Call for Papers n. LXVI/2 – Thinking Absolutely
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Deadline: 24 May 2027
The Editorial Board of the philosophy journal «Il Pensiero» invites original submissions for the issue dedicated to the topic:
Thinking Absolutely
The deadline for submissions is 24 May 2027. Notification of the outcome of the review process is expected by 13 September 2027. Articles may be submitted in any of the following languages: Italian, English, French, Spanish, or German. Submissions should not exceed 45,000 characters, including spaces and footnotes. Each submission should be accompanied by two abstracts and five keywords, both in the language of the article and in English. Abstracts should not exceed 1,200 characters each, including spaces.
The issue is scheduled for publication in November 2027.
Volume editors: Massimo Donà and Marco Rienzi – Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan.
The question concerning the possibility and status of the absolute, as well as that relating to the possibility of a thought of the absolute, today appears entirely anachronistic and, in some respects, even suspect. A significant part of twentieth-century philosophy – one need only think, for example, of the entire postmodern tradition – has given full voice to contextual, relative and historical forms of existence and language, asserting the impossibility of referring to anything that can be defined as “absolute”.
But philosophy was born in Greece as an attempt to attain a firm and absolute principle, an incontrovertible truth.
What has become of that original approach? Is it merely a matter of reconstructing it historically, or can it still contribute to philosophical inquiry? This issue of Il Pensiero aims to explore the plurality of voices that have upheld the possibility of recovering a thought of the absolute. This endeavour has been pursued on several levels: on the one hand, through the development of new theoretical perspectives; on the other, through renewed interpretations of figures and traditions in the history of philosophy. By way of example, several authors may be listed. Gregory Moss proposes a dialetheist reinterpretation of the Hegelian absolute, in dialogue also with Schelling’s philosophical project and, more broadly, with the history of philosophy in general. In Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead maintains that his cosmology can be understood as a redefinition of Absolute Idealism on a realistic basis, thus bearing witness to his complex relationship with Bradley. In Immanence: A Life…, Gilles Deleuze proposes a thought of absolute immanence, in which immanence is subordinated to no transcendence: neither that of the subject nor that of the object. The philosophy of Emanuele Severino represents a further attempt to conceive the absolute as the all-encompassing whole, beyond the contradictions that run through the history of philosophy. Finally, Quentin Meillassoux engages with the question of “ancestrality” beyond the correlationist paradigm. This may be interpreted as another attempt to recover the thought of the absolute.
These perspectives do not exhaust the contemporary landscape: one need only think of the various Spinozisms and Bergsonisms, Badiou’s hyper-Platonism, or certain “excessive” developments of phenomenology beyond its own terms and principles. Nevertheless, each of these perspectives provides an opportunity to raise questions that remain central to philosophical debate: what form might such an absolute thought take? Must such an absolute thought necessarily assume a conceptual form? Beyond the possibility of identifying an object as “absolute”, is it possible to conceive a new way of doing philosophy, in which absoluteness no longer functions as a predicate, but rather as a mode of relating to the world? If so, would this amount merely to logical or conceptual rigour? Or would it instead consist in recovering a dimension of the world beyond the determinations and dualisms of judgment? Furthermore, what is the relationship between the absolute and finitude? To what extent does finitude depend upon the instance of judgment and its logical-linguistic determinacy? Is it possible to say – or think – the real in a condition of absolute unjudgeability?
«Il Pensiero» is issuing a call for papers that explores similar questions. Its aim is to highlight how, both in the last century and in the present one, the question of the possibility of thinking absolutely has continued to animate philosophical thought, without ever being definitively settled – beyond its relationship with the Western philosophical tradition, which nevertheless remains constantly in view.
Below is a non-exhaustive list of topics of interest for this call for papers:
– The status of the absolute in classical German philosophy and its contemporary reinterpretations;
– Thinking the absolute and thinking absolutely in twentieth-century Italian philosophy;
– The absolute as a central category for thinking the process in the philosophy of nature;
– The question of the absolute in contemporary speculative realism;
– Absolute immanence and life in contemporary philosophies of immanence;
– The relationship between the absolute and the logical-speculative dimension of judgement;
– The question of the absolute as a meeting point between philosophy and artistic practices.