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What Are the Top Ancient Philosophy Journals?

Updated: Nov 7

It's hard to answer this question because ancient philosophers publish in arguably more places than any other field of philosophy: contemporary generalist journals, history of philosophy journals, ancient journals, author-specific journals, topic-specific journals, and that's only within the field of philosophy!


Wonderful articles on Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient figures can also be found in Classics journals, Religion journals, History journals, Comparative Literature journals, and more.


Focusing on Philosophy journals, this list provides the top twenty places ancient scholars tend to think about as good venues for their philosophical work.


(Note that I’m ignoring Classics journals, as well as author- and topic-specific venues like The Plato Journal and Episteme. And again, these are only philosophy journals!)


[All the links will be up shortly.]


15 Good Journals for Publishing Articles in Ancient Philosophy

This isn't really a ranked list, but 1-3 are excellent journals, top of the field; 4-10 are very good journals for ancient; and 11-15 are good ancient philosophy journals. Some of these are general philosophy journals that don’t publish much on ancient philosophy, but sometimes do publish articles, and when they do, they tend to be good.


Note that some of these are open access, or have a decent amount of open access articles if you look. These are indicated with '***'


  1. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy




  1. Phronesis: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy***




  1. Journal of the History of Philosophy***



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  1. Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science***




  1. The British Journal for the History of Philosophy***




  1. Ancient Philosophy




  1. The Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie***




  1. History of Philosophy Quarterly



[The below two are top ten general philosophy journals by at least one or another metric (see, e.g., this: https://dailynous.com/2023/12/04/new-meta-ranking-of-philosophy-journals/), but don't frequently publish in Ancient. I have no idea how to rank them (or other general journals that infrequently publish in Ancient. Still, these two seem to me to publish in Ancient a bit more than, e.g., Mind or The Australasian Journal of Philosophy.]


  1. Philosophers' Imprint***




  1. Ergo***




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  1. The Pacific Journal of Philosophy



  1. The Southern Journal of Philosophy



  1. History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis




  1. Rhizomata




  1. The Journal of Ancient Philosophy***




* Note that I have no idea how to rank the last five (11-15) for Ancient!



Other journals I’ve read good things in:


Elenchos, Epoche, Revue de Philosophie Ancienne, Ancient Philosophy Today, Methexsis, Review of Metaphysics


Note that this list is only focusing on journals I’m familiar with. For a few other journals not mentioned here, see this link to Caleb Cohoe’s website, Endoxa (https://endoxa.blog/2018/10/09/ancient-philosophy-journals/) here:




And please remember that the above list does not include, for example, Plato journals, epistemology journals, classics journals, rhetoric journals, and so on, many of which contain excellent articles as well!

2 Comments

Artie Lane
Artie Lane
Oct 21

Hi there! Maybe it's a browser thing on my end, but I can't see the list of 15 journals you mentioned. I see the heading "15 Good Journals..." but no list after that. Thanks from Canada!

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Douglas A. Shepardson
Oct 21
Replying to

Hi, I haven’t written the post yet, apologies! This website is very new and I’m just getting to the blog posts now.


But thanks for your interest :)


Basically everyone would agree that the top four places to start looking are Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Phronesis, Ancient Philosophy, and Apeiron, which are pure ancient philosophy journals. It gets more complicated with others types of journals, but I’ll get to this post soon!

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