NEXT ISSUES — CALL FOR PAPERS
ALL THE PROJECTS ARE OPEN: EVERYBODY IS KINDLY WELCOME
ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY AS WORLD PHILOSOPHY
Guest Editors:
Professor Charles Brown, Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas, USA
Professor Richard Evanoff, Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan
Deadline: July 15, 2023
The defining and most urgent issues in our time and place are ecological. Profound ecological disruption and change such as runaway global warming, mass extinction, and ubiquitous pollution are now existential threats to all living beings. These are simultaneously local and globally shared issues—challenges that demand a globally shared response which does not silence local voices. What can comparative / cross-cultural / intercultural / transcultural philosophy contribute to our understanding of how humans might better interact with each other across cultures to successfully resolve mutually shared problems related to the local and global environments they inhabit?
For this special issue of Dialogue & Universalism authors are invited to submit papers which explore the possibility and need for environmental philosophy to be world or transcultural philosophy.
Suggested Topics
- Anthropocene and world philosophy
- Environmental philosophy and intercultural dialogue
- Bioregionalism
- Social ecology
- Local vs. global in environmental philosophy/ethics
- Indigenous, post-colonial, and non-western approaches to environmental philosophy/ethic(s)
- Intercultural ecological philosophy and the problem of incommensurability
- Possible forms of convergence in world environmental philosophy in the absence of shared ethical foundations
- Global human civilization and future generations as moral patients
- The possibility of a comprehensive earth ethic(s)
- The possibility of an intercultural dialogical global ethic(s)
- Does environmental philosophy need a transcultural global ethic(s)?
- Does world environmental philosophy require a single universal ethic?
Please send submissions and any inquiries to:
Charles Brown, email: Charles Brown cbrown@emporia.edu;
Richard Evanoff, email: evanoff.richard@gmail.com
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NEW FACES OF DEMOCRACY
IN SEARCHING OF THE GLOBAL HEALTH OF DEMOCRACY
Guest-editor: dr. Gabriela Tănăsescu, Senior Researcher
Ion I. C. Brătianu Bucharest Institute of Political Sciences and International Relations
of the Romanian Academy
Deadline: November 15, 2022
The democracy, “so universally sanctified” and unanimously consented, especially in its remarkable global expansion of the last 75 years, is evaluated as being currently at an unprecedented crossroads or in the middle of a “perfect storm of threats.” Its last decade growing political trends towards “democratic erosion” (decline in democratic quality, even in established democracies), towards more severe “democratic backsliding” and forms of authoritarianism (according to empirical evidence of IDEA’s 2021) have been “accelerated and magnified” by COVID-19 pandemic “exceptional” restrictive measures, unprecedented in peacetime. The imposition of states of emergency (of danger, alarm or epidemic threat), with the risk of executive abuse of power in terms of highly centralized, non-deliberative and non-transparent decision-making, of restricted role (of oversight and control) of parliaments and the judiciary, but also of civil society and the media, has involved an excessive and disproportionate governmental and administrative overreach and a limitation of citizens’ rights, civil liberties and fundamental freedoms considered unparalleled since World War II. Under the conditions of a strong social polarization, fostered by social media and a widespread media disinformation, and of “grotesque levels of economic inequality,” democracies have lost the citizens’ trust in their institutional ability to respond to social demands and solve problems, to stop mismanagement of COVID-19 funding and corruption in public spending (IDEA’s 2021 GSoD). This current plight of democracy—weakened, vulnerable, with low immunity in relation to authoritarianism—can be considered, under the conditions of a “simultaneous emergence of credible alternative models of governance,” as a crisis of the effectiveness of democracy with long-term effects.
Under the announced topic, we propose, beyond the “health check” of current democracy, (1) the examination of the sphere of possibilities for democracy restoring and healing in the new coordinates of what has been called “the grand acceleration” of our age, with reference to the wide mutations which redefines “the grounds for public authority,” identifies “the pathologies of capitalism and the unsustainable social contract underpinning its twenty-first-century variant” (Kalypso Nicolaidis), in terms of:
- science involvement in the democratic formation of policy,
- globalization of politics, development of transnational political spaces and organizations, reconsideration “of the fundamentals of the social contract” within nations (Miguel Poiares Maduro and Paul W. Kahn),
- pro-corporate measures and policies in conditions of crisis, the pattern sometimes called “extraordinary politics” which involves the suspense of some or all democratic norms and the persuasion of the population as respects the need to give up social protection and to sustain the financial private sector in order to avoid “economic apocalypse” of society (Naomi Klein),
- new “epistemological,” non-institutional, space of politics—social media—the “emotional” space in which populist and demagogic leaders “conduct the nation’s business on Twitter,”
- a different metrics of sociability and relationality,
- “informational war” and “strategic communication,” sophisticated methods and techniques of manipulation/public communication, spread of fake news,
- decline of culture and of political culture, triumph of technology and population surveillance, and so on;
(2) the exploration of the conditions of possibility and relevance in post-pandemic times of a new faces of democracy:
- participatory democracy and restorative activism; referendum and plebiscite democracy,
- organic democracy (Alain de Benoist),
- redemptive and pragmatic faces of democracy (Margaret Canovan); populism as a “shadow” of democracy,
- citizen-centric democracy (democracy in “a more horizontal understanding,” Kalypso Nicolaidis), and so on,
in order to protect the human dignity by popular control over public decision-making and decision-makers.
An abstract (max. 250 words) of the submission which outlines its theses and argument is expected till May 5, 2022 (notice of acceptance within one month);
A full previously unpublished paper edited according to the authors guidelines: https://dialogueanduniversalism.eu/index.php/author-guidelines/ should be submitted till September 30, 2022 (notice of acceptance within six weeks).
Your contributions are warmly welcome!
Please send submissions to dr. Gabriela Tănăsescu: gabriela.tanasescu@ispri.ro
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