Polemos

About Polemos

Polemos — Overview

Polemos (styled Pólemos) is an Italian journal of philosophy published by Donzelli Editore in Rome. The Journals World record for this post (36462, slug polemos) lists its ISSN as 2281-9517, its country as Italy, coverage spans of 2020–2021 and 2023–2024 in the underlying listing, and an h-index of 2. Its publisher field on this site is a numeric code and names no publisher; the identification of Donzelli Editore rests on the journal's own site, whose article records name Donzelli Editore as publisher and print this ISSN, and on SCImago-derived listings that give the same publisher, country and ISSN for this title. All three sources agree with the stored record, and this profile is anchored to them.

The name needs care, because more than one journal is called Polemos. This post is not the Croatian Polemos, the journal of interdisciplinary research on war and peace published in Zagreb, and it is not the De Gruyter journal Pólemos: Journal of Law, Literature and Culture, which carries different ISSNs (2035-5262 in print and 2036-4601 online, per the MIAR listing consulted) and was founded in 2007 for the law-and-humanities field, later relaunched in English with an Australian law school partner. The Donzelli Polemos of this record is a philosophy journal: its pages are given to Hegel, Marx, Kant and their modern readers, to political philosophy, ethics, aesthetics and the philosophy of law and history, in Italian, with article records and abstracts also presented in English on its site. A full disambiguation note appears below, because confusing these titles is the single most likely error a reader can make with this record.

Quick Facts

The Journal and Its Archive

The journal's own website, rivistapolemos.it, presents the full text records of its articles with DOIs, page ranges, keywords in Italian and English, and citation exports. Those records are the firmest evidence for what the journal is. A 2017 article (issue 2/2017, pages 63–81) is cited in the journal's own export as volume X, number 2 — a volume count that places the journal's numbering well before the recent coverage window — and the site's topic listings reach back to a 2006 issue (1/2006) whose contents are dominated by Hegel studies: essays on negation and beginning in Hegel, on Hölderlin and Hegel, on Adorno's negative dialectics, on Kojève's aesthetics, on Hegel's philosophy of history and on the Philosophy of Right, together with reviews. The founding year of the journal could not be verified from the sources consulted for this profile, and none is asserted here; what the archive itself shows is a journal established in Italian Hegel and Marx scholarship by the mid-2000s and still publishing on the same ground two decades later.

Issues appear twice a year in the recent archive, numbered within the year (1/2020, 2/2020, 1/2022, 2/2023 and so on), and each issue has thematic gravity: the records fetched for this profile show an issue organised around Hegel and the question of responsibility, with contributions on morality and accountability, tragedy, recognition and the ontology of the social being, and a 2023 issue returning to responsibility — its forms, its pathologies and its agreements — from several directions. Articles carry DOIs in two series visible in the records: an earlier series under the prefix 10.19280 (for example 10.19280/P2017-2-004) and a later series under 10.48247 (for example the 2020 and 2022–2023 articles), both registered to the journal's own title and ISSN. Recent issues also appear as books in their own right in the trade sense — article records carry an ISBN for the issue alongside the journal ISSN — which is a common pattern for Italian humanities journals sold both as periodicals and as volumes.

Scope and Subjects

Read across the archive, the journal's scope is continental philosophy and its political and legal extensions. The Hegel cluster is the deepest: the site's topic page for Hegel alone lists dozens of articles, from the 2006 issue through themed issues in 2016, 2017 and 2018 on recognition, freedom, history and civil society, including contributions by scholars such as Terry Pinkard, Emmanuel Renault, Domenico Losurdo and Lea Ypi. Marx and the critique of political economy form a second strand — a 2020 article reads Jacques Ellul's account of the technical phenomenon, alienation and revolution against Marx; another studies Hayek's reception in Buenos Aires and the global origins of Argentine neoliberalism (issue 4:2, 2023 in the citing record, pages 87–110); a 2008 cluster treats money, labour and Gattungstheorie in Marx. A third strand is contemporary theory: Giorgio Agamben's method and biopolitics, myth and tragedy and the birth of the free individual in Attic drama, art and freedom, responsibility and imputation in law and morality, and the philosophy of technology and work. Keywords on the records fetched — Hegel, morality, responsibility, tragedy, subjectivity, certainty, truth, alienation, politics, progress, work, technology — map the territory precisely.

