Jrnl: JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY HISTORY OF IDEAS.

Open access, peer-reviewed journal that publishes studies in the history of interdisciplinary ideas. The first online issue is scheduled June 2011.

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas has been founded in 2010 with the aim to:
•publish high quality, original research works, by scholars of different fields of specialization, based on well established, as on emerging lines of interdisciplinary historical research;
•promote the study of intellectual history as an intrinsically interdisciplinary object in its genesis;
•provide a publishing space for studies dealing with the history of ideas from a genuinely interdisciplinary research perspective;
•provide a regular forum for discussing issues pertaining to the interdisciplinary approach that characterizes the Journal.

The JiHi will feature substantive articles, shorter research notes, and surveys. Being an interdisciplinary journal, all submissions will be blind-refereed by three or more peers with different competence.

Cfp: "Writing Philosophy's History," Department of Philosophy, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Irish Philosophical Society, April 15-16, 2011.

Keynote speaker: Professor Jonathan Rée

The conference addresses questions concerning philosophy's relationship to its own past. This should not to be seen as an opportunity for historians of philosophy to focus narrowly upon specific questions relating to texts or thinkers in the history of philosophy, nor should it be seen as an engagement with the philosophy of history. The purpose of the conference is much broader and more evidently methodological. It is designed to consider the ways philosophers conceptualize their own past and how this influences their interpretations of past texts (and their conceptions of the current tasks of philosophy). Amongst other things the conference focuses upon the following topics and questions:

* The relationship between philosophy and the history of philosophy.
* Methodological issues relating to the ways the history of philosophy is conceived.
* The history of philosophy as a hermeneutical task.
* Why is philosophy concerned with its past?
* Which theories of history are appropriate to the history of philosophy?
* Can one do philosophy without doing the history of philosophy?
* How is the philosophical canon constituted?
* How central figures in the history of philosophy have conceived of the history of philosophy.
* The history of philosophy as either a rationally or historically reconstructive enterprise.
* The history of the history of philosophy.
* The philosophy of the history of philosophy.
* Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches to the history of philosophy.
* The history of philosophy and postmodernism
* The history of philosophy in relation to issues of gender, class, and race.
* The role of biography and autobiography.

Send an abstract of up to 750 words, formatted for anonymous review, and sent by email to Dr. Chris Lawn (chris.lawn@mic.ul.ie) and Dr. Catherine Kavanagh (Catherine.Kavanagh@mic.ul.ie) by MARCH 11, 2011. In addition, on a separate sheet please include contact details. Notification of the committee's decision regarding submissions will be emailed no later than MARCH 25, 2011.

Cfp: "Passionate Minds: Knowledge and the Emotions in Intellectual History," 11th International Conference, Society for Intellectual History, University of Bucharest, May 26-28, 2011.

The centrality of the emotions in all areas of human thought, action and expression has lately begun to be recognized and investigated with increasing interest within a variety of disciplines, from cognitive science and the philosophy of emotions to literary and anthropological studies. One central insight of such explorations is that the view of the separation and even opposition between cognition and affectivity is an unjust representation of the complexity of the life of both individuals and communities. Intellectual historians have also become sensitive to the issue and are in fact in a privileged position to bring to the fore the variety and richness of the approaches to the interplay of knowledge and the emotions in the history of thought.

This conference aims to address the topic of the interplay of emotions and cognition as it bears on historical views of epistemology, logic, psychology, theology, medicine, moral philosophy or aesthetics, on approaches to education and the transmission of knowledge, as well as on the dynamics of intellectual communities. We invite panels and individual papers that address any aspect of this theme with reference to any historical period, as well as relevant methodological and historiographic questions. There will also be general sessions devoted to other proposed intellectual historical topics.

Visit the conference website here: http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/isih/?page_id=38.

Cfp: "Thought in Science and Fiction," ISSEI, Çankaya University, August 2-6, 2010.

12th International Conference, International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI).

Scientific knowledge is so vitally important for the welfare of mankind that it no longer needs any justification. Nevertheless, the negative consequences of science and technology require continual vigilance. This vigilance need not necessarily lead to the radical reductionism that posits science as just another ‘fiction’. As suggested by the theme of the 11th ISSEI conference in Helsinki, 2008, Language and the Scientific Imagination, we must foster the dialogue between science and literature in order to show their crucial interdependence. The pivotal role of language in ‘the two cultures’ is based on our conception of thought and is commonly believed to originate in sense perception. What we call fiction is thus the free rearrangement of our perceptual thought in language. Historically, the great works of western literature preceded philosophical speculation on knowledge and science. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides came before Plato and Aristotle, just as Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare came before Galileo, Descartes and Newton, and Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky before Einstein. The organizers of the 12th conference of ISSEI, to be held at Çankaya University, Ankara, Turkey invite scholars from various disciplines such as History, Politics, Literature, Art, Philosophy, Science, and Religion, to re-examine, redefine and reassess the scope of interdisciplinary dialogue in the past and present. The conference is divided into five sections: 1. History, Geography, Science 2. Politics, Economics, Law 3. Education, Sociology, Women’s Studies 4. Literature, Art, Music, Theatre, Culture 5. Religion, Philosophy, Anthropology, Psychology, Language

Visit the conference webpage here: http://issei2010.haifa.ac.il/.

