Call for Abstracts

The Expanse and Philosophy

Edited by Jeffery Nicholas

With a foreword by the creator, James S.A. Corey

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

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.

We are looking for essays that focus on the television show, the books, or both. Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

Being OPA: St. Augustine’s Just War Theory and the OPA’s War; Who is Julie Mao: Paul Riceour and Identity; “I am that guy”: Is Amos evil?; “They Don’t Even See Us as Human”: Are Martians, Outer Planets inhabitants, and Earthlings different races?; We Can Be Gods: Should science be subject to moral rules?; Of Two Minds: John Locke and Miller’s assimilation; The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt on Jules Pierre Mao, Sadavir Erinwright, and Fred Johnson; Free Speech: Would J. S. Mill let Holden shout fire in a crowded solar system?; Lasagna: Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking and whether the crew of the Rocinante are a family; To Butcher or Not: Can Fred Johnson redeem himself?; Being Woman: What if Simone de Beauvoir lived in The Expanse?; Losing Friends: Aristotle and Kant on Avasarala’s lying to stop war; “Here There Be Dragons”: Is Loyalty a virtue?; “God is on our side”: Feuerbach and religion in The Expanse?; Mao and Mei: Does profit require the domination of human nature?; Dresden’s Protomolecule: Nietzsche’s Űbermensch and Dresden; Paradigm Shift: Kuhn, Lakatos, and the Protomolecule; The Investigator: Descartes’ evil genius or just the protomolecule?; The Ring: The possibility of understanding different conceptual schemes; Terraforming Mars: Aristotle and the possibility of a common good; Can the Outer Planets Ever Escape Earth?: Kristeva and the semiotic-symbolic of Outer Planet language; This Naomi which Is Not One: Luce Irigaray and sexual difference; The Eros Feed: Heidegger and the poetry/technology of music; The Three World Problem: Virginia Held and the Interdependence of Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planets; Throwing in Space: Merleau-Ponty on the Body Floating in Zero-G; Faces of Oppression: Iris Marion Young and oppression in The Expanse; On Doing Good: Can the un-virtuous Holden of the books really do good?; What’s Wrong with Cursing?: Avasarala as a model good person; On Ceres Station: Is intense violence necessary or the lowest common denominator?

Submission Guidelines:

Submission deadline for abstracts (100-500 words) and CV(s): March 30, 2020.
Submission deadline for drafts of accepted papers: July 2, 2020.
Kindly submit by e-mail (with or without Word attachment) to: Jeffery Nicholas, jefferynicholas@gmail.com

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