CFP: Anthropocene | Lo Sguardo - Journal of Philosophy

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.
 

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSAL: MAY, 15th 2016

Procedure: please send to the email address [email protected], 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.