Category Archives: CFA-CFP

CFP – Odradek “Like a novel: crossing perspectives between knowing, story and digression”

25 Friday Mar 2016

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CALL FOR PAPER

Like a novel:
crossing perspectives between knowing,
story and digression

Editors: Matteo Bensi (matteobensi@gmail.com) Matteo Marcheschi (marcheschimatteo@gmail.com)

How is it configured and what is nowadays the relationship among novel, story and knowing? What are the conditions, the access roads and starting points of scientific, historical and philosophical research? Which are those of the novel?How are intertwined, not outwardly but theoretically, novel and philosophy? And what about romance and history,novel and epistemological reflection?

The purpose of this issue is to investigate the ways of addressing the problem of the relationship between narration, truth and fiction in the novel, in historical research, in philosophy and in science.

Other questions are the following: What would be the differences between a novel and a scientific paper? What kind of narrative models are available to the historian or to the scientist? What is the cognitive effect for the researcher and for the narrator stemming from the choice of one or the other model?

The problem to be solved is still to find a way to the universal, to a temporary synthesis, hard to get to without recasting the relationship and the interaction between the true, the false and the fiction (Ginzburg, Mazzarella).The path of the scientific research is not very different from that of the novelist, littered as it is of false and fake, fragments, traces and spies (Ginzburg);all this elements are all seemingly insignificant details, but they are often able to open new scenarios and perspicuous representations (Wittgenstein) letting set generalizations that do not lose the concreteness of their starting point. The universal element to explore appears as more similar to the part for the whole than to the whole for one of its parts.

In the background of all this, the third issue of Odradek aims to question the possibility that the study of the novel, of its means and its techniques, could provide an easy way to answer the questions posed above: if the meta-narration – the auto-reflection of novel itself on its knowing status – it is not only a characteristic of postmodern narrative, but a constitutive element of the novel tout court (Shklovkij, Bachtin), then the possibility of an inquiry on the “novel” as a “a way of knowing” is open.

This call encourages papers focusing on the question of the poetic origin of the novel, by adopting a multidisciplinary perspective: at issue will be not only a historical reconstruction of the genesis of the novel, but an investigation into its theoretical value, into the contribution novel gives, can give and has given to the philosophical, artistic, historical and scientificknowledge.

Influenced by Nietzschen genealogical critique of the truth, the 20th thought has questioned the possibility of a form of human knowledge characterized by clarity and certainty.The boundaries between subject and object, observer and observed object, cause and effect have become hazy. This leads to reaffirm the value of the cognitive processes by going to the detriment of their outcome. The 20th century novel sees the affirmation of the metaphor and rhetoric at the expense of rigorous logical argumentation.

In light of this, the 20th century epistemology reflected on the constitutive role of metaphor in scientific thought (T.S. Kuhn) and on that of the autobiographical story in the biological constitution of living (Gould; Bocchi-Ceruti);history, even without coming to the radical conclusions of Metahistory (H. White), has tried to stage the image of its gears, by emphasizing the traits of a study made of detours, blocked roads, prejudices and errors (Ginzburg and Prosperi);fiction revealed its genetic processes, combining and messing up, in the manner of Borges and Calvino.

Moreover, by recognizing themselves in the dizzying analogy of truth and fiction (Diderot), he different fields of knowledge had to deal with what really owns the novel: the power to create a knowledge avoiding the coarse mesh of true and false, by ranking instead in terms of what is neither true nor false but plausible (Halliwell).

In this perspective, the novel ceases to be placed on the ground of absolute otherness comparing to higher knowledge, sewing up a wound that the history of philosophy has always sought to heal and, at the same time, to reproduce. Thus, one can advance the hypothesis that narration and philosophical inquiry are getting closer when knowledge has made itself rhetorical and logological knowing (Cassin). Such a knowing would be human because of restless, always reversible and temporary, provincial (local) and atmospheric (Ortega y Gasset; Mazzoni), able to catch a glimpse of the universal in the particular (Auerbach).

