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• Analytic aesthetics’ actual or potential contribution to film theory, history, criticism, or practice
• The potential or actual contribution of film theory, history, criticism, or practice to the analytic aesthetics
• The history of analytic aesthetics’ engagement with film
• The present-day status of analytic aesthetics in film studies
• The treatment of philosophical subjects in film (philosophers as filmmakers, filmmakers as philosophers, film-philosophy)
• Challenges from film history and theory to analytic accounts of representation in film (including both fiction and depiction)
• The role of film theory in the development of analytic aesthetics
• The nature of distinction between film theory and philosophy of film
• Moving images beyond the realm of films: TV series, video games, virtual reality, video art... How are they currently accounted for in analytic aesthetic and in film studies? How can the cooperation between the two disciplines improve the research on such moving images?
• Which films count as works of art? What does it mean for a film to be a work of art? What is the relationship between film as an art form and the art system as a whole? How can the dialogue between analytic aesthetics and film studies shed some light on these issues?

Speakers will be notified of decisions by the end of July. There will be no conference fees. The conference is open to both individual papers or pre-constituted panels (with 3 speakers each and a chair). In the case of individual papers, please submit abstracts between 500 and 1000 words (references included) together with a title and 5 keywords. The abstracts should be prepared for blind review (with name, institutional affiliation, contact details, and the title of the proposal in a separate file). In the case of pre-constituted panels, the conveners are asked to submit a panel proposal including the title, a 300- to 500-word justification for the panel and 300- to 500-word abstracts (references included) for each of the three presentations making up the panel accompanied by a title and 5 keywords. Also included should be names and institutional affiliation for the three presenters and the name, institutional affiliation, contact details, and institutional affiliation for the chair. Panel conveners will be also requested to conform to the Good Practice Policy making sure that at least two of the panellists (including the convener/chair) are female. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 746619 and the British Society of Aesthetics.
Website: https://aestheticsfilmstudies.weebly.com/


Fifth International Research Conference "Mechanisms for Formation of Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones" (CEFZ)
Submission deadline: 10/08/2018

There are two aspects of the formation of cultural memory. The first one is memorial zone. The second is the zone of oblivion and experience excepted from ordinary cultural practice; it is more important as it involves more cultural phenomena. Like some inconvenient historical figure or uncomfortable historical event this cultural experience is excepted but not completely forgotten. It shapes cultural borderlines and defines processes of identification. Such zones of excepted but unforgotten cultural experience were named Cultural Exclusion and Frontier  Zones (on the analogy with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone). The main objectives of the Conference: To reveal the mechanisms for formation of cultural exclusion zones on the example of the totalitarian Soviet past. Though topographical representation of national culture is nowadays quite common in the field of the Humanities (the methods of exposing of geographical boarders of national cultures are drawn up, theories of “cultural boarders” are elaborated and imagology is actively developing), borderline is usually regarded as a characteristic of some territory possessing distinct outlines. The research group brought together by this project takes into consideration multifactor influence upon the contents of culture and sees in interaction of different cultures not only frontier zones (marginal and containing elements of two and more interacting cultures) but also exclusion zones, i. e. zones of cultural suppression whose importance for interacting cultures becomes rather questionable. Application and abstract of presentation (recommended length is 200–300 words) or full text of the paper (not exceeding 5000 words) in Russian or in English should be submitted by the 10^th of August, 2018. The Organizing Committee reserves the right to select papers for participation in the Conference. The acceptance will be communicated to authors by the 30^th of August, 2018. The Organizing Committee reserves the right to select papers for publication and edit them. The papers are not reviewed or sent back. An application containing applicant’s full name, affiliation, contact information (e-mail, phone, post address) as well as information on mode of participation (personal or virtual) should be send to the following e-mail address: sergtroy@yandex.ru. When an application is received, the Committee sends to an applicant a letter confirming its receipt and containing invitation (in case of personal participation).
For further information see: http://www.philhist.spbu.ru and http://www.labont.it
Download Call for Papers

