Comparative Philosophy

Manuscript Presentation

General Guidelines

*  The journals language is English (American English or British English spelling and terminology may be used, but either one should be followed consistently throughout the article). Submissions are to be made in clear and accessible English (whenever logical notation is not being used) electronically via internet.

* Manuscripts should be compiled in the following order: title page; Abstract; Keywords; main text; Acknowledgments (for research articles); Appendix (as appropriate); References. Number the pages consecutively.

* Abstracts of 150 to 250 words are required for all research articles submitted.

* Section headings (and sub-section headings, if any) should be concise and numbered sequentially, using a decimal system for subsections ['1.' ('1.1', '1.2'...), '2.' ('2.1', '2.2',...), ....]. 

* Use footnotes rather than endnotes for the sake of online reading convenience. Restrict notes to explanatory statements that develop an idea or expand a quotation, where to do so in the text would disturb the balance. Notes are not used to give references (but cross-references can be placed in explanatory notes).

* Acknowledgements of people, grants, funds, etc. should be placed in a separate section before the References.

* Supplementary material (if needed) should be collected in an Appendix and placed before the Reference section.

* Use double quotation marks for direct quotations (those with no more than 40 words run on in the text) and single quotation marks for quotations within quotations.

* Single quotation marks are also used to distinguish words or phrases that are mentioned [given the distinction between mention and use: though usually we use a linguistic terms (by simply giving that term without quotation marks) to talk about something non-linguistic, we sometimes mention a linguistic term (by giving its name---typically its quotation name) to talk about that linguistic item itself]. In the latter case, please use single, rather than double, quotation marks to give the quotation names. Examples of this distinction are these:
(a) Obama is the current president of the USA;
(b) ‘Obama’ consists of five letters.

* Larger sections of quoted text (i.e. anything over 40 words): set these off from other text by adding a blank line above and below the section, and indent the block of text on the left and in 11 point size. These larger sections, or block quotations, should not be enclosed in quotation marks.

* In the main text and footnotes, a cross-reference identified by means of an author name should be followed by the year of the reference in parentheses and page number(s) where appropriate.

* Use the typeface of ‘Times New Roman’ in 12 point size in the main text/"Acknowledgements"/"References", in 11 point size in block quotations, and in 10 point size in footnotes.

* For all manuscripts non-discriminatory language is mandatory. Sexist or racist terms should be not be used.

* References. The detailed reference of a citation is given in “References” at the end of the main text. We adopt the Harvard reference system; for it is a simple referencing system which is easy to use for author and reader alike.

     With this system, generally speaking, you cite the author’s surname, the year of publication and the page reference immediately after the quoted material, e.g., ‘John Smith said, “In the last chapter…Greek thought” (Smith 1948, 30).’ [However, there are conventional specifications concerning citation references to some ancient thinkers’ classical texts, such as ‘… (Plato The Republic, Book V, 449a)’, ‘…(Confucius Lun-Yü, 2.4)’.]

     With this system, the reference lists every work cited by you in the text; where there are two or more works by one author in the same year, distinguish them as 1999a, 1999b, etc.; type bibliographic entries in this order: author’s surname, given name or initials, year, title, place of publication, publisher. For example [some of the identities of the listed authors/books/articles are fictional for the sake of illustration]:

Smith, John (1948), On Beings (New York: The Macmillan Company). [authored book]

Beale, A. J. and Collins, C.H. (eds) (1992), Safety in Biotechnology (London: Routledge). [edited volume]

Wang, Dong (1999), “On Emptiness”, Philosophy East and West, 10 (4): 485-95. [article in hardcopy journal]

Moore, Joseph G. (2011), “Noûs, Dao and Ātman”, Comparative Philosophy, 2 (1): 34-56 <http://www.comparativephilosophy.org>. [article in open-access online journal]

Frank, Ernest (2001), “The Creative Chef”, in Gary Ross (ed.), The Creative Organization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 145-66. [book chapter]

Bannan, Nancy (1995), “Underground Town Planning in the US”, Dissertation, University of Chicago. [from sources such as unpublished theses]

Bird, David (1957), “Mencius on Hao-Ran-Zhi-Qi”, Asian Philosophy, 25: 266-75; reprinted in Robert Conee (ed.) (1988), Contemporary Philosophy, London: Routledge. [works which have been published in different sources]

Braudel, F. (1949; 2^nd edition 1966), La Méditerranée, trans. Sian Reynolds (1999), The Mediterranean (London: Collins). [translated works]

Husserl, Edmund (1900-1), Logische Untersuchungen [Logical Investigations] (Halle a. d. S.: Max Niemeyer). [non-English (German) works]

 
Fung, Yu-lan 馮友蘭 [note: Chinese original optional] (1988), Zhong-Guo-Zhe-Xue-Shi-Xin-Bian 《中國哲學史 》[note: Chinese original optional] [A New Inquiry into History of Chinese Philosophy], vol. 5 (Beijing: Ren-Min-Chu-Ban-She). [non-English (Chinese) works]

Lun-Yü《論語 》[the Analects]. [In case you give your own translation(s) of the cited passage(s) from it.]
or
Lun-Yü《論語 》[the Analects]; [for example,] trans. Edward Slingerland (2003), Confucius—Analects (Indianapolis: Hackett). [In case you use one of its already published English translations.]

