CFP: Against Subjectivism: Experience and Evidence in the Age of Post-Truth

ARKETE – Journal of Philosophical Studies

2024

Call for Papers

Against Subjectivism: Truth, Reality and Normativity Beyond the Self

Edited by Paolo Piccari

EXTENDED DEADLINE: 30 September 2025

In recent years, the rise of post-truth discourse has brought back to the forefront fundamental philosophical questions: the fragility of truth, the erosion of shared norms, and the marginalization of the world as an independent horizon of meaning and resistance. If post-truth is a symptom, subjectivism may well be one of its deeper causes: not as a unified doctrine, but as a constellation of theoretical tendencies that reduce truth to belief, reality to representation, normativity to will.

Throughout modernity, the subject has frequently been elevated to a foundational role: from the Cartesian cogito to constructivist epistemologies, from aesthetic theories of experience to ethical models of choice, the I has become both measure and source. Yet this centrality comes at a cost: what exceeds the subject — world, otherness, law, form, truth — risks either being reduced to a projection or being dismissed as unknowable. Against this backdrop, a renewed philosophical effort is needed to move beyond subjectivism and recover the question of reality, normativity, and shared intelligibility.

Arkete welcomes submissions that explore, either in theoretical or historical-philosophical terms, the critique of subjectivism and possible alternatives to it. Contributions may address — but are not limited to — the following areas:

• Metaphysics and ontology: reality, objecthood, levels of being, relational structures, resistance, and co-belonging;

• Epistemology: truth, objectivity, intersubjective and embodied knowledge, testimony, critical realism;

• Ethics and political philosophy: normativity, relationality, the common good, justice, critique of moral individualism;

• Aesthetics and symbolic thought: form, sense, shared experience, non-subjective meaning;

• Epistemological engagements with key authors and traditions that challenge subjectivist assumptions and support notions of realism, objectivity, or evidence-based knowledge — including figures such as Aristotle, Hume, Kant (especially his theory of judgment), Reid, Peirce, Russell, Moore, Sellars, Quine, Putnam, Austin, Strawson, McDowell, Dummett, Burge, and contemporary epistemologists working on testimony, perception, and social epistemology.

Submissions must be original and unpublished, written in English or Italian and formatted according to the journal’s editorial guidelines. All manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

The academic journal “Arkete” will dedicate issue 2024 to these questions. The issue will host articles collected through this call for papers as well as a selection of invited papers written by national and international experts.

All essays must be submitted no later than 30 September 2025 at the Editors’ e-mail address: [email protected] and [email protected]. The manuscripts must conform to the editorial guidelines that can be found on the website: http://www.arkete.it.

Accepted languages are English and Italian. The maximum allowed length is 40.000 characters (including spaces, footnotes and an abstract of max. 150 words to be written in English, prepared in anonymous form to be compatible with the blind review process. In a second file attached to the same e-mail, authors will specify their name and surname, e-mail address, title and abstract of the paper.

This journal issue will be edited by Paolo Piccari (University of Siena)