Open Access Published since December 20, 2017

Open Philosophy

ISSN: 2543-8875

Editor-in-chief: Graham Harman

About this journal

Open Philosophy is an international Open Access, peer-reviewed academic journal covering all areas of philosophy. The objective of Open Philosophy is to foster free exchange of ideas and provide an appropriate platform for presenting, discussing and disseminating new concepts, current trends, theoretical developments and research findings related to the broadest philosophical spectrum. The journal does not favour any particular philosophical school, perspective or methodology.

Article Processing Charges

Call for proposals for topical issues

Open calls for papers:

Ordinary Aesthetics, edited by Sandra Laugier (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne) and Andrew Brandel (Harvard University) - deadline for submissions: February 28, 2023.
Eichmann in Jerusalem at Sixty, edited by Trip McCrossin (Rutgers University) - deadline for submissions: April 30, 2023.
Lukács and the Critical Legacy of Classical German Philosophy, edited by Rüdiger Dannemann (International Georg-Lukács-Society) and Gregor Schäfer (University of Basel) - deadline for submissions: October 31, 2023.
The Human Being and Time: From Kant to Existentialism, edited by Addison Ellis (The American University in Cairo) - deadline for submissions: October 31, 2023.

Published Topical Issues:

2018:

The New Metaphysics: Analytic/Continental Crossovers (ed. Jon Cogburn and Paul Livingston)
Objects Across the Traditions (ed. Tom Sparrow)

2019:

Does Public Art Have to Be Bad Art? (ed. Mark Kingwell)
Computer Modeling in Philosophy (ed. Patrick Grim)
Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics (ed. Graham Harman)
Experience in a New Key (ed. Dorthe Jørgensen)

2020:

Imagination and Potentiality: The Quest for the Real (ed. Graham Harman and Kristupas Sabolius)
Changing One's Mind: Philosophy, Religion and Science (ed. Yossef Schwartz, Paul Franks and Christian Wiese)
Philosophy of the City (ed. Sanna Lehtinen)
Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics II (ed. Graham Harman)

2021:

Philosophy and Sonic Research - Thinking with Sounds and Rhythms (ed. Martin Nitsche and Vít Pokorný)
Home and Exile - Feminist Philosophy in Thought, History and Action: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach (ed. Nicole des Bouvrie and Laura Hellsten)
Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics III (ed. Graham Harman)

2022:

Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic: A Re-Evaluation (ed. Michael Lewin and Rudolf Meer)
Conceptual Personae in Ontology (ed. Carlos A. Segovia)
Ethics and Politics of TV Series (ed. Sandra Laugier)
Home and Exile - Feminist Philosophy in Thought, History and Action: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach (part II) (ed. Nicole des Bouvrie and Laura Hellsten)

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Supplementary Materials

Topics

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Volume 6 Issue 1

January 2023

Topical issue: Nihilism Through a Contemporary Lens: Post-Continental and Other Perspectives, edited by Halit Evrim Bayındır

Open Access February 1, 2023

Iqbal, Nietzsche, and Nihilism: Reconstruction of Sufi Cosmology and Revaluation of Sufi Values in Asrar-i-Khudî

Feyzullah Yılmaz

Article number: 20220230

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Abstract

While the problem of nihilism is derived from a particular historical and intellectual context in Western philosophy, i.e., the pantheism controversy in modern German philosophy and the ideas of Nietzsche, non-Western thinkers also engaged with it and developed responses to it. In this article, I am interested in analyzing Muhammad Iqbal’s (1877–1938), a leading Muslim thinker (a Sufi) from India, engagement with the problem of nihilism and his response to it from a Sufi perspective. Arguing that the existing literature on Iqbal fails to understand the deeper impact of Nietzsche’s ideas on Iqbal’s philosophy and the dramatic role “the problem of nihilism” played in causing changes in Iqbal’s philosophy, or on Iqbal’s intellectual development, in this article, I analyze how Iqbal’s encounter with the ideas of Nietzsche during his study period in Europe between 1905 and 1908 has introduced him to the problem of nihilism in its Nietzschean form, how this led Iqbal to a nihilistic mood/crisis from 1909 to 1913, and then how he later developed a response to nihilism by reconstructing the Sufi cosmology and by revaluating the Sufi values of the pantheistic/Persian type of Sufism – the outcome of which is found in his philosophical poem Asrar-i-Khudî (1915).