(3/2019) "Bridging Traditions. Chinese and Western Philosophy in Dialogue"
Advisory Editors: Wang Chengbing (Beijing Normal University), Erica Onnis (University of Turin)
Mail to: erica.onnis@unito.it; rivista.estetica@gmail.com
Deadline for submission: September 30th, 2018

(1/2020) "New Ontologies of Art"
Advisory Editor: Adam Andrzejewski (Uniwersytet Warszawski) 
Mail to: adam.epoche@gmail.com; rivista.estetica@gmail.com
Deadline for submission: January 30th, 2019

(2/2020) "Thinking with Umberto Eco. Philosophy, Semiotics, and the Arts"
Advisory Editors: Maurizio Ferraris (University of Turin), Ugo Volli (University of Turin), Davide Dal Sasso (University of Turin)
Mail to: davide.dalsasso@labont.it,  rivista.estetica@gmail.com
Deadline for submission: March 1st, 2019

(3/2020) "Ethics of the Environmental Crisis"
Advisory Editors: Davide Pala (University of Rijeka) and Carlo Burelli (University of Rijeka)
Mail to: rivista.estetica@gmail.com, davide_pala@hotmail.com, burelli.carlo@gmail.com
Submission deadline: March 31st, 2019
Download Call for Papers
 

New issue of Argumenta: Naturalism and Normativity in Hegel’s Philosophy
Guest Editor: Guido Seddone (University of Parma)
Submission deadline: 31/10/2018

Invited contributors: 
Antón Barba-Kay(The Catholic University of America, Washington D.C.)
David Ciavatta (Ryerson University, Toronto)
Katerina Deligiorgi (University of Essex)
Elena Ficara (Universität Paderborn)
Dean Moyar (John Hopkins University, Baltimore) 
Terry Pinkard (Georgetown University, Washington D.C.)
Clinton Tolley (UC San Diego)

For any query, please use the following address:
guido.seddone@unipr.it

Deadline for submission: October 31st, 2018
Notification of acceptance: January 31st, 2019

Description
The aim of this special issue is to tackle Hegel’s approach to the constitution of the normative on the basis of natural premises and to investigate his original version of naturalism. In the ambit of the American analytical philosophy, scholars like Sellars, Brandom and McDowell have already pointed out that Hegel’s thought is based on the inferential analysis of the logical and pragmatic elements constituting the mind, reason, self-consciousness and the normative. More recently authors like Terry Pinkard, Michael Thompson and Robert Pippin have highlighted that the Hegelian philosophy leads to the investigation about the natural requisites and premises of the cognitive and intentional stances, pinpointing that a naturalistic method of scrutiny is in play. Hegel’s naturalism is therefore a novel version of naturalism enhancing our understanding of the cognitive, intentional and social human dispositions by addressing their dependence on natural elements like life, desires, instincts and perception. As a naturalist Hegel claims that philosophy deals with natural entities and that the occurrence in human life of non-observational entities like mind, cognition, self-consciousness, etc. has to be explained as emerging from and depending on natural requisites that the empirical sciences can directly observe like organic and biological properties. The domain of the normative is, following Hegel, constituted by means of the self-conscious life, namely the capacity to articulate concepts and to constitute a social dimension based on norms and interpersonal interaction. Self-conscious life and the normative, namely the domain of freedom and autonomy, are not explained in his thought as irreducible to and independent from nature understood as the domain of causality, but rather as elements proper of a natural substratum with which they establish a mutual dependence. Briefly illustrated, his naturalism consists in keeping the difference between the normative and nature and, nonetheless, avoiding any sort of dualism or unsolvable contrast between them. The advantage of this approach is explaining these two ambits as reciprocally dependent: self-conscious life does not originate by the separation from nature, but rather by establishing and understanding its own bonds and dependence to nature. In contrast to other more naive versions of naturalism, which separate mind from nature by underlining the former’s emergent character, Hegel’s one maintains that the relation nature-mind is based on the mutual dependence between these two ontogenetic factors of human life and that the cognitive and social dispositions originate from the naturalization of logical and inferential categories of thinking. Consequently, understanding the normative requires a naturalized approach to the cognitive and social aspects constituting what Hegel calls Geist, namely the normative substance subjected to a historic evolution and deployed for explaining the logical structure of human civilization. Finally, this special issue intends to account for the naturalistic premises of normativity in order to extend our understanding of the philosophical category of naturalism and to enhance the comprehension of normativity from a naturalized perspective.

