Call for Papers

We invite the submission of papers for the inaugural Oxford Studies in Philosophy of AI and Computing (OSPAIC) conference, to be held June 28-30, 2027 in Washington, D.C. at the Johns Hopkins University School of Government and Policy. This will be the first of an ongoing series of annual conferences, each of which will result in the open access publication by Oxford University Press of a volume of papers selected from those presented at the conference.

OSPAIC aims to be the flagship venue for analytic philosophy of AI and computing, publishing rigorous, innovative work informed by the state of the art in research on AI and its societal impacts while remaining, to the extent feasible, accessible to a wider audience. Within that broad remit, we are open to work from any related sub-field: epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, etc. The best paper presented at the conference will receive a $10,000 prize, funded by the Cosmos Institute and selected by an expert panel chosen by the executive editor.

Papers are due by 11.59pm Feb 14, 2027, anywhere on earth.

Submissions must be prepared for blind review and must include an abstract. There is a limit of one submission per person; co-authored papers count against this limit for all authors. Submitting a paper implies agreement to publish that paper in the resulting volume of OSPAIC if invited to do so. Papers under consideration elsewhere must not be submitted.

Neither peer review nor philosophy as a field have moved at the speed required to productively contribute to societal debates over AI progress. To help change that, we strongly encourage authors to upload draft papers to arXiv, so that they can contribute in real-time to the conversations that they aim to shift. In due course a new arXiv subcode, CS.PFAI (philosophical foundations of AI), will be launched to accommodate OSPAIC submissions and other relevant philosophical work; until then submissions may be given the keyword PFAI, which will route them to the philosophy moderator.

The editors will select papers for presentation at the conference based on a rigorous review process. Authors of selected papers will be informed by March 31, 2027. Approximately 10 papers will be selected for Spotlight presentation; these will feature a longer talk and in-depth discussion. Approximately 20 papers will be selected for Lightning presentations. Papers selected for either Spotlight or Lightning presentation are eligible to be invited for submission to the volume. On the basis of the submitted paper and its presentation at the conference, the editors will expect to invite 12-14 papers to be considered for the volume; this invitation does not guarantee acceptance, which will be decided only after peer review. Papers invited for the volume will be due for review by Aug 31, 2027, and reviewers will receive an honorarium to ensure prompt review. Reviewers’ reports will be returned to authors by Nov 1, 2027, revised papers will be due by Dec 1, 2027, and final decisions will be made by Dec 15, 2027.

OSPAIC is founded on the value of bringing people together to exchange and build on one another’s ideas. Authors submitting work that they did not author are significantly less likely to be able to contribute to this kind of exchange. As such (and for other reasons enumerated in the AI policy), papers written by AI may not be submitted to OSPAIC. Authors must declare on submission that they have complied with this policy and must submit a statement describing any AI methodology involved in writing the paper, focusing on contributions relevant to the authorship test in Section II of the policy. Submitted papers will be screened for AI content both at the time of submission and subsequently as detection technology improves, including after publication. Any paper that shows disqualifying evidence of AI use will be rejected or retracted. Authors who have more than one paper rejected by the initial screening process will be banned from submitting further papers that year. If papers are identified as having been AI-written subsequent to the initial screen, the author will be banned from submitting to OSPAIC for the following year. If identified at the in-person conference or after, the author may be banned from submitting to OSPAIC indefinitely. For more information, please see our full AI policy.

We encourage submissions by underrepresented groups in philosophy and hope to ensure that both the conference and the resulting volume reflect the diversity of the field. We also encourage submissions by early-career researchers. Funding for travel and accommodation will be available for participants who would otherwise be unable to attend the conference. The 2027 Conference and Volume are funded by the Cosmos Institute, the MINT research lab at the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University, and the Templeton World Charity Fund.