The Metaphor Festival is a yearly event at the English Department, Stockholm University, taking place towards the end of September. It started as internal departmental seminars on the character and occurrence of metaphors, but has grown into an international symposium on figurative language. It is also our intention to publish a volume of articles based on talks at each Festival.
The interest in figurative language – in particular metaphor and recently also metonymy – has increased considerably over the last few decades, especially as a result of the development of cognitive science, which includes studies into natural language semantics and the connection between culture, language and cognition. It also connects to the renewed interest in rhetoric and to subject fields such as text and discourse analysis, narratology, and philosophical paradigms such as phenomenology. In short, the inquiry into the nature and importance of figures of speech for human experience, cognition, social structures, culture, production of artefacts and artistic pursuits, including both literature and other art forms, makes this a broad and varied interdisciplinary field. In particular the connection between linguistic and literary research as regards the exploration into figurative language has been stimulating for colleagues in our department and elsewhere.
Though we appreciate the development and insights in cognitive semantics concerning the basic and dynamic role of figurative thinking and expression, we also welcome other approaches into the character and use of figurative language. We include both tropes and schemes in the notion of figures of speech, and in the Festival we do not merely welcome talks on metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, but also for instance on simile, oxymoron, antithesis, hyperbole, understatement, punning, irony, and on rhyme schemes and other formal rhetorical devices.
Visit: http://www.english.su.se/pub/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=15653.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Cfp: Annual Conference, Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy, Memorial University of Newfoundland, October 6-8, 2011.
Keynote Speakers:
James Mensch (St. Francis Xavier University), Winner of the 2010 Symposium Annual Book Prize
Alia Al-Saji (McGill University)
Sophie-Jan Arrien (Université Laval)
John Russon (University of Guelph)
Peter Trnka (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Visit: http://www.c-scp.org/en/congress-parent/congress.html.
James Mensch (St. Francis Xavier University), Winner of the 2010 Symposium Annual Book Prize
Alia Al-Saji (McGill University)
Sophie-Jan Arrien (Université Laval)
John Russon (University of Guelph)
Peter Trnka (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Visit: http://www.c-scp.org/en/congress-parent/congress.html.
Cfp: "The Perception of Change: Space, Time, and Mobility after Henri Bergson," School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford, May 27, 2011.
In 1911 the French philosopher and Nobel Laureate Henri Bergson delivered a pair of lectures at the University of Oxford entitled "The Perception of Change." In these lectures Bergson explored some of the challenges of thinking through questions of “change and duration in their original mobility”. In the process, he made what are by now a series of familiar claims: that all movement and change is indivisible; that immobility is actually the product of relations between different mobilities; that the brain is not a storehouse for snap-shot like representational images; and that the past preserves itself automatically. We find it difficult to grasp the true significance of these claims, he suggested, because our thinking is dominated by perceptual habits that encourage us to understand movement as a series of fixed positions in space. The challenge, on his view, is to return to and expand perception, to grasp the fundamental continuity of life’s change, to ‘plunge into duration’ through the elaboration of a style and method of philosophical intuition. In the intervening century, Bergson’s influence has waned and waxed. In recent decades his work has received renewed attention, due in no small part to its reappraisal by Gilles Deleuze. On the occasion of the centenary of his Oxford Clarendon lectures, this symposium will explore Bergson’s ongoing significance as a major philosophical figure. More specifically, by taking these lectures as a point of departure, the symposium will provide a forum within which to reflect upon the resources Bergson provides for thinking through the complex relations between time, space, and the apprehension of movement in the contemporary world.
Confirmed Speakers:
Professor Steven Brown, School of Management, University of Leicester
Dr JD Dewsbury, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Dr Peter Merriman, Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University
Professor John Mullarkey, Film and Television Studies, Kingston University, London
Others TBA
We welcome abstracts of 150 words for papers that engage with "The Perception of Change" lectures and/or Bergson’s philosophy more generally. Equally, proposals for artistic or performance based interventions that engage themes in Bergson’s work are also welcome. Scholars of PhD level and higher are encouraged to submit an abstract. The closing date for submission of abstracts is 1st of April 2011. Please send proposals/abstracts to Derek McCormack (derek.mccormack@ouce.ox.ac.uk) or Tim Schwanen (tim.schwanen@ouce.ox.ac.uk).
