Founded MMXXVIAn Independent Student Preprint JournalIssue No. 0

Different ways to do philosophy well

Distinctions

Foundations recognizes essays not only for overall excellence, but for the particular intellectual virtues they embody. The aim is to celebrate many forms of serious inquiry without turning recognition into a fixed quota.

How it works

Issue Distinctions
& Annual Awards

Each issue may name up to three unranked Issue Distinctions. These are accompanied by short citations identifying what is especially compelling about the selected essays; they are not category awards or a shortlist for the end of the year.

Every essay included in a Foundations issue during the calendar year is automatically eligible for the Foundations Annual Awards. Annual decisions are made through a new assessment of the complete yearly collection. Receiving an Issue Distinction is neither required for, nor a guarantee of, an Annual Award.

Fields of excellence

Award Categories

Each distinction identifies a particular intellectual achievement

Foundations Essay of the Year

The annual distinction for an essay of exceptional overall achievement: a clear, rigorous, original, and consequential contribution.

Original Insight Award

For an idea that is genuinely novel, philosophically necessary, and developed into more than an intriguing suggestion.

Intellectual Care Award

For unusually attentive treatment of objections, qualifications, evidence, limits, and opposing positions.

Interdisciplinary Synthesis Award

For bringing disciplines together in a way that changes or advances the argument, rather than merely placing them side by side.

Metaphilosophical Inquiry Award

For examining how philosophical questions are framed, which methods they require, or what should count as an explanation or answer.

Empirical Grounding Award

For using observations, cases, or empirical research with exceptional relevance and philosophical discipline.

Formal Reasoning Award

For outstanding use of logic, formalization, proof, models, or carefully structured argument.

Experimental Philosophy Award

For work situated in experimental philosophy (x-phi), using surveys, experimental vignettes, behavioural data, or systematic observation to investigate philosophical intuitions, concepts, or judgments. Original data collection is welcomed but not required; research involving participants must respect consent, privacy, and research ethics.

Philosophy in New Forms Award

For reinventing how philosophical inquiry is conducted or presented—through dialogue, fiction, simulation, interactive structures, computational methods, or another unconventional form. The formal experiment must be integral to the thinking, not merely decorative.

Interpretive Depth Award

For reconstructing a philosopher’s thought with exceptional accuracy, context, depth, and fairness while uncovering its structure, tensions, or continuing significance.

Standards of recognition

Principles

Every essay remains eligible

Every essay included in a Foundations issue during the calendar year is automatically eligible for the Annual Awards. An Issue Distinction is neither required nor a guarantee.

Recognition, not a quota

Annual categories are possibilities, not promises: an award may be withheld when no essay is an excellent fit. An essay may receive Essay of the Year and one specialist award, but will not normally receive more than one specialist award.

Reasons made visible

Every recipient will be accompanied by a short citation explaining the particular achievement being recognized.

Fair assessment

Anyone involved in judging must recuse themselves from work with which they have a conflict. Editors who judge a cycle are not eligible for its distinctions.

No change in publication status

A distinction is an editorial recognition, not a claim of formal peer review, academic accreditation, or endorsement by an external institution.

Issue Distinctions& Annual Awards