Contributions addressing the following topics are welcome:

Articles must be written in English and should not exceed 8000 words.  For the presentation of their articles, authors are requested to take into account the instructions available under Information for Authors. Submissions must be suitable for blind review. Each submission should also include a brief abstract of no more than 250 words and five keywords for indexing purposes. To submit a paper, please visit this page.
Notification of intent to submit, including both a title and a brief summary of the content, will be greatly appreciated, as it will assist with the coordination and planning of the special issue.
Webpage

New issue of Philosophy Kitchen
Parts, Wholes and Systems. The Concept of Emergence in Philosophy of Biology and of Mind
Theme Editor: Erica Onnis (Università di Torino)
Submission deadline: 30/10/2018

After over fifty years of mistrust and caution, the notion of emergence is once again the object of interest for both philosophers and scientists. On the one hand, physics and the natural sciences have had to deal with phenomena that could be well described by this concept (for example, ferromagnetism and superconductivity); on the other hand, complexity science has taken the emergence of new patterns and new systemic properties as the mark of many complex physical, biological and social systems(for example, the behavior of social insects or flocks of birds, the organization of the Web into web-communities, or the formation of cognitive processes starting from brain activity). Finally, the notion of emergence is used in contemporary metaphysics, as well as in philosophy of mind and in philosophy of biology, to better define some relations of ontological and nomological dependence.
Being used in very different scientific and philosophical fields, the notion of emergence undoubtedly seems to be a useful conceptual tool; on the other hand, though, precisely because it appears in such different disciplines, there is no univocal agreement on its definition and on its explanatory power, especially in relation to complex problems such as those linked to the nature of life and of the mind. Are the latter emerging properties? If so, how can one clearly define an emerging property? And again: does emergence concern the way we know and explain phenomena (epistemological emergence), or is it rather the veritable introduction of new realities - or levels of reality - into the world (ontological emergence)?
Emergence seems to have two unquestionable characteristics: emerging properties depend on lower-level processes, but present a certain degree of autonomy and irreducibility with respect to the latter. These two characteristics, however, are insufficient to define precisely what is emerging and what is not, provided that there really are authentic cases of emergence (which is sometimes called into question).
This issue of Philosophy Kitchen has a dual goal: on the one hand, to examine the methodological value of the concept of emergence, as well as its theoretical complexity and ambiguity; on the other, to investigate how this notion can shed light on two phenomena that, despite the progress of knowledge, seem to resist any philosophical or scientific explanation, namely life and consciousness.

The proposed contributions must correspond or come close to one of the following thematic areas:
The scope of the concept: do emerging phenomena indicate an epistemological gap or an objective metaphysical difference? In other words, is the concept of emergence metaphysically innocent, indicating a (perhaps temporary) insufficient knowledge of the world? Or does it force us to admit new levels of reality and/or causal powers?
What theoretical framework does the concept of emergence belong to? Does accepting an emergentist vision coincide with abandoning physicalism? What is the relationship between emergence, physicalism and reductionism?
The usefulness of complex systems theory in putting the concept of emergence in the right scientific and philosophical perspective.
The problem of life and consciousness. Can emergence shed light on the origin of life and consciousness?
 