"New Directions in the History of Concepts," University College London and University of Oxford, September 17-29, 2009.

12th Annual Conference on History of Concepts, History of Political and Social Concepts Group. The 12th annual conference is organised by HPSCG in cooperation with University College London, Centre for Political Ideologies at Oxford University, the Finnish Institute in London, the German Historical Institute in London, CENS in Helsinki, CoePolCon in Jyväskylä. At the 12th annual conference of the HPSCG we intend to look back at the themes covered over the last ten years and focus on the new directions that has emerged in the study of the history of concepts. Some important themes have emerged over the years. We wish to investigate these themes closer and to discuss the empirical and methodological implications involved. The 12th annual conference will be organised around the following themes: • The transfer and translation of concepts from one region to the other and within regions. Several conferences of the HPSCG have been dedicated to the investigation of which concepts travel and how they travel. The focus has been on transnational concepts suited for transfer (e.g. democracy, modernisation, civilisation, international law). The travel routes of the concepts through translations and the effects of concepts being inserted in different linguistic and cultural contexts have been discussed. The underlying relations of hegemony and asymmetry in these processes have been highlighted. We wish to continue the study of transnational concept, travel routes, translations and hegemonic relations and particularly to discuss the methodological and empirical problems involved. • Concepts in politics and rhetoric. The role of key political concepts in the process of political modernisation has been a prominent theme for the HPSCG since the beginning. At the 12th annual conference we would like to focus on how political communication, broadly speaking, produces conceptual changes. This involves investigating the formative role of ideologies and political rhetoric in forming concepts. The focus on ideology will include the explicit engineering of political concepts in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. • Concepts in identity politics. Participants at the HPSCG conferences have shown a growing interest in studying the conceptual architecture of past and present identity politics. This has involved the study of a variety of auto-designators (e.g. people, nation, patriots), of asymmetrical counter-concepts (e.g. barbarian, despot, primitive) and of names (e.g. geographical names). The rising importance of infra- and supra-national identity politics calls for more studies along these lines. • Concepts in international relations. In later years scholars of international relations have taken an interest in examining the role of key concepts and their history in the forming of global systems of international relations. This entails focusing on the development of an international language, including concepts, through which states and other political entities communicate with each other. Studies of the emergence and history of concepts such as friendship, war, international law, commerce, international community, human rights in different linguistic and cultural contexts have already been undertaken within the HPSCG. • Concepts, metaphors, images and monuments. From its start the history of concepts has included an interest in metaphors. The link between concepts and metaphors has been the object of constant theoretical and methodological debates. Concepts often connect with a pictoral semiotics through metaphors. The Amsterdam conference in 2002 was partly devoted to the presentation of studies linking concepts, images and monuments. We intend to continue along these lines at the 12th annual conference • Concepts of religion. Recent years have witnessed an overall growing interest in religious concept and in comparing the key concepts of world religions. Religion is an excellent field for highlighting similarities and differences in conceptual frameworks, e.g. between the various Christian religions or between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism and Hinduism. Such meta-concepts as religion and secularism must themselves be open to critical scrutiny, not last by following their role in different cultural and historical contexts • Comparative,European, transnational and global conceptual history. From being embedded in national cultures the history of concepts has in later years tried to transgress these limits. Efforts have been conducted to undertake comparative studies at a regional level (e.g. the Ibero-American and the Central European project). Larger supranational projects are being discussed (e.g. the Europaum project of a European conceptual history), and even global projects of comparing regions across the world are being launched. Projects of this range raise a multitude of methodological and empirical challenges that needs to be discussed. • New theoretical and methodological challenges. History of concepts as endorsed by the HPSCG developed in a fruitful dialogue between Begriffsgeschichte and the Cambridge school. Other sources of inspiration have been lingering in the periphery. It is time, however, to engage more directly in dialogues with neighbouring approaches and new fields. This could include engaging with Foucauldian genealogy, with a variety of linguistic approaches (text linguistics, text pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, argumentation analysis) and with new approaches within contextualism (e.g. new historicism). Invited Speakers: Professor Emeritus Melvin Richter, New York Professor Michael Freeden, Oxford Senior Research Scholar Hans Erich Bödeker, Berlin Professor Rolf Reichardt, Gießen Professor Javier Fernández Sebastián, Bilbao Professor Pim den Boer, Amsterdam Professor Willibald Steinmetz, Bielefeld Professor Jörn Leonhard, Freiburg Professor Kari Palonen, Jyväskylä Visit the conference webpage here: http://www.hpscg.org/node/1951.