Vol 6, No 2, 2023

Call For Abstracts: Giornale di Filosofia, Vol 6, No 2, 2023
Title: Freedom of expression: what are its limits? A philosophical debate on a fundamental human right
Submission Deadline: Long Abstract (1,000 words max): 20 January 2024.
Articles (40,000 characters max): 30 Avril 2024.

In 1777, Frederick II of Prussia, one the advice of d'Alembert, invited the intellectuals of the time to challenge each other in a public contest around the question: "is it useful for the people to be deceived, either to be induced into new errors, or to be confirmed in those they find?". This public contest represents the most advanced critical point in a public debate where the impetus of the Enlightenment koinè had placed the  urgency of imposing freedom of expression as the foundation of the new political order. An order that would henceforth be determined by the indissoluble link between knowledge and power, between truth and public happiness. In the twentieth century, Hans Kelsen placed freedom (also of expression) at the center of democratic orders, arguing that it cannot be subjected to any limitation: not even those who advocate its abolition should be censored. For while it is true that a democracy can eliminate itself by the very means it has put at the foundation of its essence and value, for Kelsen it is equally true, though paradoxical, that in a healthy democracy authoritarian appetites can be defused only by means of the same freedom that allowed them to arise. As John Dewey wrote in The Public and its Problems (1927), recalling an old saying, "the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.”

The issue of freedom of expression and its fundamental meaning for democracy has returned to the center of public debate in recent years. On the one hand, the so-called "Assange case" - co-founder of the WikiLeaks organization who made public confidential documents of governments, and who is still serving a long prison sentence for this - has prompted a renewed discussion around the topic of freedom of the press and the right to information. To what extent is this right guaranteed in our democratic societies? Are there any principles - such as, for example, that of reason of state - that can still be invoked, to justify its limitation? On the other hand, the recent debate on so-called "cancel culture" has accessed a discussion of alleged new forms of censorship - such as Internet shaming or public boycotts - that would be exercised by so-called political correctness, against those who take positions considered morally and intellectually unacceptable.
What are the normative limits to the possibilities of speech and expression in the democratic public space? Is there a new progressive-brand censorious conformism today? Or would the eventual disappearance from the public scene be the just consequence of unacceptable positions that cannot have a place in a democratic perspective? 
Today, the topic of freedom of expression leads us also to the broader issue of women's fundamental rights, i.e. the effective possibility for women to take part in the public debate. Some statistics published in the latest Gmmp Report show that: “it will take at least seventy years to close the gender equality gap in the press and media”. With the lack of female figures being allowed to express their voices, enriching the public debate, the construction of critical thinking and heterogeneous knowledge is also lacking. As long as we do not address the issue of gender and its bloodiest manifestation, that of violence against women, can we really speak about freedom of expression?
We particularly encourage topics on the following:
● Historical-philosophical investigation on the theme of freedom of expression
● Freedom of expression and censorship in the 17th and 18th centuries
● Freedom of expression and women's rights
● Freedom of expression: limits and possibilities in the democratic context
For more info, details, and abstract submission, please contact: redazione.gdf@gmail.com.

Vol 7, No 1, 2024

Call For Abstracts: Giornale di Filosofia, Vol 7, No 1, 2024
Title: Telling the Untold. David Lynch’s Theater
Editors: Adolfo Fattori, Maria Poulaki, Enrico Redaelli
Submission Deadline: Long Abstract (1,000 words max): 1 November 2023

David Lynch is not just one of the most relevant filmmakers ever. He is above all an all-rounded artist who has always strived to investigate the expressive limits of representation and narrative, especially with regards to how the world is shaped by unconscious desires. This volume intends to collect papers addressing – with cutting-edge perspective but also with theoretical accuracy – Lynch’s enigmatic innovations in respect to this issue, that brings together the philosophical, psychological/psychoanalytical, and narratological traditions.

Psychoanalysis has often crossed paths with narrative; since Paul Ricœur’s innovative narrative interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis, a number of important contributions (for example by Roy Schafer, Donald Spence, János László and Antonino Ferro) have developed and strengthened the bond between the two, in theory as well as in therapeutic practice. Narrative as a process of “telling”, in the sense of making something narratable, corresponds to a process of temporalizing, making meaning, and being able to communicate something that has so far not only been untold, but also sometimes ineffable, undisclosed, or not even accessible to
consciousness and realised by the person. Siri Hustvedt argues in her article Three Emotional Stories that “involuntary and traumatic memories that are sensorimotor, affective replays of an event, are not codified in language, and cannot be located in a subjective time or space”, but fiction and narrative creativity, which she deems equivalent to dreaming and remembering, is a process of “dreamlike reconfigurations of emotional meanings that take place unconsciously”.