The journal's name is programmatic in a way its contents honour. Polemos is the Greek word for war and strife that Heraclitus called the father of all things, and a journal so named announces an interest in conflict as a philosophical category: conflict between concepts, between freedom and history, between the individual and the state, between technique and human emancipation. Readers should not, however, mistake the name for a military subject matter — that is the Croatian journal's field, not this one's. The Donzelli journal's conflicts are fought in texts: in readings of Hegel's Phenomenology, in disputes about recognition, and in arguments about whether truth, responsibility and freedom can survive their modern critics.

Inside the Issues: What the Journal Actually Publishes

Four articles fetched in full for this profile show the journal's method better than any scope statement could. In issue 2/2017, Gilles Marmasse's "Hegel and the Question of Responsibility" (pages 63–81) examines the second part of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, devoted to morality, taking accountability as its guiding concept and arguing — against readings that see only a criticism of morality's shortcomings — for its positive meaning as the internalisation of decision and the taking of responsibility. The same issue carries Lea Ypi on the critique of religion in Kant and Marx, essays on Hegel's concept of the deed and on the realism of the political body in Hegel's critique of Rousseau, and Domenico Losurdo on Hegel, Marx and the ontology of the social being. This is scholarship in the grand continental manner: long, text-centred essays in argument with one another across an issue.

Giovanna Miolli's "Thinking the True" (issue 1/2017, pages 102–119) explores the sense in which a subject's emancipation can be understood as the capacity to think the true by belonging to thought, working through Hegel's conception of truth as subject and freeing the notion of certainty from a merely subjectivistic reading. Cristina Coccimiglio's article in issue 2/2020 sets the digital revolution, network media and the effects of artificial intelligence and digitisation on employment against the older reflection on progress and technique in Marx and Jacques Ellul, following Ellul's criticism of Christian-Marxist ideology and his path toward political ecology and personalism. Fabrizio Vona's "Mito e Tragedia" (issue 1/2022) works at the other end of the tradition, arguing that Attic tragedy subjected its inherited myth to a profound reinterpretation — a problematising, cathartic and critical vision born with the figure of the actor placed before the chorus — and that tragic consciousness itself arises in that dialogical dimension. A 2023 issue returns to responsibility as its organising problem, with contributions on Hans Jonas's position in German philosophy, on responsibility and agreement, on pathologies of recognition and forms of responsibility, and on the concept of responsibility itself.

Two features of this record deserve emphasis for citers. First, the journal's articles are individually substantial — the examples above run to roughly twenty pages each — and are written to be read as essays, not skimmed as reports. Second, the journal rewards issue-level reading: presentations by the issue editors frame the clusters (the site lists presentations for the Hegel and responsibility issues), and reviews of current Hegel and Marx scholarship close the issues, so a Polemos number functions as a small edited volume on its theme. That is also why its citation pattern is what it is: essays in Italian, in themed volumes, cited by specialists over years rather than by a field at speed.

Metrics and Indexing — What Can Be Verified

The Journals World record lists an h-index of 2 and coverage of 2020–2021 and 2023–2024 in the underlying listing. A SCImago-derived listing consulted for this profile (Resurchify's page for this ISSN, updated June 2025 and attributed there to Scopus data) gives the same publisher, country and ISSN, places the title in Philosophy in the fourth quartile, gives an h-index of 2 and an SJR of 0.103, and shows a zero two-year impact score for the recent years it tabulates — figures consistent with a small, Italian-language philosophy journal whose citations accrue slowly and largely outside the Anglophone databases. At checking time, a query of the OpenAlex sources endpoint for ISSN 2281-9517 returned no record (HTTP 404), the DOAJ search API returned a total of zero for that ISSN, and Crossref returned no journal record for that ISSN (the journal's DOIs are nevertheless visible in its own article records). Accordingly, no Journal Impact Factor is cited here, because none could be verified, and a DOAJ listing for this title could not be verified. The honest summary is that Polemos is a real, long-running, Scopus-captured philosophy journal with very low database visibility — a combination that is common for humanities journals publishing in a language other than English, and one that readers should weigh as a fact about indexing, not as a verdict on the scholarship.

