We publish the first issue of Laboratorium Mentis

We are pleased to announce the publication of the inaugural issue of the journal Laboratorium Mentis. We believe it will establish itself as a lasting feature in the landscape of philosophical periodicals. We invite you to read the 'Letter from the Editor.'

 

Dear Colleagues!

Despite a huge number of already existing philosophical journals, we believe there is a demand for a new, narrowly defined type of philosophical periodical.

Firstly, in the case of most existing journals, both writing an article that would be published in them and reading it are (often unnecessarily) time-consuming. The requirements imposed on authors include the necessity of considering a rich, primarily the most recent literature, demonstrating knowledge of the state of research on the discussed topic, which to a considerable extent means the necessity of devoting a significant part of the publication to a summary of what others have written. The average length of a philosophical article is over twenty pages. A substantial part of it, alongside the main thesis and arguments, contains a detailed presentation of the views and arguments of other authors or considerations concerning side issues. The reader, especially one reading to research a narrowly defined topic, often needs to spend several hours reading material they are not looking for to have one hour of reading the sought content. The novelty proposed by the author, the most valuable part of the article, is usually only a fraction of its volume.

Secondly, no existing journal (at least to our knowledge) is primarily dedicated to thought experiments. Of course, experiments of this kind constitute a significant part of philosophy, which is reflected in publications, but rarely are they the main component of a concise text.

Guided by the above observations and the conviction that a good philosophical text should express as much content as possible in as few words as possible, we have concluded that it is worth creating a journal primarily dedicated to innovative thought experiments whose texts will be characterized by efficiency and reasonable volume. Hence the name of our journal, Laboratorium Mentis.

We want our journal to be a place where philosophers can share innovative ideas and arguments, preferably in the form of a thought experiment, even if they are still in the process of refinement. We also want these experiments to be an opportunity for discussion, so we will be open to polemical articles directly related to the published thought experiments.

An additional reason in favour of creating a philosophical journal of such a profile is that perhaps in the near future, philosophical texts in which the views of other people are presented and discussed will largely be written by artificial intelligence, which will probably do it better and faster than humans. However, we hope that what is most creative in human philosophy, including formulating innovative thought experiments, will still remain the domain of humans rather than machines.

In order to achieve the goals set by us, we propose the following format for texts that would be published by Labolatorium Mentis. Firstly, the volume of the text should be as small as possible, only as much as is required to effectively achieve the article’s goal. Although we will be flexible regarding the required size of published texts, we suggest they do not exceed twenty thousand characters, including spaces. We recommend that the articles have the following structure. The first part should be a presentation of the problem and the article’s purpose. In this part, the authors can briefly present the current state of the discussion, which also means the need to indicate a few of the most important publications. Still, we expect the authors to limit themselves here to the necessary minimum. The text should contain a separate part in which a thought experiment will be presented (as an exception, this can be an innovative argument) and a conclusion for which this experiment should speak. We assume that a thought experiment does not always have an argumentative function but can also be used to illustrate or gain a deeper understanding of a given issue or claim. We also expect the authors to spend a few pages anticipating objections and attempting to defend their ideas against them.

Sharing the belief that philosophy is a discipline without borders and that the discussion should involve all those potentially interested in a given topic, we will be open to publications in the English language. Nevertheless, we also believe that the development of the native language of Polish philosophy is extremely important for developing culture in Poland. For this reason, we will also be open to Polish-language texts. Ideally, we will strive for bilingual publications of articles.

Laboratorium Mentis will be an annual periodical published online in open access. The number of volumes published in a year will depend on the quantity and quality of the texts submitted.

We hope that our journal will be a worthwhile, creative contribution to the development of the philosophical discipline. We invite you to submit texts.

Editors