Open Access February 3, 2023

An Ontologically Nihilist Critique of Graham Harman’s Ontological Liberalism

Adam Lovasz

Article number: 20220231

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Abstract

In Graham Harman’s realist philosophy, which I call “ontological liberalism,” all objects are considered equal, there being no unbridgeable gap between various modes of being. Every object is a unique individual, endowed with a positive being. Any privileging of a certain class of objects over other classes of objects is invalidated. An object is composed of its relations, summarized under the heading of what Harman calls “sensual qualities,” while objects also contain mutually inaccessible essences. Supposedly, every object may be characterized by the duality of relationality and substantiality. According to ontological liberalism, all objects exist . In this essay, I propose an ontological nihilist critique of Harman’s liberal ontology. We cannot exclude the possibility of every object being equally nonexistent. Appearances could pertain all the way down, with no final substance at the end of the infinite chain of appearances. Building on insights gleaned from Jan Westerhoff’s defence of ontological nihilism, I propose a nihilist reconfiguration of Harman’s ontological liberalism. If objects and relations are empty and reality is made of appearances all the way down, no underlying objective essence can or should be posited. Because relations are without basis, lacking in substance, nothing exists, nothing happens, and no objects exist .

Open Access February 21, 2023

How does one Cosmotheoretically Respond to the Heat Death of the Universe?

Joel White

Article number: 20220233

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Abstract

This article asks what an adequate philosophical response to the certainty of heat death would be: the moment in the timeline of the universe when all possible energy transformations have been actualized and life, thought, and action cease to be possible. Through a reading of Hans Jonas’s existential work on Gnosticism, the article begins by defining what is meant by the notions cosmotheoretical and cosmoethical as well as offering a description of what Jonas calls “cosmic nihilism.” After this, the article looks at two extreme philosophical responses to heat death. The first response examined is by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose eternal return is shown to be a reactive philosophical response to the linear entropic finitude that heat death implies. The second response is by Ray Brassier. Different from Nietzsche, Brassier is shown to affirm the extinction that heat death promises. However, his insistence that heat death partakes of the transcendental and the real, but not the ideal, is demonstrated to be amphibolous. In the final part of the article, I offer what could be called a thermodynamic architectonic response to the heat death of the universe, arguing that heat death should be understood as a guiding transcendental Idea in the Kantian sense of the term.

Open Access March 3, 2023

Beyond Negative Freedom and the Working Class Subject: Another Kind of Madness

Cynthia Cruz

Article number: 20220236

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Abstract

Presented with the (non) choice of either assimilating into bourgeois society and, thus, annihilating themselves, or being annihilated by society, the working class subject may choose, neither, engaging, instead, in an act of negative freedom. By engaging in an act of negative freedom, the working class subject destroys all possibility of rehabilitation, thus, determining their fate. The act alone provides a means by which to mark the outer limits of what they are willing to tolerate. Through the act, the subject is altered, their world is changed. Furthermore, before engaging in the act, they do not know what will happen to them. They are, in other words, stepping into the abyss of unknowing. In this article, I will explore the concept of negative freedom in relation to the working class subject: how engaging in such an act marks their fate, separating them from bourgeois society while, also, setting them free. At the same time, due to its inherent withdrawal from civil society, negative freedom veers dangerously near nihilism, thus, reducing their act to one without meaning.

Open Access March 8, 2023

Nihilism: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Now

Peter Stewart-Kroeker

Article number: 20220235

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Abstract

In this article, I discuss how Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism concerns the complicity between Christian morality and modern atheism. I unpack in what sense Schopenhauer’s ascetic denial of the will signifies a return to nothingness, what he calls the nihil negativum . I argue that Nietzsche’s formulation of nihilism specifically targets Schopenhauer’s pessimism as the culmination of the Western metaphysical tradition, the crucial stage of its intellectual history in which the scientific pursuit of truth finally unveils the ascetic will to nothingness that motivates it. I contend that Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauer anticipates current scholarly debates around the significance of the nihil negativum and offers a compelling objection against contemporary proponents of philosophical nihilism such as Eugene Thacker and Ray Brassier.

