Call for papers n. LXII/1 - Autobiography

Call for Papers n. LXII/1 – Autobiography

Deadline: 30th November 2022

The editorial staff of the philosophy journal «Il Pensiero» selects original contributions in the form of essays and reviews for the issue dedicated to the topic:

Autobiography.

The deadline for submitting contributions is November 30th, 2022; the answer will be communicated by the editorial staff by February 28th, 2023. Contributions must not exceed 45.000 characters, including spaces and notes, and must be accompanied by an abstract in English and Italian of up to 1200 characters and 5 keywords (in English and Italian).

The issue of the journal is scheduled for April 2023.

Editor: Massimo Adinolfi – University of Naples Federico II

«It seems to me essential to say who I am»: this is what Nietzsche writes, with agitated words, in the first paragraph of Ecce homo, relating the story of his life – on the day when everything ripens, and the grapes are darker – to his times, to his contemporaries, to truth and to the possibility of supporting it, to the faithfulness or unfaithfulness of listening, to solitude and to friendship in knowledge and in philosophy.

A threshold – between autobiography and contemporaneity – that cannot be ignored, although it can be obviously be described differently. How should we consider the first person pronoun? Like a non-extended point, that disappears on the limit (Wittgenstein, in Tractatus: «There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas», § 5.631), or like the inescapable preparatory moment of every interpretation of the sense of being (Heidegger, in Being and Time: «That Being which is an issue for this entity in very Being, is in each case mine», § 9)?

With this question on the background, the volume crosses the threshold marked by Nietzsche and tries to face the crux of the autobiographical trial in philosophy. Not by simply reflecting on it, as is fitting in normal academic roles and according to all accuracy in scientific research, but by inviting the contributors to personally carry out such a trial, therefore not considering one’s biography as an obstacle but rather as a precious resource.

The volume thus collects, through “Call for Papers”, the material that can permit to set “in general” the theme of autobiographical knowledge, of the relationship between life and philosophical writing in relation to the main figures who, in the modern and contemporary age, have focused on it; it will, moreover, try to represent a certain number of life and thought paths that, without in any way surging to a model value, will be able to establish proof of that relationship with contemporaneity that, according to Nietzsche, is to necessarily be declined in the first person, ergo kai logo.

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