Call for Papers: Debates in Aesthetics Special Issue on Knowledge and Creativity in the Arts
Requesting short articles (3,000-3,500 words excluding references) responding to the arguments developed in Professor Keren Gorodeisky (Auburn)'s essay: ‘"Too Timid a Dictum”: The Art of Living’, on the creative power of art making and appreciation
Deadline: June 26th 2026
Art is revelatory. It can show us how things really are, giving us deeper knowledge or understanding of the world around us and our own forms of life. Many philosophers have defended this intuition, developing ever more sophisticated accounts of how engagement with art improves our epistemic standing. But does art also create the world? Can it bring new forms of life into being? Might this also be a way to achieve revelation?
Debates in Aesthetics is proud to invite submissions for our next Special Issue. This issue seeks to investigate the connection between inquiry and creativity in the arts. We are delighted to present a new commissioned essay by Professor Keren Gorodeisky (Auburn) entitled ‘"Too Timid a Dictum”: The Art of Living’, which develops a bold new account of the creative power of art making and appreciation.
For this special issue, we invite short articles (3,000-3,500 words excluding references) which respond to the arguments developed in Professor Gorodeisky’s target article: https://debatesinaesthetics.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Debates-in-Aesthetics-Gorodeisky-Target-Article.pdf
All submissions must conform to the submissions guidelines: https://debatesinaesthetics.org/submissions/
Please submit your article to editor@debatesinaesthetics.org
Deadline: June 26th, 2026
Author’s bio: Keren Gorodeisky’s work explores what it is to be human by focusing on: (1) the distinctive affective character, rationality, and value of our aesthetic engagements, (2) the spontaneous-receptive character of human emotions, which, she argues, are distinctively rational exercises of human agency, yet receptive, embodied, and vulnerable ways of being in the world, and (3) our second-personal relationships with each other. Gorodeisky's first monograph, "Beholden to Beauty: Aesthetic Value and the Authority of Pleasure," is forthcoming with OUP. It portrays aesthetic appreciation as an affective yet distinctively rational, agential, and universal, albeit tied to who we are as persons and as sociable beings. Her next book defends a view of human emotions as exercises of an affective capacity of reason, through which we constitute ourselves. And her most recent project defends the superiority of a second-personal model of interpersonal understanding over the empathy model.