We feel the philosophical necessity, on the basis of studies of Perelman, Garin and Fumaroli among others, that history and philosophy, science and literature, focus on their possible poetic (Vico) and artisanal (Sennett) origins – plausible and always changing – by investigating their proximity to the novel as a form of knowledge.
From this, from the perhaps fictional nature of human knowledge, we propose to investigate the encyclopaedic character of this knowledge.

In the manner of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, human knowledge is made of rewritings – translations and betrayals (Kundera) – and narrations that accompany the main story, subverting the order of what is a priority and what is not. The detail now becomes fruitful path of research, now dead end. Nevertheless, it gives the clear picture of a knowledge always referring to something else, for proximity and morphological distance (Goethe, Wittgenstein). It finally results that the detail, the individual, the fictional, are the only point of view suitable for a generalisation.

The topics of the issue may include, but are not limited to:

1. The origins of the novel: the fictional way of knowing

2. Novel and History: debts, contamination and epistemological proximity

3. Fiction and science: a cognitive proximity

4. Novel and rhetoric: proximity and theoretical distances

5. Novel and fiction: the work questioning the genre, the genre shining through the work

6. Knowledge, novel and encyclopaedia

7. Concept-interpretation and representation (mimesis), the representation-interpretation (mimesis) of the concept

8. Like a novel: the whole emerging from the detail; or the possibility oftelling the general by starting from the particular

Invited Keynote Authors:
Davide Bondì, Università degli studi di Milano
Alessandro Cinquegrani, Università Cà Foscari di Venezia
Emmanuelle Danblon, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Paolo Rossi, Università di Pisa
Alessandra Sarchi

 

Full papers of accepted abstracts cannot be longer than 40 000 characters (footnote and references included). They should be submitted by 15th June 2016 and prepared for blind peer review.

The full paper must be submitted online via OJS – Open Journal System:

zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista

Authors can find submission guidelines at the following link:

zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista/index.php/odradek/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions

All papers will be reviewed according to our peer review process policy:

zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista/index.php/odradek/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess

Languages: English, French, German, Italian

Reminder CFA: Dialectic and the Ends of Reason

11 Friday Dec 2015

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International Conference organized by ZETESIS Research Group

DIALECTIC AND THE ENDS OF REASON

Pisa, 8-10 June 2016

Advisory Committee: Alfredo Ferrarin (Università di Pisa), Gianluca Garelli (Università di Firenze), Luca Illetterati (Università di Padova)

Invited Speakers:

Andreas Arndt (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Massimiliano Biscuso (IISF – Scuola di Roma)
Remo Bodei (University of California Los Angeles)
Emmanuel Cattin (PHIER, Université Blaise Pascal)
Alfredo Ferrarin (Università di Pisa),
Gianluca Garelli (Università di Firenze),
Luca Illetterati (Università of Padova)

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

Dialectic seems to have disappeared from the contemporary philosophical debate. Indeed, the various aspects of its past fortune – the theory of becoming, the central role of negativity in thought and reality, the critique of abstract negation and of rigid dualisms in every field of knowledge and praxis, a dynamic and developmental view of reason – have all been replaced or transfigured by alternative epistemologies, from time to time: philosophy of difference, hermeneutical movement, positivism, pragmatism, theories of complexity, phenomenology, biopolitics.

At the same time, an instrumental view of reason seems to have emerged and to have imposed itself: reason is generally conceived as a tool on behalf of independent ends and judgments. Other faculties and needs – be they individual or social – impose their own legislation upon it. According to such an instrumental paradigm, reason is the mere spectator of an activity taking place in other dimensions: sensation, passion, revelation, tradition, political authority, as well as life, history or language. By being useful only to the purpose of a confirmation of the formal coherence of propositions and interpretations, reason lacks all autonomous vocation or grip on the world.

