CFP: Finding Our Place in the Digital World: Philosophical Essays on Technology, Phenomenology, and the Environment

Edited by Ian Werkheiser and Michael Butler

We invite proposals for chapters in an edited volume to be published by Springer Publishing entitled “Finding Our Place in the Digital World: Philosophical Essays on Technology, Phenomenology, and the Environment.” The volume seeks to establish the philosophy of the digital world as a unified subdiscipline at the intersection of the philosophy of technology, phenomenology, and environmental philosophy. 

Bringing together scholars working from different philosophical perspectives, this book examines everyday interactions with emerging digital technologies and the changes to our lived worlds to which they give rise. Issues discussed will include: how the concept of world and environment are shaped by technology; social justice and political issues that come out of those changes; interpersonal relationships and self-understanding in a digital world; knowing and cognition with an extended or diminished mind; what it’s like to appreciate and interpret these new mixed worlds; and the alteration of human capacities and skills through a transformation of the landscape of affordances.

This book is not only interested in applying pre-existing philosophical frameworks to new questions, however. The editors are also interested in how thinking through these new technologies causes us to reexamine issues in philosophy. For example, too often environmental philosophy neglects the built environment, and in particular non-physical, virtual elements of the environment, despite these playing an increasingly important role in people’s lives. Likewise, phenomenology and embodied cognition literature sometimes applies itself to analyses of particular technologies or tools, however we are interested in how the emergence of the digital world changes our fundamental notions of the self, the subject and the various categories of cognition and perceptual life investigated by phenomenology. 

Accepted authors will be invited to an in-person workshop at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in early 2025 to present and get feedback on chapter drafts. That event is sponsored by the Society for Philosophy and Technology

To Submit: send a brief chapter proposal (500-1000 words) and brief author biography (100-300 words) to [email protected]

Timeline: 

Proposals due September 1, 2024

Chapter drafts due January 15, 2025

Final Chapters due June 15, 2025