Confirmed Speakers:
Professor Steven Brown, School of Management, University of Leicester
Dr JD Dewsbury, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Dr Peter Merriman, Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University
Professor John Mullarkey, Film and Television Studies, Kingston University, London
Others TBA
We welcome abstracts of 150 words for papers that engage with "The Perception of Change" lectures and/or Bergson’s philosophy more generally. Equally, proposals for artistic or performance based interventions that engage themes in Bergson’s work are also welcome. Scholars of PhD level and higher are encouraged to submit an abstract. The closing date for submission of abstracts is 1st of April 2011. Please send proposals/abstracts to Derek McCormack (derek.mccormack@ouce.ox.ac.uk) or Tim Schwanen (tim.schwanen@ouce.ox.ac.uk).
Cfp: "Individuals – Individualism – Individuality," 17th International Philosophy Colloquium Evian, Evian (Lake Geneva), France, July 17-23, 2011.
Human beings encounter the world in a way that is characterized by confronting individual objects. Every object, as the specific object that it is, constitutes a unity that is not identical to any other object. Individuality is the principle of such unity – an immanent form that makes the object an individual, identical only to itself, and thus more than simply the sum of its parts. Accordingly, objects are individua, logically speaking: the elements of which the world is composed. In social ontology we are confronted with a more challenging concept of the individual, namely as the hallmark of our self-understanding as human beings. Human beings are individuals as persons. The principle of their individuality is not merely that of a continued existence in space and time, but instead the unity of their self-consciousness. Thus for persons it is not the case that individuality is exhausted by numerical oneness. Rather first and foremost the individuality of a person unfolds or is projected only insofar as the individual determines herself in and through her actions. The individual is what she makes herself. Against this background, we can view the concept of individuality as a critical concept, in two opposing ways: On the one hand one might argue that the nonidentical moment of individuality is coming under pressure in modern society. Critique in this context must defend individuality against the pressure to conform to conceptual and social systems. On the other hand critics of liberalism would argue that the very idea of individuality as the basis of modern society is itself problematic. The focus on the individual–so this critique goes–results in an atomism that loses sight of the larger social context, along with the social conditions of individuality. In a different perspective, individuality is regarded as an effect of domination or of techniques of subjectification. Accordingly, the job of critique is to disrupt the appearance of individuality in order to render the larger context intelligible.
How are these heterogeneous tendencies in the concept of the individual connected to one another? Are there criteria that would hold for this concept throughout its diverse areas of application? The 17th International Philosophy Colloquium in Evian invites philosophers to Lake Geneva to discuss the concept of individuality across the range of its manifold meanings. The International Philosophy Colloquium in Evian welcomes philosophers who are interested in engaging in discussion across traditional disciplinary boundaries. 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.
A detailed exposition of the topic and all relevant information concerning the character and history of the colloquium as well as matters of accommodation and costs can be found on our website:
http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/eviancolloquium/.
How are these heterogeneous tendencies in the concept of the individual connected to one another? Are there criteria that would hold for this concept throughout its diverse areas of application? The 17th International Philosophy Colloquium in Evian invites philosophers to Lake Geneva to discuss the concept of individuality across the range of its manifold meanings. The International Philosophy Colloquium in Evian welcomes philosophers who are interested in engaging in discussion across traditional disciplinary boundaries. 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.
A detailed exposition of the topic and all relevant information concerning the character and history of the colloquium as well as matters of accommodation and costs can be found on our website:
http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/eviancolloquium/.
Pub: KRITIKE 4.2 (2011).
Editorial: In this Issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy by Paolo A. Bolaños
Articles:
"Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics of Symbols: a Critical Dialectic of Suspicion and Faith" by Alexis Deodato S. Itao
"The Vanishing Mediator and Linguistic Hospitality" by Angelo Bottone
"Palahniuk’s Tyranny of Language and Ontological Minimalism" by Daniel Hourigan
"The Mystical Force of Money" by Edward Erikson
"Commodity, Sign, and Spectable: Retracing Baudrillard's Hyperreality" by Daryl Y. Mendoza
"Mediated Psychopathy: a Critical Discourse Analysis of Newspaper Representations of Aggression" by Roland Paulsen
"Rorty's Philosophy of Education: Between Orthodoxy and Vulgar Relativism" by Rhoderick John S. Abellanosa
"Kant's Reflections on the Unity of Consciousness, Time-Consciousness, and the Unconscious" by Ben Mijuskovic
"Nietzsche and Callicles on Happiness, Pleasure, and Power" by Kristian Urstad
"Narratives and the Dialogue of Cultures of Knowledge: a Perspective on the Experience of the West and Africa" by Uchenna Okeja
"Becoming an Expression in Deleuze: Two Cases from Turkey (Fazil Say and Misirli Ahmet)" by Cetin Balanuye
Denkbild:
"Elixirs and Fabulous Potions: On Critical Theory in the Philippines Part III (A Philosophical Fiction)" by F. P. A. Demeterio
Visit: http://www.kritike.org/current_issue.html.
