Call for Papers: Bollettino Filosofico on Martin Heidegger’s Thought (2020)

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The Bollettino Filosofico announces a CfP for a volume “Back to the Origins: Genesis and Evolution of Martin Heidegger’s Thought”.

The Bollettino Filosofico is a peer-reviewed journal founded in 1978 at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Calabria, now Department of Humanities. Since 2013 it is an Open Access online review. It represents a theoretical and historiographical forum for Italian and foreign scholars engaged in the most relevant questions of the philosophical research. Over the years, the Bollettino Filosofico has focused, and focuses actually, on the emergent topics at the center of contemporary philosophical debate, publishing papers which explore several thematic fields, such as the ontology and the epistemology, the ethics and the social sciences, the aesthetics and the religious thinking, the phenomenology and the hermeneutics, the German neo-idealism and the Italian philosophy, the Kantianism and the Marxianism, the history of modern and contemporary scientific thinking, the philosophy of language, the semiotics, the culture and the languages of performing arts.

Back to the Origins: Genesis and Evolution of Martin Heidegger’s Thought

At the beginning of the 1920s, Martin Heidegger was developing a reflection on “being” which, using the phenomenological method, would give rise to a new ontology. Being and Time, published in 1927, is also the result of a process of gestation which, in the courses and notes of the lectures, in the texts of the lectures and in the unpublished material that preceded it, can still find resources and stimuli for the re-transversal of a thought whose radical nature has not ceased to question historians and philosophers. In recent years, however, the interweaving with some more markedly theological questions (as, for instance, St. Paul’s interpretations or the study of Augustinian anthropology) seems central not only with respect to a more general understanding of the speculative horizon of Heideggerian hermeneutics, but also with respect to the question about the historicity of existence and the irruption of Kairological time in real life (as happens in the first Christian community), with the consequent redefinition of the sense of being no longer as a mere presence or ousia, but as parousia: the question of meaning is charged with a peculiar dramatic tonality in which hovers the temptation to convert the “restless concern” that characterizes every effective life in a metaphysical “appeasing”. The progressive ontologicalisation of the Heidegger lexicon, which turns from the notion of “life” to that of “being” after the call to Marburg in 1923 or which produces a more marked attention to the question of “difference”, raises important questions not only about the continuity or discontinuity of the Heidegger thought, but also about the “effects” that this thought has produced (and continues to produce) in the philosophical debate of our time. Beyond the relevant analyses of Heideggerian philology, it will be a question of reconsidering the theoretical project of a thought which, in its first movements, was interested in phenomenological debates as well as theological ones, in the attempt to compose fractures and conflicts such as, for example, that of the Fribourg period between the factual element of life and the categorisation of experience, that is the contrast between the “obscure matrix” of subjectivity and the semantic or ideal or intentional aspect which is present in actual existence. The almost complete publication of Martin Heidegger’s entire work (in which, it is worth remembering, the philosopher himself has several times retrospectively returned to the genesis of his path of thought), allows us to critically rethink a theoretical production that, as shown by the writings preceding Being and Time, had assumed the historical dimension of the individual as the unique horizon of the possible experience articulated in the forms of a phenomenology of life and that, slowly and starting from more or less explicit “turns”, will move towards the attempt to go beyond the lexicon and concepts of traditional metaphysics.

Articles can be submitted in Italian, English, French, German, and Spanish. Each submission may not exceed 8,000 words. The submission should contain an abstract in English not exceeding 150 words.

The deadline for submission of manuscripts is April 30, 2020. The issue will appear, at the latest, in December 2020.

See the Bollettino Filosofico website for the full call for papers.