CFP: Violence and Conflict in Ortega y Gasset’s works

The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence (PJCV) welcomes submissions that relate the work of Ortega y Gasset to conflict and violence.

The selected articles will be published in December 2025.

“Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence.”

Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting

One of the most creative Spanish philosophers of the twentieth century, Ortega y Gasset was lauded in his time as one of Europe’s leading essayists and intellectuals. The status of his thought today is rather ambivalent, being both venerated (within Hispanophone philosophy) and overlooked (in the Anglophone philosophical community) in equal measure. This state of affairs would perhaps not have surprised Ortega given the tendency of his work to straddle disciplinary boundaries and the difficulty of affiliating his positions with the standard political and philosophical camps. A master of deceptively limpid prose and poetic turn of phrase, Ortega’s elegant and accessible style of writing may well have counted against his contemporary consideration as a ‘serious thinker’ in an age in which philosophical opacity is often taken as evidence of profundity. Though relegated to the same bracket as formerly fashionable but now neglected thinkers of the mid-20th century, such as Spengler, Mumford and Santayana, Ortega’s philosophy refuses to be forgotten. His thought appears as a restless, gadfly spirit of European modernity, ahead of its time in identifying and analysing the existential implications of modern technology, and against the current in his combative, historically grounded and philosophically informed writings.

Ortega’s philosophical writings are the product of Ortega plus his circumstances, and Ortega’s circumstances were indelibly marked by conflict and violence. Produced during a period of unprecedented political and social upheaval in Spain and globally, Ortega’s philosophy promoted an agonistic and Protean view of human character and social relations. As a future-facing, change-seeking, conservative progressive, Ortega’s thought remains a paradox and his work demands reconsideration and re-evaluation by every subsequent generation.

This collection of papers calls for contributors to this endeavour.

Possible topics may include (but are not restricted to):

·      Ortega’s account of civilizational progress and decline

·      Hunting

·      The Sportive Origins of the State

·      Mass Culture and Homo Technologicus

·      The Theory of Evolutionary Saltation

·      Ortega’s agonistic view of the formation and function of society

·      The tension between the individual and the social in Ortega’s thought

·      The inevitability of hierarchies

·      The Disaster of 1898, the First World War, the Constitutional Crisis, the Rif War, the Primo do Rivera dictatorship, the Second Republic, Spanish Civil War, the Franco dictatorship, the Second World War

·      Ortega’s relations to Nationalist and Republican forces

·      Ortega’s political thought in relation to Nationalism and Republicanism

·      Ortega on Anarchism, Marxism, and Fascism

·      Ortega’s break with Husserl

·      Ortega’s break with Unamuno

·      Ortega’s priority dispute with Heidegger over the “existential turn” in phenomenology

·      Ortega’s critique of other philosophers (e.g. Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Spengler, Leibniz)

Important Dates and Submission Guidelines

➢ We invite expressions of interest and ask all prospective authors to send a short 500 word abstract to [email protected] and [email protected] no later than September 9, 2024.

Authors will be informed on whether to proceed or not by September 30, 2024.

➢ Full papers should be written in the PJCV template available on : https://trivent-publishing.eu/32-philosophical-journal-of-conflict-and-violence-pjcvand should not exceed 10,000 words (bibliography and footnotes aside).