Deadline for submission of proposals: October 30th, 2018
Accepted languages: Italian, English, French and German
Procedure: send an abstract of up to 6000 characters, including the title of the article and an outline of its structure, to philosophykitchen@gmail.com by October 30th, 2018. Proposals will be evaluated by the editors and editorial board and the results will be announced, by email, by November 30th, 2018, including a new deadline for the presentation of the article, which will undergo a double-blind review.
Webpage

Gli articoli, per un limite massimo di 40.000 caratteri (spazi inclusi), accompagnati da un abstract di 1000 caratteri (in italiano e in inglese), devono essere proposti attraverso l’indirizzo e-mail cfp@rivistapolemos.it entro il 15 luglio 2018 (in uno dei seguenti formati: doc, docx, odt). Inviare cortesemente articoli e abstract in un univo documento che sia adatto alla revisione anonima. Sono accettati contributi in italiano, inglese, francese, tedesco e spagnolo. Gli autori che intendano sottoporre alla rivista contributi che eccedano i temi individuati sono invitati a discuterne preliminarmente con i curatori del numero monografico, inviando una mail ai seguenti indirizzi: tommaso.morawski@uniroma1.it ernesto.sferrazza.papa@gmail.com.
Download Call for Papers
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Ardeth (Architectural Design Theory): Rights/Diritti
Theme editor: Carlo Olmo
Submission deadline: 15/07/2018

The range of actions deployed by design professions have seldom entered the debate regarding the relationship between city, rights, and powers. The legitimacy of design actions, though, undergoes the same fragmentation that, in a complementary fashion, questions both the credibility of physical limits in defining what a city is (for instance walls, urban morphology, the district) as well as the universal validity of the rights that are spatially defined by such units.
The project of architecture is often the carrier of a “tyranny of values” (Schmitt, 1966), as it breeds paradigms centered on form, on function or even on consensus, that, for instance, have indirectly reinforced the High-Tech trend, the naturalization of technology and of ecology in the project, as well as the various declinations of participatory action. Perhaps design can still offer itself as a complex dialogical form intended as the sum of technical and relational knowledge sets, and maintain its “discursive” role: nonetheless, the development of such a discursive potential implies the opening of a dialogue with the juridical (Butler, 2012) and historical disciplines (in light of the fact that even the hard sciences have been by now historicized) as well as with geography and the human sciences that deal with the urban dimension. On these premises, this call for papers proposes three main lines of reasoning.

The project as apparatus for the transfer and translation of values and rights
The principle of authority as answer to growing complexity allowed for the affirmation of a priori legitimized positions within international debate, from a form of creativity which coincides with star-architects and their signature, to scientifically tested – and thus guaranteed – systems of technical knowledge (Blau, 1976). Today, architecture and – in part design, answer not only to simplified representations of reality (Smart, Green, Sustainable architecture and city...), but also to systems of values and rights which are external to their own possibilities for negotiation and decision, and often decontextualized from the places in which they produce effects. In this situation, architectural design reads like a technical discipline relying on set ideologies, which cannot be the result of transactions and exchanges constructed along the way. Is this disciplinary marginality a given, or can it be improved upon?

The project as strategy for the statement and construction of rights
The political foundation of space has been constructed, ever since antiquity, on the definition of boundary (Barbera, 2017; Gaeta, 2004; Hansen, 1999).
Today, the coincidence between physical and juridical boundary appears to blur, while, on the contrary, the web of rights that have stratified over space have multiplied in representations and self-referentiality. How can the transformation of space through the tool of architectural projects facilitate the construction of new rights (of access, of ownership, of citizenship, of use, of cultural and symbolic representation) and guarantee their stability? This same constitutive bond governing space has succeeded, since V-Century Athens, in tying together narrative, democracy, rights and design (Loraux, 1997). Today, these concepts seem to indicate self-referential threads, working towards separate objectives: storytelling, electoral consensus, normativity of procedures, technical and economical efficacy, etc. Is this specialization of competence sets necessary and inevitable, or is it still possible to recompose these seemingly separate dimensions through the design of physical space?

