025:123) or Author (2025:123).
  • The document has been anonymised, so that no identifying information about the author is included. (Please indicate in your additional submission comments whether and how you will need to de-anonymise the article before publication.)
  • You have declared any conflicts of interest, including affiliations and sources of funding, in the additional submission comments. (For example, if you are writing about AI ethics and are currently employed or funded by or otherwise affiliated with an AI company, or if you are writing about animal ethics and are employed or funded by or otherwise affiliated with an advocacy or lobby group, this must be declared.)
  • By completing this submission, 1. you confirm that you are the sole author(s) of this work, and you are responsible for creating every part of it, except where indicated by proper citation; 2. you confirm that the content of this work abides by all applicable South African and international law; 3. you confirm that no part of the work is the product of an uncredited source, generated or other (excluding spelling- and grammar-check suggestions); and 4. you assert and declare ownership of this work under all applicable South African and international copyright law.
  • By completing this submission, you accept and agree to release your work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), with you maintaining authorship and copyright ownership, and all rights associated with that ownership, so that the Stellenbosch Socratic Journal may publish your work under the terms of said license. You further agree and accept that any not-for-profit activity of the Stellenbosch Socratic Journal, including selling printed copies of the journal volume containing your work for the purposes of recouping operating costs, shall be understood to be non-commercial activity for the purposes of interpretation of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
  • You accept that the decision to publish your work is at the discretion of the Stellenbosch Socratic Journal, and that if any of the above declarations or any statements to the SSJ are found after publication to be false or misleading, the SSJ may issue a public correction or retraction notice.

Author Guidelines

The Stellenbosch Socratic Journal accepts submissions from students at Stellenbosch University in the field of Philosophy. This is to be broadly understood, as many departments engage in philosophical work regardless of label. If you are uncertain whether your article will be a good fit for the SSJ, please reach out to discuss.

Your work does not need to be a completely novel contribution to academia, however, it must bear some interest for readers. For example, mere summaries of work are not necessarily interesting. If, however, the work is relatively unknown and your purpose is to bring it to a broader or entirely new audience, that could justify publication. Again, please reach out to discuss.

As our process is intended to be more constructive and guiding than other journals, our reviewers often put a lot of work into guiding authors in preparing their articles for publication. Therefore, we de-anonymise our reviewers on an opt-out basis in order to credit them by name. Please keep this in mind when submitting your work.

As part of your submission, you will be asked to confirm the checklist above. Please consult the list for technical, format, content, and style requirements.

Process

The Editor-in-Chief will anounce a call for submissions near the start of the year, which will specify the deadline for submissions. It will also include the dates for the two rounds of review, and you should be prepared to work on your submission between these rounds.

After the deadline, the editorial team will consider your submission to decide whether it is appropriate for the SSJ. We will then let you know whether we are continuing with reviews for your article.

After each round of review, you will receive feedback and suggestions for improving your article. The editorial team and reviewers may decide that your improvements have not been sufficient to continue, so please carefully consider the reviewers' suggestions. You are welcome to raise with the editorial team any problems that may arise.

When making changes to your article, please indicate your changes clearly. Use the "track changes" or other features to indicate exactly what has changed, or, if your changes are too substantial to be clearly indicated by such features, indicate what has changed in a separate note.

After two rounds of review, the editorial team may decide to request further changes and reviews, and may postpone publication to the next issue if necessary.

If your article has successfully finished review, it will be proofread, edited, and typeset. You will then have the chance to approve the final version for publication.

After finalising the journal, it is sent to be printed. We provide a print copy for each author.

Copyright Notice

By submitting your work to the Stellenbosch Socratic Journal, you declare that you are the sole author(s) of this work, and that you are responsible for creating every part of it, except where indicated by proper citation or reference.

You declare that no part of the work is the product of an uncredited source, generated or other (excluding spelling- and grammar-check suggestions). You assert and declare ownership of this work under South African copyright law.

By completing this submission, you accept and agree to release your work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), with you maintaining authorship and copyright ownership, and all rights associated with that ownership, so that the Stellenbosch Socratic Journal may publish your work under the terms of said license.

You further agree and accept that any not-for-profit activity of the Stellenbosch Socratic Journal, including selling printed copies of the journal volume containing your work for the purposes of recouping operating costs, shall be understood to be non-commercial activity for the purposes of interpretation of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.