Call for Papers: Issue 20
Call for Papers: Issue 20
Special Issue: Rethinking Plato Against the Grain: New Explorations
Submission Deadline: [30/10/2026]
Publication Date: [December 2026]
Plato remains a foundational figure in Western thought, yet his work continues to resist definitive systematization. This special issue invites contributions that challenge conventional interpretations and attempt to read Plato against the grain. Rather than reproducing the standard doxography of the “theory of Forms,” we seek to explore the tensions, aporias, and conceptual openings that permeate the Platonic corpus.
We welcome submissions that engage Plato through a range of methodological approaches—from philological and historical analysis to contemporary continental philosophy. Our aim is to examine how Plato’s thought continues to provoke, unsettle, and reconfigure contemporary philosophical debates.
Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
• Plato and Pre-Socratic Thought: Reassessing Plato’s relationship with Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Pythagoreans, and other early thinkers as a dynamic philosophical dialogue rather than a mere overcoming of their conceptual frameworks.
• Plato’s Image of Thought: Investigating the internal architecture of Plato’s thinking—its concepts,metaphors, and “image of thought” (be it in a Deleuzian-Guattarian or broader philosophical sense).
• The Platonic Corpus: Critical examinations of the structure, chronology, authenticity, and unity—or possible disunity—of the dialogues.
• Language, Writing, Orality, and Performance in the Platonic Dialogues: Analyses of the dramatic form of the dialogues, the question of the “unwritten doctrines,” and philosophy’s inherently performative dimension.
• Noetics and Ontology in Plato: Rethinking notions such as ousia, eidos, idea, etc., as well as the structure of being, sameness, and otherness beyond their traditional interpretations.
• Ethics and Politics after the Peloponnesian War: Reading Plato’s ethical and political philosophy as a response to the crisis of the polis, the trauma of war, and the perceived failures of Athenian democracy.
• Plato’s Reception throughout the History of Philosophy: Studies in Plato’s reception and its role in shaping—and challenging—pre-modern and modern philosophical traditions alike.
• Plato Today: Interdisciplinary approaches exploring explicit and tacit intersections between Plato’s thought, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism and post-structuralism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, speculative realism, etc., and contemporary engagements with Plato in the work of thinkers such as Leo Strauss, Cornelius Castoriadis, or Alain Badiou, among others.
• Radical Platonism: A revolutionary political model – against Popper’s criticism- that rejects authoritarianism in favor of an aporetic and dialectical approach, where institutions remain subject to constant rational criticism. It proposes a subversive manifesto featuring gender equality, social mobility, and the abolition of private property for rulers, blending liberalism and socialism. It seeks to reinvent modern politics by prioritizing philosophical inquiry over dogmatic certainty (cf. Alain Badiou).
Submission Guidelines:
Manuscripts should be between 6,000 and 10,000 words, including footnotes and references. All submissions must be anonymized for blind peer review and sent via the journal’s online submission portal.
For further information, please contact the guest editors:
– Yannis Mitrou, Ph.D., Université de Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis – philosopher-psychoanalyst ([email protected])
– Carlos A. Segovia, Ph.D., Lecturer in Humanities, Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus – Independent Scholar & Philosopher ([email protected]; [email protected])
