CFP: Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture: Volume 5: no. 2/2021 The Physical Culture Issue

Call for Papers

Volume 5: no. 2/2021 The Physical Culture Issue

This issue of Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture is uniquely centered around the accompanying magazine cover from a 1934 edition of Physical Culture: The Personal Problem Magazine (see here: http://eidos.uw.edu.pl/call-for-papers/ ). While culture is often analyzed in terms of hermeneutics, methodology, values, symbols, such analyses often leave out one of the most obvious aspects of fertilizing and transferring such concepts and values: the physical world in which we exist, strive, and contemplate. We often forget the embodied element of culture and err on the side of the mind. This issue will seek to focus on the physical elements of culture, and the cultural elements of the physical, beginning with the basic question: what is physical culture? 

From Plato’s gymnasium to modern day physical education classes, from the nineteenth century Turnverein in German-American communities to the wellness movement of current times, we see a constant link between the cultivation of the soul and the strength and training of the body. In particular, this edition of our journal will focus on physical culture through the framework of “personal problems,” using an exploration of personal problems as an answer to “what is physical culture?” The personal problems from the October 1934 edition of Physical Culture: The Personal Problem Magazine are listed as: “Why Wives Leave Home,” “Am I a ‘Neurotic’?” “What I’ve Learned about Constipation,” “What do YOU ‘Escape’ by Drinking,” and “The Movie Hercules: Joe Bonomo’s Own Story.” A smiling woman plays tennis next to these floating epigraphs, all of her personal problems seemingly solved by physical culture.

This edition calls for papers addressing physical culture through an imaginative, critical, and insightful analysis of the “personal problems” thus listed. How, for example, do the constructs of performed genders lead to clashes of culture between gender? How does the division of emotional labor contribute to the physical cultures of “womanhood” or “manhood”? Do neuroses, madness, mental “illness” or “disorders” have physical embodiment? Can neurodiverse “problems” be solved by physical training (and are they even problems?) What do we consider as neuroses, and why is it often deemed as a “woman’s problem”? What are the cultures of wellness, health, aging, illness, palliative care, and what values do they embed or reflect in our lives? What is “drinking culture” and how do different demographics view it positively or negatively? Why do millennial women buy so much wine? What is diet culture and why does low-calorie wine exist? How do food culture and religious culture inform each other? How are values – including religious values – fertilized and reproduced through physical effort and routine? Is there such a thing, as Nietzsche asks, as a “neuroses of health”?

We seek imaginative, scholarly, and interdisciplinary works on the above questions, or others. Authors are open to interpreting the epigraphs historically, in contemporary terms, and by a wide variety of philosophical, sociological, theological, physiological, psychological, literary, and in general humanities-based lenses. Papers must engage the listed epigraphs as the starting point and title of their paper. We especially seek submissions from woman-identifying authors and other underrepresented demographics. 

Papers can be submitted by January 31st, 2021to: [email protected]

They have to be previously unpublished and they cannot be under consideration for publication elsewhere. They should be prepared for a double-blind review process.

Please, make sure that your paper complies with our submission standards which are posted here: http://eidos.uw.edu.pl/submissions/