CFP: Open Philosophy (De Gruyter) - Topical Issue: "Conceptual Personae in Ontology"

Open Philosophy (editor in chief: Graham Harman, Southern California Institute of Architecture) invites submissions for the topical issue "Conceptual Personae in Ontology", edited by Carlos A. Segovia (Saint Louis University Missouri, Madrid Campus, Spain).

As Gilles Deleuze writes, through conceptual personae concepts are not only thought but also perceived and felt. They are philosophical sensibilia which often play a part in the production and the definition of new concepts. Mythical figures, science-fiction motifs, landscape impersonations... Conceptual personae are polymorphous and pervasive. Think, for example, in Nietzsche’s take on Apollo and Dionysus as meta-philosophical images; in Ihab Hassan’s reuse of the myth of Orpheus’s dismemberment to define postmodernism; or, more recently, in Haraway’s reuse of the Lovecraftian Cthulhu to mark the return of the chthonic in the limes of the Anthropocece, and in Povinelli’s triangulation of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus to map the open renegotiation of what is life and non-life today. In short conceptual personae can function as icons, indexes, or symbols for thinking, and thus can also play a major role in the making of an ontology of the present and its margins, that is, in helping to figure out what the present is and what it can eventually become, in the short and the long run, under the sign of the Otherwise. Papers exploring existing conceptual personae and/or proposing new ones in any territory relevant to the philosophical analysis of the present and its futurability are thus welcome.