CFP: Philosophy and Literature

Philosophy and Literature Submission deadlines: October 1, 2024 (Title & Abstract)
April 30, 2025 (Text)

Vol. 13, Issue 2, 2025 [https://www.thaumazein.it/]

Edited by Isabella Adinolfi
&
Roberto Celada Ballanti

Traditionally, truth is the object of philosophy, as the word “sophia” itself suggests. He is indeed a “philosopher” who, loving wisdom, leans towards it as knowledge of truth. But truth is also what literature takes its cue from in a quest that is immediately inexhaustible. The brief dialogue that Frank Alpine, the protagonist of B. Malamud’s masterpiece “The Assistant”, has with the daughter of the owner of the grocery where he works, Helen Bober, with whom he is in love, enucleates in just a few incisive lines the bond that truth and great fictional literature entertain.

Frank, who is holding a biography of Napoleon, asks Helen what she is reading: “The Idiot. Do you know him?” A quick exchange of banter between the two follows: “‘No, what is it?’ ‘It’s a novel.’ ‘I’d rather read the truth.’ ‘It’s the truth,’ said Helen.”

The dialogue’s cutting conclusion refers to the horizon that unites philosophy and literature, to an original thought that precedes the distinctions and specific ways in which the word, i.e.: language, can articulate itself and recognize itself, or not recognize itself, as philosophical or as literary. Philosophy and literature, M. Heidegger also suggests are two neighboring stems, growing from the same root and hurtling towards the same truth, so they cannot remain indifferent to each other.

It is with this in mind, then, that the present issue of “Thaumàzein” aims to retrace the plot of certain figures in this long history, asking the authors to dwell critically on selected exemplary moments of crossing boundaries between the two disciplines. And its to better illuminate that margin in which philosophy becomes literature, and literature philosophy, to dismiss that “ancient enmity” that according to Plato would always oppose one to the other, and which he ends up exhausting by entrusting to narrative and mythology the truths that cannot be described by philosophical objectification alone.

Submission of title and short abstract (1.500 characters max., in English or Italian): October 1, 2024 to the editors:

        Isabella Adinolfi ([email protected])
        Roberto Celada Ballanti ([email protected])   

Submission of full text (45.000 characters max. spaces included, in English or Italian): April 30, 2025 through OJS platform: https://rivista.thaumazein.it/index.php/thaum/about/submissions.

Please follow the formatting guidelines for authors:
https://www.thaumazein.it/la-rivista/about-the-journal/formatting-guidelines/

Scheduled publication of the volume: December 2025.