Cfp: "Nature, Freedom and History: Merleau-Ponty after 50 Years," Irish Phenomenological Circle, Newman House, Dublin, June 22-24, 2011.

On the 4th of May 2011 year it will be 50 years since Merleau-Ponty’s untimely death at the age of 53. With this conference we wish to gather an international team of prominent scholars to pay tribute to Merleau-Ponty’s achievements by providing new perspectives on his groundbreaking work and by confronting questions that his philosophy raises for us today. The conference will be focused on, though not exclusively, the later works.

Speakers:

Thomas Baldwin (Universtiy of York)
Étienne Bimbenet (Université Jean Moulin, Lyon 3)
Mauro Carbone (Université Jean Moulin, Lyon 3)
Taylor Carmen (Columbia University)
Sara Heinämaa (University of Helsinki)
Burt Hopkins (Seattle University)
Kwok-ying Lau (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Leonard Lawlor (The Pennsylvania State University)
Timothy Mooney (University College Dublin)
Dermot Moran (University College Dublin)
Ted Toadvine (University of Oregon)

 Email: merleaupontyconference@gmail.com.

Cfp: "A Past That Has Never Been Present? Art / Philosophy / History," University of King's College, June 8-11

Keynote Speakers:

• Cathy Caruth (Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Emory University)
• Leonard Lawlor (Sparks Professor of Philosophy, Penn State University)

This interdisciplinary conference, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, will bring together scholars from various disciplines to explore the ways in which Maurice Merleau-Ponty's reference to "a past that has never been present" in The Phenomenology of Perception might be said to challenge our conventional notion of memory as a past perception, and so also to complicate our understanding of what is at stake in represen, ting the past as an object of experience.

Given Merleau-Ponty's claim that this "original past" is not to be interpreted on the basis of consciousness, perception or bodily engagement with the world, might the notion of a "past that has never been present" provide a new angle of inquiry in our explorations of temporality and its rupturing, memory disorders and obsessions with the past, in short, a thinking of representation that moves beyond a subject-object dichotomy?

Papers are welcome from scholars in philosophy, arts and art history, film studies, architecture, literary studies, history, trauma studies and/or psychoanalysis. Conference organizers will select a number of papers for subsequent publication. Paper proposals should provide a) name/institutional affiliation; b) 250-word abstract of proposed paper.

We invite proposals on such topics as:

Belatedness
The primal scene (psychoanalytic interventions)
Questions of messianism
Nostalgia
Augustine (confession, time, memory)
Politics of Foundation / Revolution
Merleau-Ponty / Levinas / Bergson/ Deleuze
Proust (In Search of Lost Time)
Difference and Repetition
Revisiting Trauma
Mourning and Melancholy
Film and New Technologies (Digital Reproducibility)
Traces and Materiality

Deadline for proposals is December 15, 2010.

Please send submissions electronically to sarah.clift@ukings.ns.ca.

Diprose, Rosalyn. Review of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, INSTITUTION AND PASSIVITY. NDPR (November 2010).

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.  Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954-1955).  Foreword by Claude Lefort.  Trans. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey.  Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2010.

Institution and Passivity is Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey's translation of Merleau-Ponty's course notes for the two lecture courses he taught contemporaneously at the Collège de France in 1954-55. Also included is Claude Lefort's lengthy and informative Foreword to the French edition. The volume is significant for several reasons. Appearing in French for the first time in 2003, it is only the second volume of detailed lecture notes from the twelve courses that Merleau-Ponty taught at the Collège de France to be published in any form. While Merleau-Ponty's summaries of these courses have been available in French since 1968 (Résumés) and in English since 1970 (Themes), the more detailed course notes have remained unpublished until recently. Those who have been tantalized by the summaries of three courses on the topic of "nature" have had access to the more detailed lecture notes (two courses documented by a student and one by Merleau-Ponty) since the publication of Nature in French in 1995 (and in English in 2003). Institution and Passivity, to my mind, is more rewarding and coherent than Nature for the reason that it consists entirely of Merleau-Ponty's own sequentially numbered notes, scrupulously compiled by Dominique Darmaillarcq, Lefort, and Stephanie Ménasé. The philosophical significance of the volume then is this: it makes available key aspects of the development of Merleau-Ponty's thought in the period just prior to the penning of The Visible and the Invisible. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=21810.