In light of such a scenario, the conference brings forward the hypothesis that the possibility of a different conception of reason is historically and theoretically bound to the possibility of dialectics. From a dialectical point of view, reason has indeed its own interests, needs and manifestation powers, revealing itself through its cognitive and self-structuring attitude. According to this view, reason is not just a calculating tool led by external forces but moves itself by its internal ways of being and realization: dialectical reason is active by itself, and its goals are expressions of its own living interests.

The conference aims at rethinking and bringing back to the agenda the bond between reason and dialectic, between a thought able to measure up to contradiction and reason as an autonomous and free reality.

The topics of the papers might include, but need not be restricted to:

  • The Relationship between Eros and Intellect in Plato
  • The Scientific Status of Dialectic in Aristotle
  • Kant’s Teleological Conception of Reason and its Dialectical Tendency
  • Hegel’s Speculative Dialectic
  • The Realization of Reason in Historical-Materialistic Philosophy
  • The Dialectic of Drive and Rational Ego in Nietzsche and in Freudian Metapsychology
  • Thinking, Desire and Just Life in Adorno
  • 19th and 20th centuries’ criticisms to dialectic from the perspective of the theory of reason

The organizers strongly encourage the proposals of comparison between different authors of the dialectical tradition, as well as the attempts – aware of past criticisms and contemporary resistance – at a global redefinition and defense of the bond between dialectic and reason; thematic contributions on single concepts and authors will nevertheless be taken into consideration.

The official Advisory Committee of the Conference will be communicated in a later rejoinder of the call, as will be the dates. Submissions should be suitable for blind refereeing and consist of:

An extended abstract of 600-800 words to be sent in pdf format to zetesis@unipi.it by March 1, 2016.
A separate cover sheet including name, title of paper, affiliation, email address and contact details.
Notification of acceptance will be sent by the end of March. Contributions should be suitable for 30 minutes talk and can be submitted in English, Italian, German, French; however, all the non-English speaking contributors will have to supply a long abstract of their paper in English (no less than 1300 words).

For further information please write to zetesis@unipi.it

CFA-CFP Odradek: “Denkbilder: The «Thought-Image» in 20th century German Short Prose”

04 Friday Dec 2015

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CALL FOR PAPER 

Here the following version, below that in Italian

Denkbilder: The «Thought-Image» in 20th century German Short Prose

Editors: Raul Calzoni and Francesco Rossi

 

The term ‘Denkbild’, in English translated with ‘Thought-image’, is already documented in 18th century German Literature, i.e. in Winckelmann’s and Herder’s works. In the Modern age its meaning becomes broader than the original one, namely ‘emblem’. Indeed, it can routinely be employed to mean an image of thought, the literary and conceptually elaborated representation of a visual element. Hence, it fluctuates between different senses such as that of subjective reproduction, idea, or ideal.

As Gerhard Richter has pointed out in his Thought-Images. Frankfurt School Writers’ reflections from Damaged Life, the use of the term ‘Denkbild’ in 20th century philosophy has to be taken as a case of ‘paleonomy’, namely the “maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept”.

In the narrower context of Literary Studies, ‘Denkbild’ means a specific form of short prose.

Th. W. Adorno ushered in the reflection on Denkbild as literary genre, by describing Walter Benjamin’s Einbahnstraße (One Way-Street) as a “collection of Denkbilder”. Adorno takes Thought-Images to be rather “scribbled picture-puzzles, parabolic evocations of something that cannot be said in words” (“Es sind eher gekritzelte Vexierbilder als gleichnishafte Beschwörungen des in Worten Unsagbaren”). They establish “a kind of intellectual short-circuiting (eine Art von intellektuellem Kurzschluß”), which does not hold back conceptual thinking, but shocks through its enigmatic form and by that get thought moving (Th. W. Adorno, Benjamin’s One Way-Street in: Notes to Literature, vol. 2, New York 1992). In light of this, Adorno includes among image-thoughts several different texts such as description of cities, report of dreams, montage and aphorisms. All these texts share the feature of brevity and the figurative element fosters the reflection.

