CFP: The Real and the Known. Comparative Perspectives on Ancient and Modern Philosophy

The Real and the Known.
Comparative Perspectives on Ancient and Modern Philosophy Submission deadline: October 31, 2022

Vol. 11, Issue 1, 2023 [https://www.thaumazein.it/]

Edited by

Silvia De Bianchi
(Università degli Studi di Milano / Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
&
Lorenzo Giovannetti
(Università di Roma Tor Vergata / Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen)

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Confirmed contributors:

Klaus Corcilius – Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen
Fiona Leigh – University College London
Nicholas D. Smith – Lewis & Clark College

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The Real and the Known aims at hosting comparative studies on Ancient and Modern Philosophy to investigate the roots of the reflection upon knowledge, its meaning and purposes throughout history. In analyzing a variety of significantly distinct approaches, this special issue sheds light on the modification of the debate on the notion of knowledge and its full or partial capacity of grasping what is identified as “the real”. At some stages of its long history, the question concerning knowledge has met with crucial turning points and this special issue aims at identifying those that can be found in ancient Greek and early modern philosophy.

The nature of knowledge is nowadays discussed with respect to the object-based / subject-based dichotomy. This means assuming two things when debating the nature of knowledge: (i) the extent to which some theories of knowledge rely on ontological views; (ii) the extent to which some theories of knowledge require the subject to work in some given way quite independently of what there actually is. In relying on these two core ideas, the special issue will also shed new light on what kinds of textual and theoretical contacts early modern philosophers had with ancient philosophy. This will produce at least two scholarly remarkable results: (i) a new way to understand the influence of ancient philosophers on (early) modern ones; (ii) potentially innovative insights into the relation between what is real and what is known.

The proposed volume aims to address the following issues, but also submissions that are not limited to them are welcome:

1) The view that in ancient philosophy one is faced only with object-dependent knowledge while the early modern tradition is exclusively concerned with subject-dependent knowledge is too simplistic and should be put into question. This means, among other things, highlighting the co-presence of, and possibly interrelations between, the two approaches. Some hybrid theories regarding the nature of knowledge should then be considered.

2) In deepening the analysis of the ontological and epistemological underpinning of the notion of reality from a comparative perspective, it is natural to address the question of the character of the notion of fundamentality. What did it mean “fundamental” in the ancient world and what is meant to be fundamental in the early modern period? The meaning attributed to ontology is clearly different, this has an impact on the notion of what exists, and what is real for instance. This in turn offered different variations of how to take what is fundamental either from an ontological or an epistemological perspective or both of them.

Full articles will be subject to double-blind peer review. Articles must be submitted in English and should not exceed 40.000 characters (including spaces) or 10,000 words including references.
Please follow the formatting guidelines for authors:
https://www.thaumazein.it/la-rivista/about-the-journal/formatting-guidelines/
and submit the paper on the following page:
https://rivista.thaumazein.it/index.php/thaum/about/submissions

The special issue will be published in early 2023.