Heinamaa, Sara. Review of Taylor Carman, MERLEAU-PONTY. NDPR (October 2010).

Carman, Taylor.  Merleau-Ponty.  London: Routledge, 2008.

Taylor Carman's book on Merleau-Ponty is ambitious. It aims at covering Merleau-Ponty's philosophical works, from the early study The Structure of Behavior (1942) to the latest unfinished manuscript The Visible and the Invisible (1964), and explicating the main arguments and results, from the analysis of perception to discussions on language, arts, and politics.

For some decades Merleau-Ponty was a marginal figure in Anglophone philosophy which was dominated by post-analytical, post-pragmatistic, and post-structuralistic currents of thought, but today his philosophy is embraced from all sides. Carman's work belongs to the Dreyfusian school which combines Heideggerian phenomenology with American pragmatism and 20th century analytical philosophy of mind. The book may serve as a useful introduction to students who want to get a grip of the main topics and sections of Merleau-Ponty's works, but it suffers from a tendentious reading of the sources and gives a superficial picture of Merleau-Ponty's innovative inquiries into experience. More thorough and careful argumentation for the interpretative choices and the systematic views would have added to the scholarly value of the presentation.

The main problem is that Carman not only diminishes and belittles Merleau-Ponty's continuous interchange with Husserlian sources, an interchange which began in Phenomenology and continued until The Visible, but that he also states that Merleau-Ponty's relation to Husserl's classical phenomenology is oppositional and "antithetical" (e.g., 35, 37, 42-43). This is not just a problem of exegesis but more fundamentally a problem in the understanding of philosophy, its tasks and the types of results that it can offer. . . .

Read the rest: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=21709.

Cfp: "The Experience and Expression of Space," School of Architecture, Mississippi State University, Oct. 1-3, 2009.

34th Annual Conference of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle. Keynote Speakers:

• Steven Holl, Steven Holl Architects, New York
• Suzanne Cataldi, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
• Helen Fielding, University of Western Ontario
• Alberto Pérez-Gómez McGill University

Panels:

• Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy by Lawrence Hass (Panelists: Dorothea Olkowski, Jonathan Singer)
• The Experience and Expression of Space (Panelists: Steven Holl, Suzanne Cataldi, Helen Fielding, Alberto Pérez-Gómez; Commentary on Steven Holl: Hugh Silverman)

Interdisciplinary by design, the 2009 meeting is co-organized by Rachel McCann (School ofArchitecture, MSU) and Patricia Locke (St. John’s College, Annapolis). We welcome papers investigating all aspects of spatial experience and expression. Music, dance, painting, sculpture, architecture, and embodied daily experience are all expressions that are illuminated by this central theme in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. See other side of this sheet for questions in play. Papers: Submit your completed paper (maximum 4,000 words/30 minutes' reading time) with a 100-150 word abstract. Graduate students who wish to be considered for the annual M. C. Dillon Memorial Lecture, an honor and monetary award for the best graduate student submission, should indicate this in their cover letters. Submit materials to the address below. Submissions by email attachment (pdf) arepreferred. Hardcopy must be submitted in triplicate, to the MSU address. DEADLINE for submissions: APRIL 15, 2009. Rachel McCann (rmccann@caad.msstate.edu), Patricia M. Locke (patricia.locke@sjca.edu) Merleau-Ponty Conference Organizers School of Architecture Mississippi State University P. O. Box AQ Mississippi State MS 39762 Further details are here: http://www.caad.msstate.edu/merleau-ponty/.

Protevi, John. "Review of Rosalyn Diprose, et al., eds. MERLEAU-PONTY: KEY CONCEPTS." NDPR (December 2008).