The history of Denkbild still has to be drawn. In fact, such a genre does not only belong to Benjamin and to some thinkers closer to him such as Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer and Adorno himself (thinks of Minima Moralia). Many other writers employ it frequently such as Stefan George, Paul Sheerbart, Robert Walser and Franz Kafka. It was a long-lasting phenomenon; circulation and genealogy of which should be investigated deeply, by taking in count groups and individuals, cultural and editorial contexts and all aspect pertaining to the literary field. This will be the first goal of this volume. The second will be the textual analysis of Thought-Image’s structure. It is necessary a close reading of several texts. Further contribution could be given by comparing Thought-Images with other genres sharing with it similar structure or historical relations. For instance, thinks of the short story (in German Kalendergeschichte, then Kurzgeschichte), aphorism, prose poem (Prosagedicht) and the journalistic constellation of the feuilleton.

Accepted papers are expected to be published in a monographic issue of the online Journal “Odradek” (open access and ISSN 2465-1060) edited by Raul Calzoni and Francesco Rossi

http://zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista/index.php/odradek/

The topic of the proposals might include, but need not to be restricted to:

  1. Analysis of one or more Denkbilder, by placing them in the conceptual framework of Modernism and German Literature of the interwar period.
  2. History and Genealogy of Denkbild from Baroque Theory of Emblem/Symbol to 19th German Literature.
  3. Meaning and role of Denkbild in After Second World War German Literature
  4. Genres and modes of writing close to Denkbild: prose poem, short story, parable, aphorism).
  5. Aspects, functions and role of Denkbild in the literary field
  6. Aesthetical and theoretical reflection on Denkbild.

 

An abstract of 250-300 words must be sent by 31 January 2016 to editors email addresses: Raul Calzoni (raul.calzoni@unibg.it ) and Francesco Rossi (francesco.rossi@unipi.it).

Notification of acceptance will be sent by 1 March 2016.

Full papers of accepted abstracts cannot be longer than 40 000 characters (footnote and references included). They should be submitted by 31 August 2016 and prepared for blind peer review.

The full paper must be submitted online via OJS – Open Journal System:

http://zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista/index.php/odradek/index

Authors can find submission guidelines at the following link:

http://zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista/index.php/odradek/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions

All papers will be reviewed according to our peer review process policy:

http://zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista/index.php/odradek/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess

Languages: English, French, German, Italian

 

CALL

Denkbilder. L’«immagine di pensiero» nella prosa breve tedesca del Novecento

Curatori: Raul Calzoni e Francesco Rossi

Il termine ‘Denkbild’, in italiano ‘immagine di pensiero’, attestato in tedesco già nel Settecento ad es. in Winckelmann e Herder, assume nell’età del moderno un significato più esteso rispetto al significato originario di ‘emblema’. Può indicare sia l’immagine pensata, sia la rappresentazione letteraria e concettualmente elaborata di un dato visivo, oscillando tra accezioni diverse quali rappresentazione soggettiva, idea o ideale. L’utilizzo di questo termine nell’ambito filosofico-letterario novecentesco è dunque un caso di “paleonomia”, come ha osservato Gerhard Richter nel volume Thought-Images. Frankfurt School Writers’ reflections from Damaged Life del 2007, cioè del “mantenimento di un vecchio nome per lanciare un nuovo concetto”.