Editorial and Submission Information

The journal is published by Donzelli Editore, one of Italy's established academic and trade publishers, based in Rome, and its public face is its own site, rivistapolemos.it, which carries article records, abstracts and downloads. The sources consulted for this profile did not include a current named editorial board list or a public set of author instructions that could be quoted reliably, so this profile does not name editors and does not invent submission rules: present editorship and the journal's submission route could not be verified from the pages fetched, and prospective authors should take both from the journal's site or from Donzelli directly before preparing a manuscript. What can be said from the archive is practical enough to be useful: the journal publishes in Italian, articles are long-form scholarly essays with abstracts and keywords in Italian and English, themed issues are a recurring format, and contributions come from an international circle of Hegel, Marx and continental-philosophy scholars writing for an Italian readership. An author whose work fits that description, and who can publish in Italian, is the journal's natural contributor; an author who cannot should not mistake it for the English-language De Gruyter title of the same name, whose submission route is entirely separate.

Disambiguation: Three Journals Called Polemos

First, this record: Polemos, Donzelli Editore, Italy, ISSN 2281-9517, philosophy. Second, Pólemos: Journal of Law, Literature and Culture, founded in 2007 as an Italian-language journal and relaunched with De Gruyter in conjunction with the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University (Australia) as an international English-language journal of law, literature and culture, with print ISSN 2035-5262 and online ISSN 2036-4601 per the MIAR listing, and an Italian association (AIDEL, the Italian Association of Law and Literature) connection. Third, Polemos: Journal of Interdisciplinary Research on War and Peace, a Croatian journal from Zagreb covering war, security and the military across sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, economics, demography, medicine, political science and military history, with a publication-ethics statement hosted on the Hrčak portal. Topic alone separates them in most cases — a Hegel essay belongs to the first, a law-and-literature essay to the second, a civil-military relations study to the third — but the ISSN is the decisive check, and citers should always give it.

For librarians, one cataloguing caution follows from all of this. Because three live journals share this name, a holdings record or a citation that gives only "Polemos" and a year is genuinely ambiguous, and the ambiguity is worst exactly where the topics overlap — a philosophical article on war, for example, could in principle belong to either the Italian or the Croatian title. The remedy is mechanical: catalogue and cite by ISSN (2281-9517 for this journal), add the publisher (Donzelli Editore) where a system allows it, and treat any Polemos reference that arrives without one of those two anchors as a query to be resolved, not a fact to be copied forward. This profile has applied that rule to itself throughout: every statement above about the Donzelli journal traces to a record carrying its ISSN or its publisher's name.

Similar and Related Titles

Within Italian philosophy publishing, the natural neighbours are the other long-running journals of Hegel, Marx and political philosophy studies in Italy, and, for the journal's law-adjacent themes, Italian journals of philosophy of law. Internationally, readers of Polemos's Hegel issues will also read the Hegel Bulletin and the German Hegel yearbooks, while its Agamben and political-theology material speaks to readers of continental-philosophy journals in English. None of these is a substitute for the Donzelli journal's particular combination: Italian-language, book-format issues, organised thematically, anchored in the Hegel–Marx tradition and open to contemporary French, German and Italian theory.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Polemos (ISSN 2281-9517)? An Italian journal of philosophy published by Donzelli Editore, stored here as post 36462. Its archive centres on Hegel, Marx, political philosophy, ethics and contemporary continental theory.

Is it the journal of law and literature of the same name? No. That title, Pólemos: Journal of Law, Literature and Culture (De Gruyter), carries ISSNs 2035-5262 and 2036-4601. Nor is this record the Croatian Polemos on war and peace. Check the ISSN before citing.

What are its metrics? This record and a SCImago-derived listing agree on an h-index of 2; the same listing gives SJR 0.103 and a fourth-quartile placing in Philosophy. No impact factor could be verified at checking time.

In what language does it publish, and how often? In Italian, with English abstracts and an English site interface, in two issues a year in the recent archive.

How do I submit? The submission route and current editorial board could not be verified from the sources consulted; consult the journal's site or Donzelli Editore directly. Do not use the De Gruyter title's submission system for this journal.

Does it charge an article processing charge? No APC figure is stated in the sources consulted; the position is recorded here as not publicly disclosed rather than assumed.

Checking Note

This profile is anchored to the live Journals World record 36462 and to sources fetched for this batch: the journal's own site and article records, a SCImago-derived listing for this ISSN, the De Gruyter and MIAR pages used only to separate the same-named law-and-literature journal, and the Hrčak-hosted ethics statement used only to separate the Croatian journal. Anything that could not be verified from those sources — a founding year, a named current editorial board, submission rules, an APC — is stated above as not verified or not publicly disclosed rather than filled in by guesswork.