Diprose, Rosalyn, and Jack Reynolds, eds. Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts. Chesham: Acumen, 2008. The editors have compiled a useful collection of introductory essays on Merleau-Ponty. The volume would serve well as an accompanying textbook in philosophy courses or as a guide for scholars unfamiliar with Merleau-Ponty wishing a brief, clear, and comprehensive introduction to his work. For readers with some familiarity with Merleau-Ponty, however, the essays, while they do provide ample food for thought, do not by and large fully explore the many complex issues they address. This reticence is a function of the design of the book as an introductory text, and the limitation on the size of the essays. With nineteen substantive essays taking up some 220 pages, each essay is limited to approximately eleven pages. The choices of level and essay size are certainly valid editorial decisions, but it also means that the interest of the book for established readers of Merleau-Ponty will largely be on judging its suitability as a course text, though its ability to provoke reflections that might lead to continued research should not be underplayed. We should not, however, see these essays as themselves full-fledged research pieces. It might be useful in this regard to compare this book with the Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, which contains thirteen essays taking up some 360 pages, or twenty-eight pages each so each essay allows for more in-depth analysis. The result is that while the Acumen book is limited to an introductory audience, the Cambridge book provides for more sustained and more developed intellectual work for those already familiar with Merleau-Ponty. Again, this is not to fault the Acumen volume, but simply to indicate its position in the field. We might also remark that one of the editors of the Acumen volume reviewed the Cambridge volume in NDPR (http://cfweb-prod.nd.edu/philo_reviews/review.cfm?id=3881), remarking on the somewhat 'analytic' tilt of many of the Cambridge essays. The Acumen volume doesn't label itself as a 'continental' approach to Merleau-Ponty, but there is room for a good bit of metaphilosophical and/or sociological reflection on the institutionalization of contemporary philosophy in pursuing this line of thought. This review, however, is not the appropriate venue for such an undertaking. The volume is divided into four parts: an Introduction which gives a brief account of Merleau-Ponty's life and works and a brief overview of the volume, a section on "Interventions" which places Merleau-Ponty's work in relation to the major fields of intellectual inquiry with which he engaged, a section on "Inventions" which details Merleau-Ponty's conceptual innovations, and a final section on "Extensions" dealing with the way Merleau-Ponty's work has been taken up in contemporary fields of research. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14786.

"Towards a New Philosophy of the Body," Merleau-Ponty Circle of Japan, Rikkyo University, November 22-23, 2008.

The theme of the congress is "international research for the construction of a new philosophy of body -- the 100th anniversary of Merleau-Ponty". This congress is sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Merleau-Ponty's theory of body has been researched in a wide field, not only in phenomenology and the philosophy but also in sociology, social anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, aesthetics, linguistics, pedagogies, nursing studies, cognitive science and robotics, etc. So, this international congress is held aiming to focus on his theory of body, and to succeed to his thought based on the latest researches, and to search for the possibility of new development in the future, inviting the researchers in such various areas from around the world, and exchanging the researches that concern Merleau-Ponty's theory of body. Visit the conference homepage here: http://homepage3.nifty.com/mpc/icmpcj_en.html.

Cesario, Marco. "The Primacy of Perception in the Era of Communication." RESET DOC September 8, 2008.

A transversal study of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of time and space does not mean only analyzing the relationship between those categories and objects and events perceived by the conscience, but also to open a constructive dialogue between pure phenomenology and others sciences such as psychology, psychoanalysis, literature, neurology, biology, physics and arts. The objective is to reconstruct and develop Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “this space and this time that we are” through the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Bergson, and Whitehead, but also through the work of Proust, Claudel and Simon. These were the conclusions of the international congress of philosophy “Merleau-Ponty. L’espace et le temps”, which took place at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris to celebrate the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth. The congress gathered together many experts from France, the United States and Japan, who attempted to answer the questions posed by Merleau-Ponty’s main work, Phenomenology of Perception (1945). The event has today a special meaning, because we should not only discuss his philosophical positions, but also use his ‘phenomenological instruments’ to rethink the categories of space and time in the age of global communication. The new technological instruments and the media’s increasing power, provide us with free access to knowledge, as well as the possibility to become actors in spreading this knowledge. This is an advantage compared to period during which Merleau-Ponty debated ‘spatial consciousness’ because these new technologies have provoked an enlargement of cognitive structures and perceptive consciousness. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.resetdoc.org/EN/Merleau-ponty-cesario.php.