* Punctuation. (1) Use a single (not a double) space after a full point, and after commas, colons, semicolons, etc. (2) Do not put a space in front of a question mark, or in front of any other closing punctuation mark. (3) The closing quotation mark should precede any punctuation, unless the text quoted forms a complete sentence, e.g.:

     (a) He commented that it was “the best of times”.

     (b) He commented: “It was the best of times.”

* Numerals. (1) Spell out numbers under 10 (except of the chapter-number and page-number cases like ‘Chapter 2’ and ‘page 5’). Use numerals for measurements, e.g. ‘12 km’, and ages, e.g. ‘10 years old’. (2) Should use numerals for percentages in the text but spell out ‘per cent’, e.g. ’24 per cent’. The percentage sign (‘%’) should be used only in table and figures. (3) Insert a comma for thousands and tens of thousands, e.g., ‘1,000’ and ‘10,000’. (4) Use minimum numbers for number spans except in ‘teens’, e.g., ’25-8’, ‘136-42’, ‘150-1’, but ’12-16’.

* Italic (and bold)
(1) Use italic for <1> non-English terms of phonetic languages like Greek and <2> English transliterations of terms of ideographic languages like Chinese that are not person names. For example, ‘elenkhos’ form Greek, ‘yin-yang’ and ‘dao’, ‘the Han dynasty’ from Chinese, etc. but not for ‘Plato’ and ‘Fung Yu-lan’.

(2) Use italic for titles of books, plays, films, long poems, newspapers, journals (but not for articles in journals), ships.
(3) Use italic for emphasis, which should be used sparingly.
(4) Do not use bold type for any purpose.

* Abbreviations. Full stops should be used after abbreviations (‘p.’, ‘Ch.’) but not in acronyms (‘BBC’, ‘UNESCO’, ‘USA’). Note especially: ‘ed.’ but ‘eds’; ‘vol.’ but ‘vols’; ‘Ch.’ but ‘Chs’; but one exception: both ‘no.’ and ‘nos.’ with full stops.

* Dates. Set dates out as follows: ‘July 8, 1995’, ‘on July 8’, ‘on the 8^th’; ‘1990s’ (not spelt out, no apostrophe); ‘nineteenth century’ (not 19^th century); ‘1995-7’, ‘1914-18’.

Special Guidelines for Chinese Scripts and Transcriptions

* In the main text, when there is need to give an original Chinese term for its English translation, please follow this conventions: when the term (its English translation) first appears in your main text, put its pinyin transcription (in italics) and then its original Chinese script within parentheses after its English translation. For example: rectification of names (zheng-ming 正名)

     If the pinyin transcription of an original Chinese term is mentioned (see the distinction between use and mention as explained above) or just given first (whether or not also given its English translation in the current context in parentheses), then, when it first appears in your text, put its original Chinese script (and, if you prefer, its English translation in the current context) within parentheses after the transcription. For example:
     The Chinese term ‘wu-wei’ (無為) in this context means…;
     The dao (道)….

     Dao-xue (道学, Learning of Dao)

* The pinyin romanization system is employed in this journal for transliterating Chinese names or terms. However, those Chinese names or terms are left in their original romanizations (typically in the Wade-Giles system) in the following cases:

     (1)   Titles of cited publications;

     (2)   Names whose romanizations have widely and conventionally accepted (such as ‘Confucius’);

     (3)   Names of the writers who have had their authored English publications under their regular non-pinyin romanized names (such as ‘Fung Yu-lan’).

* Chinese names for persons:

     (1) When the transliteration (or the usual English name) of a Chinese name (for a Chinese person) first appears in your article (either in the main text or in the “References”), its Chinese original script is given within parentheses after the transliteration. For example, ‘Wang Yang-ming (王陽明)’, ‘Wing-tsit Chan (陳榮捷)’, and ‘Julia Ching (秦家懿)’.
     (2) The following rule of thumb is used in dealing with the order of the surname (family) name and given name in romanized Chinese names: (i) for the name of a historical figure in Chinese history, the surname appears first, and the given name second (such as ‘Zhu Xi’) (to avoid possible confusion, in the index of the book a comma separated the indexed surname from the given name); (ii) otherwise, the given name appears first, and the surname second.
     (3) Use ‘Lao Zi’, ‘Xun Zi’, ‘Zhuang Zi’, etc. instead of ‘Laozi’, ‘Xunzi’, ‘Zhuangzi’, etc. to avoid the reader’s misunderstanding of the identity of the genuine family name of such a figure, as ‘Zi’ is not part of the figure’s genuine family name but a respectful form of address (like ‘Master’) in ancient China.