Lo Sguardo – Journal of Philosophy / Call for Papers
THE ANTHROPOCENE: END, MEDIUM OR SYMPTOM OF THE HUMAN BEING?
N. XXII, October 2016
edited by Sara Baranzoni, Antonio Lucci, Paolo Vignola
The term “Anthropocene”, ever since its rise to scientific, intellectual or public visibility, has been presented as an event (Bonneuil, Fressoz), both as a kind of shock produced and experienced by humankind, and in terms of the response this shock has elicited from diverse disciplines. “Anthropocene” is a term coined in 2000 by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen that refers to a new, current geological era, one that would therefore supposedly have succeeded the Holocene, a new epoch in which the human being will have become the main factor involved in the transformation of terrestrial conditions. First emerging from the hard sciences, during the last fifteen years the Anthropocene has been taken up widely in the social sciences, but also in the humanities and philosophy, and for a powerful reason: while at a technical or superficial level it is concerned directly with the climate change brought about by industrialization, it inevitably leads to profound issues involving the entire Western tradition. That is, it involves cruxes of thought that may have been confronted in the past, for instance through the upheavals provoked by Nietzschean thought, but which we continue to face today: in the first place the opposition between nature and culture, and then, like a cascade, the issues of anthropocentrism, ethnocentrism, androcentrism, Prometheanism, Enlightenment reason, the very idea of telos and the idea of universal history in its intrinsic relation with the Neolithic. Finally, the Anthropocene seems to call natural scientists, philosophers, economists and politicians to respond to the possibility and the necessity of thinking the future as such.
ACCEPTED LANGUAGES:
ENGLISH, ITALIAN, FRENCH, GERMAN, SPANISH
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSAL: MAY, 15th 2016
Procedure: please send to the email address callforpapers@losguardo.net, an abstract of up to 4000 characters, including the title of the proposal and a description of the essay. All the proposals will be evaluated by the editors and our readers. The result of the selection will be notified to the authors by June, 10th, 2016. Accepted proposals will be received by the editors within a new deadline, which will be communicated to the authors with the outcome of selection, and then subjected to a double blind review.
Call for abstracts
“Lo Sguardo” invites researchers and scholars from philosophy, sociology, geology, media studies, cultural studies and related disciplinary fields to contribute to the 22/2016 issue, by taking up one of three possible topics:
CFA/1: Archaeologies of the Anthropocene: this section will feature papers focused on the historical and conceptual recognition of the concept of the Anthropocene. Papers in this section may explore the history of this term in geology and the human sciences, or explore it from within a particular disciplinary field of knowledge.
CFA/2: In the Middle of the Anthropocene: contributions to this section may be concerned with media studies, aesthetics, communication or anthropology. Articles should have a focus on the dimension of perception, on specific medias and on the “position of the human within the cosmos” (Scheler) in the age in which the surrounding environment is conditioned in a fundamental way by the human.
CFA/3: Ethics and Philosophies of the Anthropocene: papers in this section will focus on the Anthropocene from the point of view of the active subject placed within such an epoch. Is an ethics possible that could be adequate to the age of the Anthropocene? How are categories and the a priori changed in this age? Papers in this section should attempt to locate answers to the set of problems such questions imply.