Salamon, Gayle. "Review of Dorothea Olkowski, et al., eds. FEMINIST INTERPRETATIONS OF MERLEAU-PONTY." NDPR (September 2008).

Olkowski, Dorothea, and Gail Weiss, eds. Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2006. There are few philosophers more deserving of a feminist reconsideration than Merleau-Ponty, as this excellent volume demonstrates. Nancy Tuana describes the motivation of the 'Re-Reading the Canon' series in a general preface:

Feminist philosophers have begun to look critically at the canonized texts of philosophy and have concluded that the discourses of philosophy are not gender-neutral. Philosophical narratives do not offer a universal perspective, but rather privilege some experiences and beliefs over others.

Phenomenology presents itself as an unusually suitable partner in this endeavor, for like feminism, phenomenology also understands its project to be an unsettling of the fantasy of a universal perspective, and the means by which it accomplishes this unsettling is careful and close attention to the perspectival nature of experience and of the world. Co-editor Dorothea Olkowski provides a concise and useful introduction of phenomenology's place in philosophy, Merleau-Ponty's place in phenomenology, and prior feminist engagements with Merleau-Ponty, beginning (as so many feminist origins stories do) with Beauvoir. This volume is not an introduction to Merleau-Ponty, or to feminist philosophy, and each of the essays assumes some familiarity with Merleau-Ponty and early feminist responses to him, though Olkowski's introduction and the first essay by Sonia Kruks provide helpful orientation through the history of these engagements for less-familiar readers. It is instead a guided tour through the current state of feminist Merleau-Ponty criticism, and the result is a strong and impressively expansive collection. Merleau-Ponty's insights about the centrality of embodiment to subjectivity make him a particularly apposite interlocutor for feminists, though he has been an underutilized resource for feminist philosophy, with a few notable exceptions. This dearth of feminist attention may be in part due to the arguably masculinist readings of his theories of body and perception offered by some of his more prominent readers. One might think, for instance, of Hubert Dreyfus's contention that the Phenomenology of Perception describes the relation between self and world as one of maximal grip, a description confuted by the rather more delicate and ambiguous metaphors -- a soap bubble, or an intertwining -- that Merleau-Ponty himself relied upon, particularly in his later work, to describe the intricate styles of being that we are. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14206.

Carman, Taylor. "Review of Thomas Baldwin, ed. READING MERLEAU-PONTY." NDPR June 14, 2008.

Baldwin, Thomas, ed. Reading Merleau-Ponty: On Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 2007. This excellent volume contains most of the papers read at an Anglo-French colloquium on Merleau-Ponty held at the Collège de France in the summer of 2005, plus two additional essays (by Sean Kelly and Mark Wrathall) not presented there. The colloquium itself may have been Anglo-French, but the authors are overwhelmingly Anglo. The book is neither an introduction for beginners wholly unfamiliar with Merleau-Ponty's thought nor an academic exercise exclusively for specialists. Instead, the collection offers an engaging mixture of textual interpretation and critical argument to those who already have at least a rough sense of what Phenomenology of Perception is all about. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13327.

"Coloquio Internacional Merleau-Ponty, 1908-2008," Universidad de Zaragoza, October 22-24, 2008.

El Departamento de Filosofía de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Zaragoza, en colaboración con el Institut Français de Saragosse y la Embajada de Francia en España, pretende organizar el que será el Coloquio central de los actos de conmemoración del aniversario del nacimiento de Maurice Merleau-Ponty en España. Further information is here: http://www.merleau-ponty1908-2008.com/.

