We are currently soliciting paper proposals for our first issue of Diaphany on the theme of A Living Book of Nature.
Our theme for this year derives from the Corpus Hermeticum, a Hellenistic Egyptian text foundational to the development of Western inquiry into the relationship between ‘science’ and the ‘divine.’ Nature is thus viewed as a living symbol of an invisible structure of reality. We intend to cultivate a reinvigorated understanding of nature as a shifting, holistic expression taken in its broader reciprocal mirroring of the exoteric and esoteric context that may apply to daily life and professional research at large.
These are some of the questions we seek to explore:
Can nature be observed as a living symbol of a deeper structure of reality?
What natural phenomena help us grasp the “chiasmic” structure of existence?
What different ways can we observe nature?
What are the more unconventional forms of its manifestation?
How does nature express the contrast between competition and the growing concept of cooperation?
How is nature like poetry, a care-full imaginative response of internal relations to care-fully observed external relations?
Can nature tell us something about the relationship between immanence and transcendence?
What comments can be made on our notions of formative force or health?
How is nature a metaphor for beauty, truth, and love?
This list is by no means exhaustive, but meant rather to inspire new insight.
We seek active investigations into the claim that fluid insight is a result of cultivated sensitivity for reciprocation that arises within an awareness of dualistic frameworks. This kind of insight reveals not only the connectivity of a specified context—but the total, holistic structure of inter-related material and spiritual existence. Here, the term spiritual is not intended to mean mystical per se, but self-evident—in Jean Gebser’s language: an act of diaphanous cognition.
We welcome a variety of disciplinary perspectives from geologists, poets, economists, theologians, politicians, botanists, philosophers, artists, musicians, computer programmers, and all others interested in observing nature as a creative model. By taking into account different disciplines, our journal will also investigate how each supports this view, conceals it, sharpens it, challenges it, or even idealizes it.
Please submit an abstract of no more than five hundred words, including your name, institutional affiliation, email and phone number to editor@diaphany.org. The deadline for abstracts has been extended to May 15, 2012. Include your abstract both as an attachment and in the body of your email. Include within this a brief biographical statement describing the lineage of your thinking, what inspires your study, your method of research, a key insight that you have into your subject, and questions you find useful for further research.
Sincerely,
Diaphany Editors
Please see website for author guidelines with submission specifications: www.diaphany.org