Articles:
"Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics of Symbols: a Critical Dialectic of Suspicion and Faith" by Alexis Deodato S. Itao
"The Vanishing Mediator and Linguistic Hospitality" by Angelo Bottone
"Palahniuk’s Tyranny of Language and Ontological Minimalism" by Daniel Hourigan
"The Mystical Force of Money" by Edward Erikson
"Commodity, Sign, and Spectable: Retracing Baudrillard's Hyperreality" by Daryl Y. Mendoza
"Mediated Psychopathy: a Critical Discourse Analysis of Newspaper Representations of Aggression" by Roland Paulsen
"Rorty's Philosophy of Education: Between Orthodoxy and Vulgar Relativism" by Rhoderick John S. Abellanosa
"Kant's Reflections on the Unity of Consciousness, Time-Consciousness, and the Unconscious" by Ben Mijuskovic
"Nietzsche and Callicles on Happiness, Pleasure, and Power" by Kristian Urstad
"Narratives and the Dialogue of Cultures of Knowledge: a Perspective on the Experience of the West and Africa" by Uchenna Okeja
"Becoming an Expression in Deleuze: Two Cases from Turkey (Fazil Say and Misirli Ahmet)" by Cetin Balanuye
Denkbild:
"Elixirs and Fabulous Potions: On Critical Theory in the Philippines Part III (A Philosophical Fiction)" by F. P. A. Demeterio
Visit: http://www.kritike.org/current_issue.html.
Peucker, Henning. Review of Joaquim Siles i Borras, THE ETHICS OF HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGY. NDPR (March 2011).
Siles i Borràs, Joaquim. The Ethics of Husserl's Phenomenology: Responsibility and Ethical Life. London: Continuum, 2010.
First the bad news: this book is not, as the reader might well expect on the basis of its title, a book on Husserl's ethics. Joaquim Siles i Borràs does not investigate Husserl's ethics and does not even take into account the two volumes in the Husserliana series containing the majority of Husserl's ethical writings (28 and 37), which incidentally have not yet been translated into English. Instead, this book investigates the hidden ethos or moral attitude that underlies Husserl's phenomenology as a whole and its development. Thus, Siles i Borràs understands ethics not simply as dealing with moral normativity, but rather in a much broader sense. As a result, he attempts to show that Husserl's phenomenological epistemology in general and its basic methodological principle of presuppositionlessness in particular have ethical relevance. This basic principle calls for radical freedom from prejudice and dogmatism as an ethical demand, a demand that the later Husserl combines with an ideal of absolute and universal self-responsibility. Thus Siles i Borràs sees phenomenology as ultimately grounded in an ethical attitude of reflective self-responsibility. Ethics is therefore not secondary to epistemology but founds it on the basis of an ethical demand of rigor and radical self-responsibility. The thesis of this book is that this ethical demand -- it would perhaps be better to speak about the ethos of the phenomenological philosophy than of its ethics -- guides Husserl's work and drives its development of increasing radicalization from beginning to end. This leads Siles i Borràs to a set of slightly ambiguous claims, viz., that phenomenology (i) is "an ethical project" (5), (ii) is an "ethical life" (18, 49), (iii) is an "ethical inquiry" (19, 30) or -- perhaps most precisely -- (iv) is motivated by an ethical demand (19). . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23049.