Open Access March 14, 2023

G. Deleuze’s Untimely [non-]: The Inverter of Platonic Nihilism to Ethics of Creation

Konstantinos Nevrokoplis

Article number: 20220232

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Abstract

In F. Nietzsche’s philosophical thought, there is a profound link between European Nihilism and the task of modern philosophy to produce new Platos. The current article demonstrates how G. Deleuze uses the Nietzschean term Unzeitgemäβ – (Untimely – Unfashionable) in his attempt to overturn nihilistic Platonism. Deleuze enriches the Stoic paradox of [non-] when seeking an image of thought without image for the sake of what he calls the “untimely creative intensity,” an affirmative power in immanence. I argue that Deleuze reads the Stoic [non-] using the lens of the Nietzschean untimely to construct the technique of reversibility in his philosophical plane. Following the cartography of Deleuze’s philosophical route, I first examine two problems caused by Platonic nihilism: the destruction of the form in anonymity and the noiseless transmutation of copies into simulacra. Second, I discuss Deleuze’s two types of nihilism: (i) the cruciform structure of the Platonic and (ii) the use of the paradox of the [non-] upon the surface by Stoics. Finally, I comment on Deleuzian nihilism as the birthplace of creation.

Open Access March 17, 2023

Being Truly Wrong: Enlightened Nihilism or Unbound Naturalism?

Patrick Gamez

Article number: 20220238

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Abstract

I present an account of nihilism, following Foucault and Nietzsche, as a sort of colonization of our thinking by a religious form of normativity, grounded in our submission to truth as correspondence, in the idea that the facts themselves could be binding upon us. I then present Brassier’s radicalization of nihilism and showed how it both remained subservient to this religious ideal of truth. I argue, further, that far than showing how a commitment to Enlightenment reason and science demands a cold metaphysics of death, in dismissing the irreducibly plural ways in which what is determines thought, Brassier’s attempt to secure a fit between thought and disenchanted world suggests that the view is an expression of the unliveable condition of nihilism, rather than its proof. Finally, I present a form of naturalism that makes legitimate claim to the legacy of Enlightenment, drawing from French historical epistemology, and dispenses with the problems animating Brassier’s nihilism by radically transforming the concept of truth and how we relate to it.

Open Access March 20, 2023

Between the Void and Emptiness: Ontological Paradox and Spectres of Nihilism in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event and Graham Priest’s One

Georgie Newson

Article number: 20220234

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Abstract

In this study, I reconstruct and compare Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (2005) and Graham Priest’s One (2014), arguing that the ontologies pursued within the two texts are intriguingly analogous in a number of ways. Both Badiou and Priest are committed to thinking through classically ontological problems without denying the validity of the paradoxes they raise; both regard Plato’s Parmenides as an early and formative account of these paradoxes; both establish conclusions to the effect that unity – or “oneness” – is indeed a contradictory phenomenon; and both, as a corollary of this conclusion, develop frameworks which confer ontological prominence upon the void and emptiness respectively, thereby arriving at what appears to be a shared ontological nihilism. In this comparative study, I not only enquire whether the frameworks adopted by Badiou and Priest really do lead to nihilist conclusions, but also attempt to clearly outline their trajectories of thought for the benefit of those who might be tempted to dismiss their seemingly outlandish theses out of hand.

Topical issue: Hybrid Domesticities, edited by Gonzalo Vaillo and Jordi Vivaldi

Open Access January 30, 2023

Anti-Work Architecture: Domestic Labour, Speculative Design, and Automated Plenty

Helen Hester

Article number: 20220226

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Abstract

This article presents a partial history of visions of technodomesticity in the global north, concentrating on dwellings which seek to problematize, challenge, or reorganize unpaid household labour. It is structured around three case studies, primarily drawn from the United States in the 1950s and 1960s: the single-family suburban dream house, the bachelor pad, and the fully automated future home. While these chosen examples may lend us certain resources for thinking about how best to mitigate the challenges of reproductive labour via living arrangements, they also possess a number of clear drawbacks or limitations. The article will argue that contesting these imaginaries (as much as learning from them) is likely to prove necessary in unpicking the connections between an inequitable distribution of unpaid intrafamilial domestic labour and the house itself as both a concrete site and an ideological formation – necessary, that is to say, in terms of building a meaningfully feminist conception of anti-work architecture.

