Call for Papers for a Special Issue on "Scope and limits of digital methods within philosophy (and text-oriented humanities)" in Philosophy & Digitality

Posted on 2026-02-25

The impact of digital methods (including the Digital Humanities) in philosophy and further text-oriented areas can be welcomed as a promise of computational enhancement, it can be felt as ‘sting of the digital’ (Krämer 2025) or it can be critically interpreted as a positivistic displacement of the traditional humanities. We have—to some extent—small knowledge about the philosophy and theory of the digital. But what do we know about doing philosophy under the methodological conditions of digitality—including or excluding methods of the Digital Humanities?

This Special Issue aims to bring four perspectives together under the general heading of “Digital Philosophy”:

  1. Is there a praxeology of philosophy done digitally yet? What are concrete applications of computational methods towards genuinely philosophical research questions?
  2. What is the current state of the critical epistemological discussion of digital methods in philosophy and text-oriented humanities? 
  3. What about the role of digital research infrastructures and working environments as prerequisites of discovery and knowledge?
  4. What are the changing necessities of digital skills and competences used in philosophy and text-oriented disciplines?

Of special interest is the correlation between these aspects.

Philosophy as a profession always had aspects of philology, historiography, (applied) logic and poetics. The mediality of our discipline always was multifaceted and complex. Our work can be oral or written, openly published or privately circulated, aimed at a concrete historical event or meant for eternity. Our main types of publication are in a process of rapid remediation: Editions or lexica are assembled and published collaboratively online, crowdsourced annotations and public reviews in real-time are emerging. The blogosphere has become an important place for public essays, our talks and discussions are streamed and re-published on media platforms. Thereby philosophical texts—in the broadest sense—have become digital research objects which enable the use of digital—i.e. primarily quantitative—research methods. In addition to theoretical questions about the status of the scientific findings obtained this way, there are also questions about the digital ontology of the research objects, the role of the underlying and mostly opaque and thus ‘invisible’ digital infrastructures, and the associated new requirements in terms of digital skills.

The relationship between digital methods and philosophical research questions currently (still) needs to be clarified. While there is no question that digitality and digitisation are legitimate areas of research for a ‘philosophy of digitality’, the search for genuinely philosophical questions that can be answered (or enriched) with the help of the toolkit of a Digital Philosophy is still in its infancy. Although there are early adopters—for example the indexicalisation of the Index Thomisticus by Roberto Busa or the coupling of computing and philosophy by Luciano Floridi (1999)—as well as some recent examples of the application of digital methods—the project Text Mining Mill by O’Neill et al. (2021), the quantitative analysis by Pence and Ramsey (2018), the stylometric analysis of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty by Schmidt-Petri, Schefczky and Osburg (2022), simulation applications as described in Grim and Singer (2020) and the historical network analysis towards Francis Bacon by Warren et al. (2016) and some others—there seems to be still an unclear ground of knowledge production via digital tools and methods in philosophy (Berry and Fagerjorg 2017). A ‘philosophy of science of digital processes—as a process for philosophy’ is still pending in order to enable, for example, ‘digital hermeneutics,’ ‘digital ideology critique,’ ‘digital structuralism,’ ‘digital heuristics,’ or ‘digital source criticism’ (Gehring 2024, 64). The central question here is to what extent quantifying methods that produce sufficiently large amounts of data to be evaluated algorithmically are relevant to philosophy at all and to what extent infrastructural and technical conditions are ontologically inscribed in these digital objects (Hui 2016).

The transformation of working environments in philosophy also involves a reflection on digital editions (Kamzelak 2023), research data in philosophy (Heßbrüggen-Walter 2018), infrastructural tools such as ontologies like the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (Buckner, Niepert and Allen 2011) and authority data, open access publication models, as well as digital teaching and learning materials (Open Educational Resources). That means, thinking about the epistemic value of philosophical knowledge produced by or with digital means does not only mean thinking about the methods but also about mediality and materiality of its objects like in terms of their ‘formal’ and ‘forensic materiality’ (Kirschenbaum 2007). For this last point, also digital infrastructures have to be pulled out of the background into the light.