Nell’ambito più ristretto degli studi letterari si parla di ‘Denkbild’ in rapporto a una particolare forma di prosa breve. È Th. W. Adorno a inaugurare la riflessione sul ‘Denkbild’ in ambito letterario, quando in una sua recensione definisce Einbahnstraße (Strada a senso unico) di Walter Benjamin una “raccolta di immagini di pensiero” (“Sammlung von Denkbildern”). Si tratterebbe, per Adorno “piuttosto [di] immagini ambigue scarabocchiate che [di] evocazioni paraboliche di qualcosa che non può essere detto a parole” (“Es sind eher gekritzelte Vexierbilder als gleichnishafte Beschwörungen des in Worten Unsagbaren”), in una “sorta di cortocircuito intellettuale” (“eine Art von intellektuellem Kurzschluß”) che di per sé non offre argini al pensiero concettuale, ma colpisce con la sua forma enigmatica e con ciò mette in moto il pensiero (Th. W. Adorno, Benjamins “Einbahnstraße”, in: Noten zur Literatur [ = Gesammelte Schriften 1.1, Frankfurt 1974). Sulla scia di queste parole, Adorno sussume sotto il concetto di ‘Denkbild’ una serie di testi molto diversi tra loro come descrizioni di città, resoconti di sogni, montage e aforismi, accomunati dalla brevità e dall’alto tasso di riflessività che in essi assume la componente figurativa.

La storia del Denkbild è ancora tutta da tracciare. Infatti, questo genere di scrittura non viene praticato soltanto da Benjmain e dal gruppo di intellettuali a lui vicini come Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer e dallo stesso Adorno (si pensi ai Minima Moralia), ma da numerosi altri scrittori, tra cui Stefan George, Paul Scheerbart, Robert Walser e Franz Kafka. Si tratta di un fenomeno di lunga durata, la cui effettiva estensione e la cui genealogia andrebbero investigate in senso diacronico, in un’ottica che tenga conto di singoli gruppi e individualità, del contesto culturale ed editoriale, delle dinamiche legate al campo letterario. Questo è il primo scopo del volume monografico in preparazione. Il secondo concerne più da vicino l’analisi testuale, perché nemmeno la struttura del ‘Denkbild’ può dirsi sinora del tutto chiarita. Troppi sono ancora i testi di cui mancano letture ravvicinate. Ulteriore chiarimento può inoltre portare il confronto con generi contigui o comunque collegabili al ‘Denkbild’ per motivi legati alla sua evoluzione storica come la short story (ted. Kalendergeschichte, poi Kurzgeschichte), l’aforsima, il poema in prosa (Prosagedicht) e la costellazione giornalistica del feuilleton.

La pubblicazione dei contributi è prevista in un numero monografico, a cura di Raul Calzoni e Francesco Rossi, della rivista online “Odradek” (open access e ISSN 2465-1060):

http://zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista/index.php/odradek/

Gli articoli proposti possono confrontarsi con i seguenti temi, senza doversi limitare agli stessi:

  1. Analisi di uno o più Denkbilder e loro contestualizzazione nella letteratura della Moderne e del dopoguerra in lingua tedesca.
  2. Storia e Genealogia del Denkbild nella letteratura precedente alla Moderne dall’emblematica barocca fino all’Ottocento.
  3. Il significato e il ruolo del Denkbild nella letteratura in lingua tedesca successiva alla seconda guerra mondiale.
  4. Generi e modi della scrittura contigui al Denkbild (poema in prosa, short story, parabola, aforisma) nel contesto di una riflessione teorica sulle “immagini di pensiero”.
  5. Aspetti, funzioni e ruolo del Denkbild nel contesto editoriale e nel campo letterario.
  6. Riflessione estetica e teorica sul Denkbild.

Gli abstracts di 250-300 parole dovranno essere inviati entro il 31 gennaio 2016 ai curatori Raul Calzoni (raul.calzoni@unibg.it) e Francesco Rossi (francesco.rossi@unipi.it).

Entro il 1 marzo 2016 i curatori selezioneranno i contributi pubblicabili sulla base degli abstracts pervenuti.

I contributi, che non dovranno superare le 40 mila battute (incluse note e riferimenti) e saranno sottoposti a peer review, dovranno pervenire entro il 31 agosto 2016.