"Être à la vérité: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1908-2008," Basel University, March 11-15, 2008.

The question of truth was one of the fundamental philosophical questions which challenged the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty throughout his life. He developed his reflections on the (im)possibility of truth – starting with a critique of René Descartes’ body-soul-consciousness-separation – through a thorough reading of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, and Hegelian dialectics, as well as of different forms of ontology, especially modern ontology, including the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. On this background, his questioning of truth reflected not only the philosophical conception of truth, but also truth in the natural sciences as well as in art, music and literature. The naïve understanding of truth in être au monde (being towards the world) is the starting point for his reflection in all periods of his work. It might be merely a belief – as M. Merleau-Ponty says – that the world and other humans are given in perception, yet this belief grounds the philosophical doubt of perception and its truth. Although starting from perceptive certainty might be grounded in belief, it is possible to reflect on this starting point itself. M. Merleau-Ponty approaches perceptive certainty again and again from different perspectives and situates it in different contexts. In his first book, The Structure of Behaviour, he develops a holistic conception of behaviour based on Gestalt theoretical concepts. This approach links a double critique of realist and idealist research and philosophy. He conceives behaviour as being at the same time, both perceptible and internally structured by non-intellectual connections. In his second book, Phenomenology of Perception, M. Merleau-Ponty explicitly speaks of “perception as access to truth” (PP XI (French original) / XVII (English translation)). Reflection on perception is the privileged approach for clarifying the question of the truth of être au monde (being towards the world). In his unfinished book, The Prose of the World, he develops, through a dialectical relation of linguistic sense in literature and perceptive sense in art, a conception of sense which is not representational but structural. However, his thesis is based on a cultural and historical paradigm that renders the possibility and the status of formal truth a problem. As the question of truth concerns literature, art, music, history, culture, society, and politics, as well as the natural sciences and philosophy, including not only epistemology and logic, but also ontology and aesthetics, Maurice Merleau-Ponty has to relinquish his cultural and historical paradigm for a more fundamental approach. In his last book, The Visible and the Invisible, he provides a sketch of an indirect ontology which approaches truth by reflecting on the other (the world, the other human and the other of the self) as neither the same nor completely different. Être à la vérité (being towards truth) is necessarily grounded in être au monde (being towards the world) and être à l’autre (being towards the other). The question of truth – one of the fundamental questions of Western philosophy – is resituated in M. Merleau-Ponty’s work in a fundamental way. Accordingly, M. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is of decisive impact for philosophy at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. The fact of the growing importance of his philosophy, not only in France and Germany but also in the US and Asia, is therefore no surprise. This conference, celebrating his centenary, brings together different generations of renowned specialists of M. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy from different philosophical disciplines and several continents. For further information: http://www.phenomenology.ro/newsletter/pages/Ponty_Basel_2008.html.

CFP: "Corporeity and Affectivity: in Celebration of Merleau-Ponty's 100th Birthday," Charles University, Prague, September 28-October 2, 2008.

In an article written in 1959, in commemoration of Husserl’s 100th anniversary, Merleau-Ponty writes that “with regard to a philosopher whose venture has awakened so many echoes, and at such an apparent distance from the point where he himself stood, any commemoration is also a betrayal” (“The Philosopher and His Shadow”). These words, however, are not meant to prevent us from commemorating a philosopher and his work. Quite the contrary, for Merleau-Ponty this “betrayal” seems to have a positive meaning. In fact it means that, in order to do justice to a philosopher’s work we should not – or perhaps, we could not – merely repeat it. To keep the work of thought alive we should trace and conjure up its “unthoughts”, and the greater the work of a philosopher, the richer the unthought elements in that work. Commemorating Merleau-Ponty’s 100th day of birth in 2008, nearly 50 years after his dead, his work is still alive. Not because his work was unfinished by his sudden death, but because his work was meant to be open and interrogative and thus not to be closed off, it left us with many elements yet to think. This conference aims at bringing into play the topicality of this work with respect to various debates in contemporary philosophy. . . . The rest of the CFP is here: http://www.phenomenology.ro/newsletter/pages/corporeity&affectivity.html.