The project as map for a space of fragmented rights
On the one hand, rights answer to a system of values and norms that were made autonomous from space, and rather functional to other dimensions (for instance, the financial sphere or even the World Wide Web). On the other, clusters of rights that are increasingly fragmented and hidden can define other types of spatial boundaries, for which neither ideologies of sprawl nor jeux d’échelles (Revel, 1996) seem to offer effective interpretive strategies. Megalopolises like Mexico City, São Paulo, Mumbai, Guangzhou, rely on boundaries governed by property legislations, on increasingly stronger physical barriers, on a model of city that works through closed sub-communities – gated communities- and through research clusters inaccessible to new ‘strangers in the city’ (as it happens, for instance, in the case of Google, Amazon, or Facebook in California). These are socially impenetrable enclaves, not only because the communities living there abide to informal rules that are much more rigid than formal ones (thus replicating forms of self-segregation like the ones regulating the favelas or those districts founded on religious exclusiveness), but also because those rules are legitimized and recognized by outside society as well, thus maintaining and reinforcing their conditions of separation. Today, the boundaries that politically shape space, which is often seen as globalized and abstract, are marked by rights that are increasingly “corporative” and often made invisible – as in the case of Asian smart cities designs. Which are the implications of this? In such conditions, where the separation of space coincides with a segregation of rights, which design action can be of use? Can the project of architecture critically confront conditions such as the ones described?

This call for papers addresses scholars that variously deal with the spatial, social and political dimension of urban transformations, and that through the proposition of theoretical argumentations, case studies, and field work, attempt to answer one or more of the following questions:
1. Can the project of architecture transfer a system of general values and rights within a specific action of spatial transformation? And if so, through which scientific alliances, and, even more importantly, with which outcomes?
2. Does the project of architecture have the power of dialoguing with the juridical foundation of space? If so, through which tools can this power be effective? 3. Can the design of space still be the tool through which to reframe narratives, democracy and rights?
4. Is it possible to unhinge the segregated system of rights through the action of the project, or should we give in to the clustered structure of contemporary urban space?
Download Call for Papers

ARGUMENTA. Journal of Analytic Philosophy
Deadline for submission: July 31^st, 2018
Notification of acceptance: November 30^th, 2018
https://www.argumenta.org/
 
The Editorial Board of Argumenta invites the submission of papers in answer to the following call: Persons, Reasons, and What Matters: The Philosophy of Derek Parfit 
Guest editor
Fabio Patrone (University of Genova) 
Invited contributors
John Perry (Stanford University) 
Eric T. Olson (University of Sheffield)
Martine Nida-Rümelin (University of Fribourg)
 
For any query, use please the following address:
fabio.patrone@unige.it
  
Description
Derek Parfit’s influence has been substantial in the discussions on personal identity, rationality, and ethics in general. On the one hand, since his first works (Parfit 1971, Parfit 1984) he initiated a new trend in the classic debate about criteria of personal identity, putting forward different and more specific methodological requirements. With the so-called “identity doesn’t matter view” he stressed the importance of a metaphysical analysis of personal identity, arguing that (logical) identity doesn’t matter in survival. On the other hand, Parfit analysed the relation between rationality and time (Parfit 1984: Ch. 2), as well as the concerns about the future generations (Ch. 4), and argued in favour of a universal moral theory (Parfit 2011).
The purpose of this issue is to stress Parfit’s influence in the contemporary philosophical debate, and the significance of his revolutionary ideas. We welcome papers that analyse Parfit’s theses on (but not limited to) the following topics:
 
- Parfit “identity doesn’t matter view”
- Personal identity and its criteria
- Thought experiments
- Reductionism
- Time and rationality
 
References
Parfit D. (1971), “Personal Identity”, Philosophical Review 80, 3-27.
Parfit D. (1984), Reasons and Persons, Oxford: OUP.
Parfit D. (2011), On What Matters, Oxford: OUP.
 
Articles must be written in English and should not exceed 8000 words.  For the presentation of their articles, authors are requested to take into account the instructions available under Information for Authors. Submissions must be suitable for blind review. Each submission should also include a brief abstract of no more than 250 words and five keywords for indexing purposes. To submit a paper, please visit this page.
 

Website

FMSH, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme