Wheel of Time and Philosophy

Call for Abstracts

Edited by Jacob M. Held

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

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

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.

Essays may focus on the books, the first two seasons of the Amazon Prime series, or both.

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

Ta’veren, Threads, and Fate: A Stoic Metaphysics; Time is a Wheel: The Metaphysics of Time; Aelfinn, Foreknowledge, Prophecy and Determinism; Balefire and the Structure of Reality: Undoing the Past, Disrupting the Future; Ages comes and pass…legend fades to myth: On Philosophy of History; Balance, Order, and the Pattern: Taoism and the One Power; Dragons, False Dragons, and Abduction: Moiraine’s Best Guess; Trust is the Color of Death: Deceit, Trust, and Self-Defense; No Eye can See the Pattern: Hegel, History, and Hindsight; I would not mind you in my head, if you weren’t so clearly mad: Self-Knowledge and madness; Rand and the visions of the Dark One: Choice is only Choice if it’s Free; One Rule…Face it on Your Feet: Lan and Honor; You surrender when you’re dead: Kant, duty, and absolutes; Mat’s Hedonism: Women, wine, and dice; Run when you have to, fight when you must, rest when you can: The Pragmatic Ethics of Emond’s Field; Tinkers, and the Way of the Leaf: Passivism and Self-Defense; Live with what you can’t change: Stoicism, Nihilism, and Fatalism; Hope is like a piece of string when you’re drowning: Affective Faith; It’s always better to choose than to be forced: Coercion and Nudges; Maybe dead tomorrow….gloriously alive, today: Epicureanism and gratitude; The dragon reborn, and reborn, and reborn….Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence; You can’t “Heal” Death; I am Tower Law: Authority, Power, and Popular Sovereignty; Let the Lord of Chaos Rule: Anarchy, States, and Dystopia; Aes Sedai and Bonding Warders: Servitude and Exploitation; Asha’man, Kill: On “making weapons” and the ethics of war; Having the stomach for justice: Stilling, Execution, and Punishment; Damane, gai’shan, and a’dam: Autonomy and Control; Blood calls Blood: Genetic Destiny, Race, and Social Construction; Saidin, Saidir, and gendered magic: Is gender in the soul?; Mat, Eelfinn, Memories and Personal Identity; Mat, Padan Fain, and being turned: Addiction, Compulsion and Free will; Logain and Redemption; Perrin, Elyas, and Wolfbrothers: Humans, Animals, and Nature; Whitecloaks, Religious Fundamentalism, Kierkegaard, Faith, and Ethics; The Price is Paid: Coercion and Contracts; Always Plan for the Worst: Negative Visualization; The Death of the Author, Literally: Who wrote the Wheel of Time – Jordan, Sanderson and Authorship; Stories have Power: Homo Narrans, values, and rhetoric; I’ve heard this all before: Authenticity, Forgery, and Fantasy Fiction; Min, Auras, and Character; Sea-Folk and Suicide; Verin and the Ethics of Sacrifice; Dreams, Visions, Prophecies, and Aboriginal Knowledge: Native American Epistemology

Submission Guidelines:

Submission deadline for abstracts (100-500 words) and CVs: January 29, 2024.
Submission deadline for drafts of accepted papers: August 2, 2024.

Kindly submit by e-mail (with or without Word attachment) to: jmheld@uca.edu