PUB: Hiltmann, Gabrielle, ed. MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY: 1908 – 2008. JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 39.1 (2008).

Articles: MAURO CARBONE The Mythical Time of the Ideas: Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze as Readers of Proust FRANÇOISE DASTUR Merleau-Ponty and the Question of the Other ELIANE ESCOUBAS Merleau-Ponty: The Body of the Work and the Principle of Utopia DUANE H. DAVIS and TONY O’CONNOR Intentionality, Indirect Ontology and Historical Ontology: Reading Merleau-Ponty and Foucault Together: BERNHARD WALDENFELS The Central Role of the Body in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology GALEN A. JOHNSON The Voice of Merleau-Ponty: the Philosopher and the Poet For more information see: http://britishphenomenology.com/aboutus.aspx.

CFP: "Time, Memory and the Self: Remembering Merleau-Ponty at 100," International Merleau-Ponty Circle, Ryerson University, September 18-20, 2008.

Keynote Speakers:

• Edward S. Casey,
• Bernhard Waldenfels,
• Elizabeth Behnke

Call for Papers: In addition to papers on the topics of time, memory and the self, we would be interested in papers, appropriate to this centenary occasion, that critically appraise Merleau-Ponty’s significance or reception in various areas of philosophy or related disciplines. But papers on any area of current research in Merleau-Ponty studies will also be considered for inclusion in the program. We may also consider including one or two panels, appropriate to the centenary occasion, geared to critical appraisal of Merleau-Ponty’s significance or reception. Papers: Submit completed papers (maximum 4,000 words/30 minutes reading time) with 100-150 word abstracts. The conference features the annual M. C. Dillon Memorial Lecture, an honor and monetary award for the best graduate student submission. Graduate students who wish to be considered for the Dillon award should indicate this in their cover letter. Panel proposals: Submit a panel title, a proposal of 500 words for the panel as a whole, and, for each paper in the panel, either a) a complete paper or b) long abstract (minimum 750 words) and CV of the participant. Also include a short (100-150 word) abstract for each paper in the panel. Panels would be scheduled for 90 minute slots, with either two 30 minute papers, three 20 minute papers, or four 15 minute papers. Submit all materials to the address below. Submissions by email attachment (in RTF or PDF) are preferred. Hardcopy must be submitted in triplicate. Kym Maclaren and David Morris Merleau-Ponty Circle Conference Department of Philosophy, Ryerson University 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario CANADA M5B 2K3 mpc2008@trentu.ca Deadline for submissions: March 17th 2008

Further information is available here: http://www.trentu.ca/academic/philosophy/mpc2008/.

"100 Years of Merleau-Ponty: a Centenary Conference," Sofia University, Bulgaria, March 14-16, 2008.

A Conference to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Merleau-Ponty's birth will take place at Sofia University. We welcome essays on any topic related to the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. We will accept papers in either English or French — approximately 30 minutes reading time. For full consideration, complete papers must be received by January 14th, 2008. All papers will be published in a book.

Featured Speakers include:

• Leonard Lawlor, Faudree-Hardin University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphise; International Merleau-Ponty Circle; Chiasmi International; Society of Existential and Phenomenological Philosophy,
• William Hamrick, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Southern Illinois Univeristy at Edwardsville, USA
• Zeljko Loparic, Professor of Philosophy, State University of Campinas, Brasil

Please send essays to the conference co-directors:

Dr. Duane H. Davis Philosophy Department, CPO # 2830 University of North Carolina at Asheville, One University Heights Asheville, NC 28804-8520 USA ddavis@unca.edu

Ivan Kolev Philosophy Department Sofia University 15 Tsar Osvoboditel 1000 Sofia Bulgaria ivankolev.bulgaria@gmail.com www.ivankolev.com