I contributi saranno consegnati online via OJS – Open Journal System:

http://zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista/index.php/odradek/index

Le linee guida per la consegna si trovano al link seguente:

http://zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista/index.php/odradek/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions

Tutti i contributi saranno esaminati e recensiti secondo le nostre procedure

http://zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista/index.php/odradek/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess

Lingue: Inglese, Francese, Tedesco, Italiano

 

 

CFA: Emotions and Conflict

21 Monday Sep 2015

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Emotions and Conflict

3-5 February 2016

Call for Abstracts

Abstracts are invited for a philosophical workshop on the theme of Emotions and Conflict.cfa_EmotionsConflict
The workshop will take place at the University of Pisa, as a joint collaboration between the Interdisciplinary Group on Phenomenology and History of Emotions (funded by the University of Pisa, PRA 2015), the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSSE), and with the organizing support offered by the research group Zetesis (University of Pisa).

The workshop will start on Wednesday, 3rd February 2016 at 2.00 pm and will conclude on Friday, 5th February, at 6.00 pm.

The number of participants will be limited to 15 people.LOGOuniPISA

Abstracts should not exceed 1000 words. Please prepare your abstract for anonymous review. Abstracts may be submitted the following link.

Submission Deadline: 15 November 2015
Acceptance Notification Date: 1 December 2015

Inquiries may be directed at first to the local organizer Alessandra Fussi (alessandra.fussi@unipi.it)

Aims & Topics
The workshop aims at discussing the theoretical, practical and historical aspects involved in emotions prominent in situations of enmity, conflict and war.

Aristotle formalized the competitive emotions as a system of opposite states, which included anger, hatred, indignation, envy, emulation, pity. However, it is questionable whether situations of conflict involve opposite emotions. Furthermore, it is worth considering how private and public conflicts evoke emotions such as disgust and humiliation, which came to the forefront of philosophical inquiry in the 20th century. From the point of view of the resolution of internal (intra-psychic and private) and external (interpersonal and public) situations of conflict, the workshop will discuss the role of compassion, respect and forgiveness.

Contributions to the workshop will consider conflicting emotions, as well as emotions in situations of conflict. Papers can address the nature and history of specific emotions, the role of emotional clusters, the role of collective emotions in fueling, maintaining and resolving conflicts. The perspective can be methodological, conceptual, ethical, political, or cultural.

Workshop Organizing Committee

Alessandra Fussi (University of Pisa), Edward Harcourt (University of Oxford), Anthony Hatzimoysis (University of Athens)

For more information about the Workshop and related Activities of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions, please visit the website: http://navotnaor.wix.com/epsse

CFP: ODRADEK, vol. I, no. 2: The Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy

13 Sunday Sep 2015

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Siamo lieti di annunciare l’uscita della call for paper per il secondo numero di Odradek, che sarà dedicato al tema “The Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy” e curato da Danilo Manca e Alessandra Aloisi.

Submission open: 13th September 2015

Submission deadline: 15th December 2015

Call for papers

 The Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy

Editors: Danilo Manca and Alessandra Aloisi

 

When in Book Ten of The Republic Plato proscribes poetry from the city and refers to a long-standing quarrel between poetry and philosophy, he raises an issue that has since made its mark in the history of Western thought. The aim of this call for papers is to delve deeper into the original meaning of this quarrel, to evaluate the implications it has had for the Western way of thinking and writing, and to explore the different forms the quarrel has assumed, between poetry and philosophy, between literature and philosophy.

Plato’s treatment of poetry looks as resolute as ambiguous. Plato claims that the mimetic art is essentially an imitation of imitation. Accordingly, the work of art is a mere copy of the ideal model that nature already reproduces. Art is therefore seen as twofold far from the truth, whereas philosophy is the love for truth. Nevertheless, this does not hinder Plato from expressing his philosophical arguments by means of dialogues and myths. Could this ambiguity be solved? Is poetry, in Plato’s view, just an extrinsic aspect that the philosopher has at disposal to have a talk with the ordinary people, namely with the men who are still in the cave? Or, rather, is poetry a fundamental dimension belonging to philosophy itself?

