Cfp: "Conditions of Freedom," 15th International Philosophy Colloquium Evian, Evian (Lake Geneva), July 12-18, 2009.

The idea of freedom stands at the center of practical philosophy, embedded in a thick web of relations with concepts such as subjectivity, rationality, morality, and existence. It draws its force from the tension between two roles: on the one hand as a fundamental metaphysical or anthropological determination of human beings; on the other as designating a political ideal that can more or less be realized or fail to be realized in concrete forms of life. Rousseau's opening flourish in The Social Contract, "Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains," underlines this tension. In this sense the idea of freedom stands not only practically but also conceptually under complex conditions, which need to be understood in order to grasp what we really mean by "freedom." In this context there is a canonical distinction between two traditions: on one side liberalism, which follows Hobbes in understanding freedom negatively as freedom from physical constraints; and, on the other, the tradition inaugurated by Rousseau and Kant, which critically insists that an increase in real freedom cannot consist merely in more options, but only in autonomy, the freedom to rational and self-determined action. Recently theorists like Raz, Skinner, and Pettit have argued that autonomy is threatened when we are dominated or lack a reasonable range of options. With Hegel, Heidegger, or Merleau-Ponty it can be objected that the idea of autonomy is too abstract and that freedom must be understood as situated freedom, embedded in and developing out of our everyday bodily and practical engagement with the world. Philosophers like Schiller as well as, in different ways, Nietzsche and Foucault have attacked the one-sided rationalism of the notion of autonomy and argued for an aesthetic model of freedom as self-fashioning and self-realization that occurs in a framework of bodily practices and techniques of the self. On the social level, debates over the concept of freedom first and foremost revolve around the question of how a common life of free individuals, a free society, is possible. While the liberal tradition, following for instance Tocqueville and Mill, mainly reflects on how individual freedom can be protected from the encroachments of society, the autonomy tradition, from Hegel to Arendt to Habermas, maintains that individual freedom can only exist in a society of free, self-governing people. But the objection of abstraction is soon raised against this conception as well: Marx points to the persistence of real unfreedom under conditions of exploitation and alienation, despite the realization of formal freedom - an argument taken up by Adorno and Marcuse in the twentieth century that finds echoes in discourses on the situation of excluded voices, like those of (post-)colonial subjects, or the freedom-restricting effects of gender norms (for example by Beauvoir, Butler, and MacKinnon). The question of mediating between the basic liberties of the individual and the collective right to self-determination continues to structure debates in recent French social philosophy (Balibar, Castoriadis, but also Levinas and Nancy) as well as in Anglo-American discussions around authors like Walzer, Taylor, and Fraser. The Fifteenth International Philosophy Colloquium Evian invites philosophers to Lake Geneva to discuss these issues concerning the conditions of freedom. We especially invite contributions that explore the conditions of freedom from (post-)structural, phenomenological, hermeneutic, or (post-)analytical perspectives, as well as the differences and convergences among them. The International Philosophy Colloquium Evian aims especially to encourage its participants to transcend the narrow confines of different traditions in philosophy. It is conceived particularly as a place where the divide between continental and analytic philosophy is overcome, or at least where their differences can be rendered philosophically productive. The passive mastery of French, German, and English (the three languages of discussion of the colloquium) is an indispensable prerequisite for its participants. Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/we01/arbeitsbereiche/ab_bertram/eviancolloquium/.