Finally, critical knowledge of digital objects and infrastructures also means a realignment of practical skills and abilities with regard to digital materiality. While texts and books traditionally require hermeneutic or linguistic analysis skills, accompanied by library-oriented information competences for searching and contextualising books, digital objects and working environments also necessitate data literacy and basic knowledge of proper research data management. Source criticism, hermeneutics and working with data bring data literacy frameworks into play (e.g. Schüller et al. 2019), which, however, have a strong value-production emphasis and still need to be adapted for scientific and philosophical purposes, also as part of a ‘digital enlightenment’ (Gramelsberger, Schröter and Geiger 2026).

 

If you are interested in contributing to our Special Issue on Digital Philosophy, please send your name, the title of your paper, an abstract of about 200 words and the area you would like to address (1. application of digital methods, 2. critical theoretical inquiries to these methods, 3. digital infrastructures, 4. data literacy) to the editorial team of the Special Issue:

until 15th of April 2026. We will get in touch if your contribution will be accepted for the Special Issue. The deadline for the papers (with 2,500 to 6,000 words in length) will then be 30th of September 2026. The publication of the Special Issue is scheduled as a rolling publication for the very end of this year and the beginning of 2027.

If you have any questions regarding the call, please don't hesitate to get in touch!

We are looking very much forward to your contributions.

 

References

Berry, David & Anders Faberjorg (2017): Digital Humanities. Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. Polity.

Buckner, Cameron, Mathias Niepert & Colin Allen: From encyclopedia to ontology: toward dynamic representation of the discipline of philosophy, in: Synthese 182, 2011, 205–233. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-009-9659-9.

Floridi, Luciano (1999): Philosophy and Computing. An Introduction. London, Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9780203015315.

Gehring, Petra: Why is there a lot to be said in favour of – and what would be – auxiliary digitality? Between a genuine digital pragmatics for the humanities and a philosophy of science of digital procedures, in: P&D Philosophy & Digitality 1(1), 2024, 62–66. DOI: 10.18716/pd.v1i1.2426.

Gramelsberger, Gabriele, Christian Schröter & Jonathan D. Geiger (eds.) (2026): Digitale Aufklärung. Grundfragen unseres Verhältnisses zum Digitalen. Paderborn, Brill|mentis. (=philosophia digitalis 4).

Grim, Patrick & Daniel Singer: Computational Philosophy, in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020. Online: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-philosophy/.

Heßbrüggen-Walter, Stefan: Philosophie als digitale Geisteswissenschaft, in: Martin Huber & Sybille Krämer (eds.): Wie Digitalität die Geisteswissenschaften verändert: Neue Forschungsgegenstände und Methoden, in: Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften 3, 2018. DOI: 10.17175/sb003_006.

Hui, Yuk (2016): On the Existence of Digital Objects. University of Minnesota Press.

Kamzelak, Roland S.: Forschungsdaten und Edition: Herausforderungen und Chancen, in: Editio 36(1), 2023, 106–115. DOI: 10.1515/editio-2022-0005.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (2007): Mechanisms. New Media and the Forensic Imagination. MIT Press. DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/7393.001.0001.

Krämer, Sybille (2025): Der Stachel des Digitalen. Geisteswissenschaften und Digital Humanities. Suhrkamp.

O’Neill, Helen, Anne Welsh, David A. Smith, Glenn Roe & Melissa Terras: Text mining Mill. Computationally detecting influence in the writings of John Stuart Mill from library records, in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36(4), 2021, 1013–1029. DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqab010.

Pence, Charles H., & Grant Ramsey: How to Do Digital Philosophy of Science, in: Philosophy of Science 85(5), 2018, 930–941. JSTOR.

Schmidt-Petri, Christoph, Michael Schefczyk & Lilly Osburg: Who Authored On Liberty? Stylometric Evidence on Harriet Taylor Mill’s Contribution, in: Utilitas 34(2), 2022, 120–138. DOI: 10.1017/S0953820821000339.

Schüller, Katharina, Paulina Busch & Carina Hindinger (2019): Future Skills: Ein Framework für Data Literacy. DOI: 10.5281/ZENODO.3349865.

Warren, Christopher N., Daniel Shore, Jessica Otis, Lawrence Wang, Mike Finegold & Cosma Shalizi: Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: A Statistical Method for Reconstructing Large Historical Social Networks, in: Digital Humanities Quarterly 10(3), 2016. DOI: http://digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/10/3/000244/000244.html.