Call for Abstracts

Disney and Philosophy

Edited by Richard Davis

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

Please circulate and post widely.

Apologies for cross posting.

To propose ideas for future volumes in the Blackwell series please contact the Series Editor, William Irwin, at williamirwin@kings.edu

If you have comments or criticisms for the series, please contact the series editor after reading “Fancy Taking a Pop?” and “Writing for the Reader: A Defense of Philosophy and Popular Culture Books”

Abstracts and subsequent essays should be philosophically substantial but accessible, written to engage the intelligent lay reader. Contributors of accepted essays will receive an honorarium.

Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

“Always Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide”? Mill, Moore, and Moral Values; “One Girl is More Use than Twenty Boys”: Disney Women in the World of Men; Happiness, Hedonism, and Neverland: Peter Pan’s Paradox; The Love Bug and Lightning McQueen: AI and Disney’s Intelligent Machines; Reporting for Duty: Mickey, Donald, and the Ethics of Propaganda; “Our Problem Free Philosophy”: The Fear of Death and the Circle of Life; “This is Where the Path of Hatred Has Brought Us”: Pocahontas and Esmerelda on Building Bridges Instead of Walls; Maleficent Meditations: Disney’s Dark Side and the Problem of Evil; The Beauty of the Beasts: Disney’s Monstrous Aesthetics; Profiling Pocahontas: Disney, Native Americans, and ‘The White Man’s Burden’; Mulan and the Military: Disney’s Gender Politics; What Place, Then, for Transgenderism?: DeGeneres, Dory, and Destiny; “Everyone is Special, Dash”: Tolerance and Inclusion in a World of Differences; Living Inside or Out?: The Trouble with Our Emotions and the Triumph of Plato’s Charioteer; “Free to Write Our Own Story”: Bravely Following Our Hearts Amidst the Fates?; Trumped Up: Democracy, Dictatorship, and the Toy Story Daycare; Wall-E and the Last Tree Standing: The Environment and Our Duties to Future Generations; “You Got a Friend in Me”: Disney and the Stoic Art of Friendship; Thawing Frozen Hearts: Good Magic, Spells, and the Nature of True Love; “Amusing Ourselves to Death”: The Media, the Mind, and the Magic Kingdom; Making the World Great Again: Leibniz, Voltaire, and the Wonderful “Worldview” of Disney; Living in Fantasyland: Harmful Delusion or Making One’s Dreams Come True?

Submission Guidelines: