We are glad to give notice that a call for papers is now open for a special issue of Estudos Kantianos. The special issue is dedicated to a critical reevaluation of Kant’s critical philosophy through the lens of African thought and culture.
The deadline for submitting an article is set on August 31, 2021.
Please find below more information concerning the call as well as the instructions concerning the submission process.
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Immanuel Kant devotes his thought to the diversity and unity of humanity both in the natural and cultural domains, especially through the foundation or, at least, renovation, of two complementary disciplines: Geography and Anthropology. Thinking of Africa based on Kantian philosophy is an exercise that exposes essential tensions, inherent in questioning the meaning of universality and particularity, as well as its relations. From the angle of the critical power of human intelligence, one can find Kantian resonances in the ideas of freedom and liberation that animate all contemporary African cultural expressions, with an anti- and post-colonial outlook, from politics to the arts, through religion, law, economy and education. However, simultaneously, the Aufklärung that Kant announces and lives, is located in European history, in the mutation of Modernity whose passion for the Universal remains deeply anchored in the concrete body of 18th-century Europe divided between Feudalism and Liberalism, but always inclined towards physical and spiritual possession of the world, aimed at the expansion of its Faith and its Empire, identifying the apex of the supposedly progressive history of humanity with its Logos and its civilizing Ethos. Therefore, Kant’s German-Christian Eurocentrism is a constitutive position that challenges the self-critical power of all Critical Reason. Moreover, if Kant rejects and disapproves of colonial violence as a war of aggression that destroys the conditions of perpetual peace, offending Cosmopolitan Justice, he remains nevertheless permeable to Eurocentric stereotypes that represent the character of black otherness and its cultural creations, oscillating between a hierarchical and an egalitarian view of humanity’s ethnic-racial differences.
With the launch of this thematic issue, we intend to stimulate the reevaluation and reinterpretation of Kantian thought, taking African culture and history as the guiding thread of the questioning, practicing an “African way” of critical intelligence, destabilizing the Copernican Revolution of the critical subject with the inscription expression of African otherness in the plural subjectivity of humanity. We invite the submission of philosophical research papers that may interdisciplinary relationships with all scientific areas that exhibit the vital interests of theoretical and practical reason (with special emphasis on epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics, theology and anthropology). Thus, we aim to enrich the mutual understanding between the cultures of Africa and Europe, so disturbed by consecutive centuries of multidimensional, physical and symbolic violence. Through critical hermeneutics and conceptual innovation, we will be able to reimagine and experience other ways of feeling and other categories of intelligence, as well as other purposes, more capable of dynamizing freedom in the composition of the Common Good.
Text submissions should be made on the journal’s website until August 31, 2021: https://revistas.marilia.unesp.br/index.php/ek/user/register.
Papers written in German, Spanish, French, English, Italian and Portuguese are accepted, typed in 12 Times New Roman font, size 12, spacing 1.5 and maximum length of approximately 30 pages. Notes in the text must be presented at the end of the text, after the list of References, in size 10 and with single spacing. Quotations longer than three lines should be typed in size 11, with simple spacing and indentation to the left of 4 cm. When the article is written in Spanish, Italian or Portuguese, the bio-bibliographic note, abstract and keywords should be bilingual, including also a translation into English. Quotations and references should follow the specific norms of the Brazilian Association of Technical Norms [ABNT]; respectively: ABNT / NBR 10520/2002 and ABNT / NBR 6023/2002 (see an abridged version on the journal’s website).
Scientific and Editorial Coordination:
Paulo Jesus (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Marita Rainsborough (Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany)
Inácio Valentim (ISPSN, Huambo, Angola)