Throughout history of Western thought many thinkers took a position on the Quarrel. For instance, Hegel claimed that Plato’s mode of representation belongs to an earlier stage of the concept’s development. By contrast, by employing the notions of “dichtende Vernunft” and “dichtende Denken” respectively, Nietzsche and Heidegger endorsed the idea that philosophy is essentially connected with the poetic production, that is with Metaphernbildung. Another way of understanding the Quarrel is to consider philosophy one of the tools the poet and the writer employ in order to reflect upon their artistic activity. Philosophy plays an important role in the compositional activity of the poet: such role would consist in making possible a meta-literature, that is, a poetry whose point at issue is its own nature. Examples of this are Schiller’s “sentimental poetry”, Schlegel’s “transcendental poetry”, and Borges’s “intellectual poetry”.

Thus, what is at stake in the quarrel between poetry and philosophy is the distinction between myths and logos, thinking in images and thinking in concepts, between the picturing and the inferential arguing, between the imitation of and the reflection upon reality.

To what extent could the poet’s activity be distinguished from the philosopher’s one? To put it in Aristotle’s terms, what does it mean to say that poetry is more philosophical than history because it deals with the universals? And, consequently, what is the relationship between the universals used by philosophy and the ones used by poetry?

In Phaedo, Socrates admits to have often been suggested in dreams to cultivate the art of the Muses. Even though he had always taken it to be an exhortation to do philosophy, only at the end of his life he understands that he was required «to compose myths, not simply to elaborate arguments». On a similar note is Giacomo Leopardi who claims that the greatest poets are also philosophers (e.g. Omero, Dante and Shakespeare) and that the greatest philosophers are poets (e.g. Plato), since imagination is an essential component of poetry as well as of philosophy.

Thus, if poetry and philosophy are activities that stand on the same footing, one may argue that Plato’s thesis against art and poetry, far from dealing with the problem of truth and its representation, has nothing but a political meaning.

By banishing poetry from the polis that is ruled according to philosophical principles, Plato was trying to prevent a free circulation of words and discourses that may divert bodies from their social and intellectual destination. As Jacques Rancière would put it, the reason why Plato himself told stories and invented myths was to justify a hierarchical order and to provide a foundation for a distribution of knowledge and positions which has no foundation itself. From this point of view, the “ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy, between falsehood and truth, appears to be nothing but the expression of the never-ending quarrel between equality and inequality, between democracy and hierarchical order. Not differently from philosophy, poetry is a way of using language and of “making” the truth; in other words, a way of thinking and of organizing reality that can rival the one that philosophy promotes.

Consider otherwise the political issue in Strauss’s terms: the genuine quarrel between philosophy and poetry is not concerned with “the worth of poetry” as such, but with the order in which philosophy and poetry should be ranked. According to Socrates, poetry is legitimate only as ministerial to the user par excellence, namely to the king who is a philosopher, and not as an autonomous enterprise. In this sense, the greatest example of ministerial poetry would be the Platonic dialogue because of its capacity to present the non-philosophical life as ministerial to the philosophical one.

The topic of the proposals might include, but need not to be restricted to:

  1. Any philosophical and/or poetic experience which has nourished and/or questioned the distinction between imagination and thought, myths and logos, and so on.
  2. The problem of the style of philosophy and the role of rhetoric in philosophy
  3. Limits and potentialities of a philosophy of poetry
  4. Features of a literature aiming to be philosophical
  5. Any political aspects entailed in the Quarrel.
  6. The distinction between verse and prose as decisive or not to distinguish poetry from philosophy.

Languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish.

The paper can be submitted online via OJS – Open Journal System:

http://zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista/index.php/odradek/index

Authors can find submission guidelines at the following link:

http://zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista/index.php/odradek/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions

All papers will be reviewed according to our peer review process policy:

http://zetesis.cfs.unipi.it/Rivista/index.php/odradek/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess