[PHILOS-L] Nostalgia of the Infinite CFP - Upcoming Publication, Edited Collection

[Max K. Feenan]

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NOSTALGIA OF THE INFINITE?: 

Philosophical Investigations into Metaphysics and Historicity. 

Edited by Max K. Feenan and Jan Kerkmann

 

DETAILS:

Abstracts of c. 300 words, with contribution proposals can be submitted until June 1st, 2026

And should be sent to these email addresses: jan.ke...@philosophie.un-freiburg.de and mkfw...@gmail.com. Feedback regarding accepted submissions will be provided by June 15th, 2026. Final versions of the essays are due by December 31st, 2026. The edited volume will be published by a renowned German publisher in 2027, with a contract signing scheduled for December 2025.

 

NB: It is not necessary for the contributions to focus on the thinkers and traditions discussed below. Submissions that other modern figures and figurations are most welcome! The only requirement is that a clear connection to the relationship between metaphysics and historicity is established and explored in depth within the essays.

 

Overall, the planned volume claims to make a significant contribution to modern intellectual and cultural history, and contemporary philosophical discussions about the limits of philosophy itself, by highlighting the idea of historicity as a fundamental challenge to metaphysics and speculative thought. To so treat the concept of historicity with the necessary precision, the focus is explicitly placed on the modernity in which not only the historical self-positioning of humankind became a central theme, but also the course of philosophy itself was understood for the first time as a coherent whole, viewed from the perspective of a historical logic of its development. The contributions to this volume aim to illustrate how and to what extent the systematic and direct access to the fundamental principles of the world, which had previously characterized metaphysics, was increasingly abandoned – and how this access might be regained today.

 

Infinitely speculative, metaphysics may even justifiably seek to apprehend eternity itself, while historicity, which often lacks a fundamental definition, emphasises the relativity and contingency of human temporal existence. This volume aims to explore the tension-filled, ambiguous and perhaps even paradoxical relationship between the seeming-opposites of metaphysics and historicity. In doing so, a special focus is to be placed, from a conceptual-historical perspective, on the emergence and the changes in meaning of ‘historicity’ itself, and its definitions. The basic question asked is: Is it possible to still pursue a speculative even metaphysical philosophical project which is also a critical engagement with the real history such speculation is always already within? The edited volume aims to combine philosophical styles and traditions attempting to answer this questions, while engaging with the philosophical problems and question in the longue durée of modern philosophy. We also welcome submissions from related disciplines such as history, politics, literature or theological/religious studies.

 

Chapters could engage with this relationship in the idealist systematizing of metaphysics grounded in a logical account of history, culminating in the late systems of Hegel and Schelling, but stemming from the Copernican revolution of Kant’s critical philosophy and the contemporary intellectual controversies during the time of the democratic revolutions. Or the anti-Kantian philosophies of Hamann, Herder, the critiques Mendelssohn, Jacobi, Goethe and Schiller, not to mention the contours of European Romanticism both within and beyond Germany. Perspectives on neglected aspects of the modern idealist heritage, whether from George Berkeley’s theories or the Cambridge Platonists’ theological-philosophies in the 17th & 18th centuries; or the varieties of British Idealism or French Spiritualisme across the 19th century. Not to mention underappreciated voices from elsewhere!

 

We also want to deal with the twentieth century traditions critiquing metaphysics itself, or the allied attempts to reform metaphysics against the dangers of reductive historical relativisation. After Kierkegaard and Feuerbach, the political and theological receptions of Hegelianism and its discontents from Schopenhauer to Marx, the social upheavals and reforms of the mid-19th century, the twin developments of pragmatism and positivism, the increasing secularization of society and perceptions of knowledge and science, and perhaps culminating in the lasting effects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, the 20th century thinkers increasingly saw themselves working and writing in the wake of a metaphysical tradition. Perhaps exemplified most of all, in the historical yet speculative philosophies of Heidegger’s Seinsfrage and Rosenzweig’s Stern; the political critiques of the history of metaphysics in Arendt or in Strauss, or even the mystical-yet-political critique found in Simone Weil’s writings. Perhaps one could ask with Löwith, Blumenberg, or in a different vein Emmanuele Severino, whether this very absolutisation of the historical itself proves to be a metaphysical assumption that prevents deep reflection on the nature of being, of nature, and of humanity? Alternatively, submissions could pursue the processual thinking in Whitehead or in different form in Deleuze, and the anti-metaphysical tradition arising from phenomenology, such as Levinas’ ethics or Derrida’s thought; the linguistic-sociopragmatic accounts in Appel and Habermas’ systems, and finally voices from the historiographical critiques such as Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte or the Anglophone ‘Cambridge School of Political Thought’ (Pocock, Skinner, Dunn et al.) and their respective influences would be welcome.

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