CFP: Multiple Knowledges. Learning from/with Other Beings (Deadline: 15.04.2021)

07 04 2021

Thematic focus of the issue:

Multiple Knowledges. Learning from/with Other Beings

“In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. […] After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. […] But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world.” (Tr.  Walter Kaufmann)

The words used by Friedrich Nietzsche to begin his 1873 essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” can serve as the motto of the planned issue of Transpositiones. More than 150 years after the publication of this thought-provoking text about the inadequacy of epistemological usurpations revealed in supposedly stable linguistic constructions and identity constructs, we would like to reiterate the question about the status of cognition and models of knowledge in a world that requires radical decentralization in response to the greatly endangered multiplicity of human and non-human beings and their discursive representations.

We are primarily interested in interdisciplinary and critical approaches to classic and alternative conceptions of cognition and sources of knowledge, oscillating between the paradigm of the empirical and heuristic intuition, the sense of human exceptionalism and the many types of sensory and extrasensory knowledge of other beings, which is unavailable to humans. The existence of these knowledges makes us question species boundaries and onto- and epistemological perspectives, in the process of learning no longer only about other beings but also from and along with them. Therefore, overcoming the anthropocentric perception of subjectivity should be a significant element of this endeavor, as should the abandoning of an optics based on the dualisms of nature and culture, spirit and matter, subject and object, animate and inanimate nature, physis and techne, etc., which are so firmly entrenched in the Western intellectual tradition. Concepts stemming from new materialism – the work of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad or Jane Bennett – can constitute an important reference point for this type of reflection.

We would like to invite authors to submit articles which relate to, among other possibilities, the following topics:

• the decentralization and heterogenization of knowledge in light of the multiplicity of beings,
• bio- and zoosemiotics and the semiotics of culture,
• interspecies communication,
• more-than-human perception and sensory knowledge,
• pre- and extra-rational cognition,
• non-anthropocentric cognitive experiences and their discursive and artistic representations,
• scientific and medical empirical knowledge and creative artistic experience,
• pre-Enlightenment cognitive paradigms vs. contemporary evidence-based knowledge,
• learning processes in the world of non-human beings,
• non-human languages and systems of communication,

• the autonomy of indigenous epistemologies in the ecocritical perspective,
• imaginative cognitive and intentional acts in the context of bio-empathy in the age of crisis.

Proposals for contributions in German or English (max. 300 words) with title, abstract and short biographical details should be sent by April 15, 2021 to: transpositiones@uw.edu.pl

You will receive information about the acceptance or rejection of the proposal by the end of April.

Deadline for submitting the completed manuscripts: September 15, 2021.

The issue is expected to be published in spring 2022.

Publication languages: German and English.