Announcements

  • Call For Papers: Naturalism, Normativity and the Convergence of Human and Natural Sciences

    2025-08-13

    Philosophical naturalism, in general, and the proposal to naturalize Morality, in particular, have been challenging and thought-provoking in contemporary philosophy, especially considering the tensions between scientific and normative explanations of human practices. Moral naturalism seeks to understand moral values and norms as phenomena emerging from the natural world. It offers a promising bridge to rethink the historical division between the human and natural sciences. The central question posed here is: To what extent can the naturalization of normativity ground a rapprochement between these areas of knowledge?

    We invite submissions for a special issue exploring the relationships between naturalization in philosophy—and Morality, particularly—and the integration of human and natural sciences. Our goal is to foster a robust debate on the potential and limits of these connections. The issue will investigate how normativity, especially moral normativity, can be explained in naturalistic terms and to what extent this explanation can support a reconfiguration of the role of human sciences in dialogue with methods and insights from the natural sciences.

    Our premise is that normativity can and must be explained in naturalistic terms to build a more integrated and empirically grounded conceptual framework. However, such an explanation is not without its philosophical and methodological challenges. In philosophy, opponents of naturalism point out that there is the risk that significant philosophical issues are eliminated or reduced in the face of scientific methods. Concerning Morality, those opponents see the danger of a simplistic reduction of Morality to natural facts, which could obliterate the alleged normative specificities of human practices. However, naturalization promises a richer, more nuanced, veridical analysis of Morality that incorporates cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and social psychology advances.

     

    Among the questions we hope to see addressed in the contributions are:

     

    1. To what extent can the human sciences engage with and benefit from methods and findings in the natural sciences?

    2. What philosophical and methodological boundaries emerge when attempting to naturalize normative phenomena in Philosophy and Morality? 

    3. How might naturalistic accounts of Morality reshape or enhance our understanding of social normativity and its practical implications?

    4. Can moral naturalism offer a compatible basis for robustly explaining normativity in human practices, including science?

      5. How can advances in the natural sciences, primarily cognitive and biological sciences, contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of relevant philosophical problems and moral normativity?

     

    We invite articles addressing these and other related questions, seeking theoretical interventions and empirical contributions that shed light on this approach's complexities and promises. We aim to gather original and unpublished works that challenge disciplinary boundaries and offer new perspectives on the dialogue between human and natural sciences.

     

    Articles should be submitted by March 1st 2026, and the special issue will be published on the second semester of 2026 edition of Geltung – Journal of Studies on the Origins of Contemporary Philosophy. Please consult our website - https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/geltung/about/submissions -  for more information on submissions and guidelines.

    Submission Deadline (CFP): March 1st, 2026

    Guest Editor: Prof. Adriano Naves de Brito

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  • Call for Papers - Geltung: Categories - Post Kantian and Phenomenological Perspectives - 2025/2 - Extended deadline

    2025-01-13

    This special issue is devoted to the problem of categories, i.e. the problem of how reality and the capacities to think about it are divided, structured or organized.

    The topic of categories, that can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, and played a central role in philosophical debates during the Middle Ages, fell into disrepute during early Modernity. German metaphysics engaged in discussions concerning categories but it is with Kant and his successor that the question concerning the status of categories and their role to understand the world and our capacities to make sense of it come to the fore again. From Kant through his early critics, the tradition of German Idealism and 19th Century Neo Kantians, through to Frege, Brentano, Lask and Husserl, the question of categories plays a central role in the philosophical debates surrounding the birth both of analytic philosophy and phenomenology. More recently, discussions within Analytic Metaphysics have brought the question of categories back into mainstream philosophical discussions. However,  the contributions of the Kantian, Neo-Kantian, Phenomenological and Hermeneutical traditions to the debate have not been taken into account into more recent developments in analytic metaphysics.

    This special issue aims to remedy that situation by re-examining the 19th and early 20th century discussions on the question of categories, both in its historical significance and its potential contribution to contemporary debates.  

    Some of the questions the papers in this Special Issue aim to address are the following:

    - What and how many are the categories? What is their status: real or mental?

    -  Are the categories themselves entities, concepts or terms?

    - How is access to them possible: through analysis or experience?

    - What are the theoretical yields of a reflection on categories for ontological research in general?

    - Is a unitary system of categories possible or is it necessary to identify specific categories for each field of reality?

    - Are categories modes of being?

    - What kind of generality is proper to categories? Are they genera, species, or is it a question of a peculiar kind of generality?

    - What kind of definition corresponds, therefore, to categories? Or are they simply indefinable?

    Papers discussing such questions from a systematic perspective or with reference to authors of the Kantian, Neo-Kantian, Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Traditions are welcome. References to the work of, e.g. Kant, Lotze, Rickert, Windelband, Lask, Natorp, Cassirer, Brentano, Bolzano, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer will be welcome.

     

    Guest Co-Editors: Prof. Róbson Ramos dos Reis (UFSM - Brazil) / Bernardo Ainbinder (University of Wollongong - Australia)

    Submission Deadline (CFP): September 30th, 2025

    Guidelines for Authors: https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/geltung/about/submissions

    Read more about Call for Papers - Geltung: Categories - Post Kantian and Phenomenological Perspectives - 2025/2 - Extended deadline