CFP: Revista Opinião Filosófica

Submission deadline: September 30, 2020

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Journal Opinião Filosófica

Call for Papers

Nature and Society in the Anthropocene – Breaching the Divide?

In the last 70 years, the increased scale of human action over nature produced irreversible transformations in the Earth’s systems whose consequence was an ecological crisis with two interrelated dimensions: on the one hand, social, political and economic phenomena; and, on the other hand, natural or environmental processes.

In face of these transformations, Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer argued, in the early 2000’s, that the Earth had entered a new geological epoch, which should be called “the Anthropocene”, considering that humankind had become the core driving factor in geological and ecological change.

Since then, the Anthropocene became the focus of debate not only in traditional scientific fields, but also in the human and social sciences as well as in the humanities, discussions ranging from attempts to pinpoint its beginning to criticism and doubts regarding its overall validity.

One of the debates rekindled by the introduction of the term “Anthropocene” in the academic but also non-academic public space was the age-old separation between Nature and Society.

In mainstream Western culture, this separation was considered self-evident, even if differently comprehended throughout the eras. In pre-Modern times, nature was seen as cyclical and unchangeable, a permanent cosmic order that served as a model and a background for human communities and their activities. In Modern times, nature became the always-available and always-abundant storehouse of material for human purposes, although independent from them. In one case and the other, nature was ethically and politically indifferent, the everlasting Other regarding human societies and human relations.  

This separation seems no longer self-evident. If human action became capable of irreversibly transforming nature and its processes, then nature became an integral part of society, it became an ethical-political entity. In fact, society, nature and their intertwined processes are so co-dependent that a clear-cut distinction between them seems nearly impossible.

The indistinction between nature and society is one of the underlying issues the Anthropocene debate helped to bring forth.

The challenge put forward by this volume is to rethink the relation between Society and Nature in the context of the Anthropocene, offering novel ways of dealing with the newfound condition of humankind as a geological force. Submitting authors may address the issue in one of the following ways:

By reframing traditional approaches to the distinction;

By proposing new approaches to the distinction;

By abandoning the distinction altogether, presenting a new theoretical framework.

Contributions from all fields of research in the humanities, social sciences, human sciences and related areas are welcome.

Volume Editors

Davide Scarso ([email protected])

Assistant Professor - Applied Social Sciences Department - Nova School of Science and Technology / Associated Member CIUHCT - Interuniversitary Center for the History of Science and Technology

Nuno Pereira Castanheira ([email protected])

Researcher PNPD/CAPES – Graduate Program in Philosophy – PUCRS – Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul / Associated Member CFUL - Center of Philosophy University of Lisbon

Submission Deadline

October, 2020

Online Submission System

http://periodico.abavaresco.com.br/index.php/opiniaofilosofica/login   

Author Guidelines

http://periodico.abavaresco.com.br/index.php/opiniaofilosofica/about/submissions

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