Existenz Menu Jaspers
Scholarship
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Call for Papers From the
Editors We believe that the first responsibility of EXISTENZ is to Jaspers scholarship, both past and present. But because the philosophy of Karl Jaspers was itself truly encompassing, we interpret "Jaspers Scholarship" broadly. Jaspers was concerned with the whole of human experience and his thinking could never be confined to one or two highly specialized sub-fields within philosophy. For these reasons, we believe that EXISTENZ should also position itself at the edge of the dynamic interface between philosophy and religion, politics, and the arts. The inaugural theme of our first issue, “Philosophy, Religion, and Politics,” was the theme of KJSNA during the past two years. It is particularly timely and also problematical for several reasons. It is fair to say, first, that many of the senior members of KJSNA commenced their careers in the 1950s and 1960s during the mature years of Karl Jaspers' philosophical influence. This was a time when philosophers and theologians were at the vanguard of emancipatory movements of justice and human rights. Today, by contrast, it seems as though things have turned into their opposite. The topic of religion and politics no longer elicits the likes of Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Heschel, and Martin Luther King, Jr. One is far more likely to think of apocalypticists, millennialists, and Neo-cons of various religious stripes and pathologies who see nothing inconsistent between faith and torture, who condone wars of occupation driven by missionary zeal, and whose conspectus of religion and politics is driven by ideology and intolerance. We intend to show that this latter position, while dominant in the popular media, is by no means representative of the entire picture. To that end, we devoted the inaugural issue of Existenz. Please follow the current KJSNA calls for papers to assess the themes that will be published in the future volumes of Existenz. However, even if you do not plan to attend the KJSNA meetings, we cordially invite you to submit an unpublished manuscript related to Jaspers scholarship to be considered for publication in one of the forthcoming issues of Existenz.
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