Logic · Mathematics · Science · Mind · Language · AI
Foundations is an independent, student-led preprint journal where high school and undergraduate students share developing work on the assumptions, concepts, structures, and implications behind STEM.
Mission
oundations is an independent, student-led preprint journal for ambitious young scholars who examine the assumptions, concepts, structures, and implications behind STEM. We share developing scholarship and provide developmental editorial feedback without claiming to be a formal academic publisher.
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
The fields below are illustrative, not exhaustive. Work outside them is welcome when it advances rigorous inquiry into the philosophical foundations of STEM.
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
Call for preprints · Issue 1
Foundations curates four student preprint issues each year. We welcome English-language submissions from high school and undergraduate students worldwide, as well as exceptional middle-school and gap-year authors.