Imagination Today: Between Theory and Practice of Phantasia
Due Date: 12-01-2023
A special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, to appear in 2026, will delve into the challenging debates abundant in twentieth- and twenty-first-century continental philosophy about the place of imagination in not only aesthetics but also metaphysics, epistemology, and practical philosophy, as well as its importance in the separate yet intricately connected domains of literary theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and the behavioral sciences.
Since the history of the concept of imagination can be traced back to the archaic times of Plato, Plotinus, and Aristotle, and later to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the groundbreaking treatment of phantasia and imaginatio in those works surely invites us to go back in time in search of origins. We propose a specific return to the traditions of Kant and the school of German Idealism, probing those philosophical contributions from the vantage point of modern and contemporary continental philosophy and the relevance of these traditions for the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences.
We invite papers that significantly engage with the works of the modern European thinkers, from Kant onward, on the topic of imagination, but, at the same time, we would like to see papers that discuss the important reinterpretations which the twentieth and twenty-first centuries contribute to the analysis of the role of imagination in the humanities and in the production of cultural artifacts.
Please send an abstract (up to 500 words) and a current CV to artemis.r@unic.ac.cy by 1 December 2023. Notifications of accepted proposals will be sent by 5 January 2024. Complete papers (approx. 9,000–10,000 words) will be due by 1 November 2024. For further inquiries, please contact Rossie Artemis at the email above. For more information, visit www.tandfonline.com/journals/cang20.