Call for Contributions: Special Issue on The Structure of Humanistic Revolutions

The journal History of Humanities invites essays that contribute to a special issue devoted to The Structure of Humanistic Revolutions. 

Inspired by a conference of the same name that took place earlier this year in Toruń, this special issue will critically explore the transformations that have shaped the history of the humanities. Departing and diverging from Thomas Kuhn’s seminal work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” authors will engage in a reflective analysis of how “revolutions” within humanistic disciplines have been conceptualized, contested and institutionalized over time. 

The issue will include reflections on epochal movements — from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and from Romanticism to contemporary posthumanism. What are the “structures” that underpin these transformations? Can we even speak of unified revolutions in the history of the humanities, or are these shifts more nuanced, gradual, and contested than the revolutionary label suggests? 

Deadline for contributions: 1 April 2027.

For more info, click here.

New paper: The De Waal paradox: can we account for human distinctiveness within the continuity framework?

Primatologist Frans de Waal showed that humans are not unique. 

But that leaves us with an even bigger mystery. How can relatively small differences between humans and other animals have produced such enormous differences in their impact on the world? 

In this open access publication in Behaviour, I introduce the De Waal Paradox and explore how recursion -- building upon the products of earlier processes -- may solve it.

Click here for the full paper.