Logic · Mathematics · Science · Mind · Language · AI
Foundations is an independent, student-led preprint platform exploring the theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical foundations of STEM. You do not need a background in analytic philosophy—or to think of yourself as a writer—to contribute. Start with a question from a field you care about, explain your reasoning as clearly as you can, and develop your work through feedback and revision.
Mission
oundations brings together students who want to think seriously about the foundations of STEM. We welcome work that is still developing and offer constructive editorial feedback to help authors sharpen their questions, reasoning, and arguments.
We value logical precision, conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, accessibility, responsible intellectual collaboration, and authors’ freedom to develop their work for future publication.
Issue 0 · Pilot Preprint Collection
Logic, Mathematics & Formal Philosophy
From the Fictionalism Perspective
A challenge to mathematical platonism that questions whether the indispensable role of mathematics in science warrants ontological commitment to mathematical entities—and defends fictionalism against that demand.
Science, Nature & Metaphysics
A Dynamical Approach
A trajectory-based refinement of psychological accounts of personal identity, designed to explain diachronic continuity through fission, duplication, and radical psychological intervention.
Mind, Language & AI
Why Phenomenal Consciousness Cannot Be a Variable in Scientific Explanation
An argument that the Hard Problem rests on a category error: phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally first-person and cannot function as a variable, property, or explanandum in third-person scientific models.
Departments of inquiry
Proof, abstraction, computation, and the structures through which rigorous thought becomes possible.
Scientific explanation, causation, identity, modality, grounding, nature, and the fundamental structure of reality.
Intelligence, representation, consciousness,meaning, language, computation, and the evolvingboundary between human and machine thought.
Aims & scope
Our starting point is a foundational question, not a particular academic background. We welcome clear arguments about STEM’s underlying concepts, assumptions, and methods, including work using analytic, formal, experimental, and interdisciplinary approaches. The fields below are illustrative, not exhaustive.
Classical, modal, non-classical and mathematical logic; proof theory; paradoxes.
Platonism, structuralism, nominalism, infinity, explanation and foundations of proof.
Space and time, quantum foundations, cosmology, causation, symmetry and emergence.
Life, evolution, species, genetics, molecular ontology, emergence and reduction.
Machine reasoning, alignment, intelligence, language models, representation and computation.
Consciousness, perception, cognition, meaning, reference, semantics and pragmatics.
Decision and game theory, Bayesian reasoning, economics, social choice and causal inference.
Identity, modality, free will, grounding, knowledge, evidence and scientific realism.
Responsible intellectual collaboration
Authors may include an optional Collaboration Appendix: a transparent record and philosophical reflection on authorship, originality, and the respective roles of machine and human thought.
Optional prompts for reflection
Issue 1 · Review & revision underway
Submissions for Issue 1 are now closed. Manuscripts are undergoing developmental review and author revision ahead of the October 1, 2026 release.