Cite Score	1.0
European Reference Index for the Humanities
Journal Citation Indicator	1.11
SCImago Journal Rank	0.277
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	0.735

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All submissions must be made via online submission system Editorial Manager:　http://www.editorialmanager.com/opphil. In case of any technical problems, please contact the Managing Editor of Open Philosophy at Katarzyna.Tempczyk@degruyter.com

Instructions for Authors

Editorial

Editor-in-Chief:
Graham Harman, Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Los Angeles, USA

Editorial Advisory Board
Frank Ankersmit, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen – KNAW), Amsterdam, Netherlands
Harald Atmanspacher, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Babette Babich, Fordham University / The Jesuit University of New York City, USA
Renaud Barbaras, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France
Seyla Benhabib, Yale University, USA
Johan van Benthem, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands / Stanford University, USA / Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Robert Bernasconi, The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Richard Bett, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University, USA
Susanne Bobzien, University of Oxford, UK
Stephen Bronner, Rutgers University, USA
Panayot Butchvarov, University of Iowa, USA
Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Adriana Cavarero, University of Verona, Italy
Ruth Chang, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA
Arthur Fine, University of Washington, USA
Bas van Fraassen, Princeton University / San Francisco State University, USA
Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University, USA
Paul Franks, Yale University, USA
Jacob Golomb, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Alastair Hannay, University of Oslo, Norway
Stephen Hicks, Rockford University, USA
Ingvar Johansson, Umeå University, Sweden
Dorthe Jørgensen, Aarhus University, Denmark
Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto, Canada
Philip Kitcher, Columbia University, USA
Brian Klug, Oxford University, UK
Hans Koechler, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Sandra Laugier, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France
John Marenbon, University of Cambridge, UK
Uskali Mäki, University of Helsinki, Finland
Alfred Mele, Florida State University, USA
Timothy Morton, Rice University, USA
Nel Noddings, Stanford Graduate School of Education, USA
John Perry, University of California, Riverside, USA
Gualtiero Piccinini, University of Missouri – St. Louis, USA
Alvin Plantinga, University of Notre Dame, USA
Nicholas Rescher, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Amelie Rorty, Harvard Medical School / Tufts University, USA
John Searle, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Peter Simons, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University, USA
Peter Unger, New York University, USA

Managing Editor
Katarzyna Tempczyk

Assistant Managing Editor
Deepan Selvaraj

Assistant Editor
Michał Kowalczyk, University of Łódź, De Gruyter Poland

Section Editors
Laura Ciubotarașu Pricop, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Romania
Adi Efal-Lautenschläger, University of Lille 3 Charles de Gaulle, France
Francesca Ervas, University of Cagliari, Italy
Nevena Ivanova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
Michael Kocsis, Queen's University, Canada
Benjamin Martin, Queen's University, Canada
Dan O'Brien, Oxford Brookes University, UK
Nick Sagos, Seneca College, Ontario, Canada
Nicola Spanu, Italy / Poland
Robert Scott Stewart, Cape Breton University, Canada
Sander Verhaegh, TiLPS, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Jason Waller, Kenyon College, USA

Language Editors
Kyle Barbour, University of Guelph, Canada
Michael L. Fitzgerald, Canada
Philip Miti, University of Heidelberg, Germany
James Rehwaldt, USA
Jennie Rothwell, Obex Project, UK
Dean Skelley, USA
Wayne G. Smith, Nova Scotia, Canada

Publisher
DE GRUYTER Poland
Bogumiła Zuga 32A Str.
01-811 Warsaw, Poland
T: +48 22 701 50 15

Editorial Contact
Dr. Katarzyna Tempczyk
Katarzyna.Tempczyk@degruyter.com

(Deutsch)

Type: Journal
Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Open Access
First published: December 20, 2017
Publication Frequency: 1 Issue per Year
Audience: scholars