It was Freud who, according to theorist of “narrative psychology” Dan McAdams, first indicated the
connection between dream stories and psychoanalysis, characterising the former as the “royal road
to the unconscious”.

David Lynch’s narratives have often been discussed as non-linear, fragmented, and dream-like, following indeed the “royal road to the unconscious” rather than the beaten path of classical Aristotelean drama; but they are still communicating, affectively, preconsciously, and through atmosphere, meanings lying beneath the surface of conscious awareness. Telling the untold for Lynch, is, for example, to show what Mark Fisher calls weird and eerie, situations in which appears “a preoccupation with the strange”, which Lynch evokes with showing nothing where it should be something, or, in reverse, something where it should be nothing.

Telling the untold also recalls the Lacanian concept of the “Real” as that which is unspeakable but produces effects, a concept that has become a fundamental tool of Lacanian-inspired cinematographic criticism such as that of Joan Copjec. For example, Slavoj Žižek used the Lacanian concepts of “Real” and “fundamental fantasy” to interpret Lynch's cinema in The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime. On David Lynch's Lost Highway.

The use of the term “telling” does not mean to reinstate a dualistic relationship between verbal and nonverbal, cognition and emotion, mind and body. Telling here rather extends beyond language alone, and involves showing as well, as Schaffer has argued, addressing the whole of embodied experience, and narrative as an embodied experiential process (as explored for example, by Aaron Mishara). Hence the “theater” as a non-linguistic, embodied metaphor for Lynch’s art as a whole (expanding beyond the moving image, to painting, music etc.), and one that has also been used, notably by Baars, in relation to the mind and consciousness.

Abstracts and papers will be accepted in French, Italian, German, and Spanish, even though English is highly recommended. Linguistic revision, if required, will be authors’ responsibility.

For more info, details, and abstract submission, please contact: redazione.gdf@gmail.com.

Vol 8, No 2, 2024

Title: The Historical Dimension of Human Existence. Philosophical Perspectives from Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Narrative Approaches, and Post-Colonial Studies

Editors: Daniele Nuccilli, Emiliano Trizio

Submission Deadline: Long Abstract (1,000 words max): 15 June 2024. Articles (40,000 characters max): 15 October 2024.

The way our history matters to us is a defining trait of our identity. It affects our individual and the collective perspective on the world and on those who inhabit it. Furthermore, there are global, traumatic times, when the collective view of historical events and its reinterpretation become a matter of intellectual responsibility. Especially in today’s globalized and digitalized world, history filters daily into our lives, often shaped by artificial and ready-made narratives. Thus, we find ourselves not only constrained by our individual past, but also entangled in one of the many possible readings of our collective past. In so far as the globalized world in which we live makes the encounter among different cultures inevitable, it also necessarily puts different views and different uses of the past side by side, whether the past of a given community or that of humankind in its entirety. These various perspectives, however, do not differ only, nor primarily, as to what we normally call “historical facts”, neither do they disagree, in a somewhat scientific way, merely about the interpretation of these facts. Arguably, the most significant differences across times, cultures, and philosophical perspectives concern the very way in which history matters for a given society, or, in other words, the modality in which the form of awareness of the past informs the present and the future prospects of those who share it. In this sense, one could claim that the history of a community is endowed with an enormous power on its present, a power that takes up different forms depending on the cultural context.

The aim of this issue is to offer a multidisciplinary approach to describe and understand the historical dimension of human existence and its countless implications. Possible topics may include:
● Historical dimension of human beings
● Historicity and human existence
● Experience, perception, narration of the past
● Philosophy of history
● Historicity and perception
● Individual and collective memory
● History and life-world
● Phenomenology and history
● History and embodiment
● Post-colonial approach to history
● Hermeneutics and history
● History and cultural anthropology
● Cognitivist dimension of historical narrative
● Narrative approach to history
● History and histories

Abstracts and papers will be accepted in French, Italian, German, and Spanish, even though English is highly recommended. Linguistic revision, if required, will be the authors’ responsibility. For more info, details, and abstract submission, please contact: redazione.gdf@gmail.com.