First the bad news: this book is not, as the reader might well expect on the basis of its title, a book on Husserl's ethics. Joaquim Siles i Borràs does not investigate Husserl's ethics and does not even take into account the two volumes in the Husserliana series containing the majority of Husserl's ethical writings (28 and 37), which incidentally have not yet been translated into English. Instead, this book investigates the hidden ethos or moral attitude that underlies Husserl's phenomenology as a whole and its development. Thus, Siles i Borràs understands ethics not simply as dealing with moral normativity, but rather in a much broader sense. As a result, he attempts to show that Husserl's phenomenological epistemology in general and its basic methodological principle of presuppositionlessness in particular have ethical relevance. This basic principle calls for radical freedom from prejudice and dogmatism as an ethical demand, a demand that the later Husserl combines with an ideal of absolute and universal self-responsibility. Thus Siles i Borràs sees phenomenology as ultimately grounded in an ethical attitude of reflective self-responsibility. Ethics is therefore not secondary to epistemology but founds it on the basis of an ethical demand of rigor and radical self-responsibility. The thesis of this book is that this ethical demand -- it would perhaps be better to speak about the ethos of the phenomenological philosophy than of its ethics -- guides Husserl's work and drives its development of increasing radicalization from beginning to end. This leads Siles i Borràs to a set of slightly ambiguous claims, viz., that phenomenology (i) is "an ethical project" (5), (ii) is an "ethical life" (18, 49), (iii) is an "ethical inquiry" (19, 30) or -- perhaps most precisely -- (iv) is motivated by an ethical demand (19). . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23049.
Pub: INFORMAL LOGIC 31.1 (2011).
Table of Contents:
Articles:
"Functionalism, Normativity and the Concept of Argumentation" by Steven W Patterson
"Dialog Models for Persuasion Strategies of Quotation Manipulation" by Douglas Walton, Fabrizio Macagno
"Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence" by Christopher Lee Stephens
Book Reviews:
Book Review of Is that a Fact? by David Hitchcock
Book Review of Controversy and Confrontation, Relating Controversy Analysis With Argumentation Theory by Maria Navarro
Visit: http://ojs.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/informal_logic/issue/view/366.
Articles:
"Functionalism, Normativity and the Concept of Argumentation" by Steven W Patterson
"Dialog Models for Persuasion Strategies of Quotation Manipulation" by Douglas Walton, Fabrizio Macagno
"Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence" by Christopher Lee Stephens
Book Reviews:
Book Review of Is that a Fact? by David Hitchcock
Book Review of Controversy and Confrontation, Relating Controversy Analysis With Argumentation Theory by Maria Navarro
Visit: http://ojs.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/informal_logic/issue/view/366.
Sperry, Elizabeth A. Review of Marianne Janack, ed. FEMINIST INTERPRETATIONS OF RICHARD RORTY. NDPR (March 2011).
Janack, Marianne, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2010.
(A) It is objectively true that women should not be oppressed.
(B) We must work to overcome the oppression of women.
Are A and B opposed? These claims undeniably represent a difference in emphasis, one seeking to describe reality and the other to alter it. But if feminist progress is best obtained on a non-foundationalist approach to truth, the difference between A and B is substantial. Richard Rorty argued that neo-pragmatism better advanced feminism's aims than did representationalist philosophical approaches, and Marianne Janack has collected ten essays that examine the import of those arguments. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22913.
(A) It is objectively true that women should not be oppressed.
(B) We must work to overcome the oppression of women.
Are A and B opposed? These claims undeniably represent a difference in emphasis, one seeking to describe reality and the other to alter it. But if feminist progress is best obtained on a non-foundationalist approach to truth, the difference between A and B is substantial. Richard Rorty argued that neo-pragmatism better advanced feminism's aims than did representationalist philosophical approaches, and Marianne Janack has collected ten essays that examine the import of those arguments. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22913.
"Agnotology: Ways of Producing, Preserving, and Dealing with Ignorance," Bielefeld University, May 30-June 1, 2011.
Within the last 10 years historians of science such as Robert Proctor, Londa Schiebinger, Peter Galison, and Naomi Oreskes, have been promoting a new area of enquiry—Proctor calls it agnotology, the study of ignorance—which they suggest is of as much relevance to philosophers and social scientists and others as it is to historians. Indeed, the suggestion is that agnotology offers a new approach to the study of knowledge, an approach at least as complex and important as its more established sister, epistemology. The aim of this workshop is to map out this new ignorance-centered terrain in an effort to determine just what and where it might add to knowledge-centered terrains such as epistemology and philosophy of science and how valuable the additions might be. Topics will range over the naturalness and even inevitability of certain kinds of ignorance and the unnaturalness or deliberate production of other kinds—for example, on ignorance created through government secrecy and censorship, cultural prejudice, industry influence on scientific research, and so on—and the epistemological and societal implications of such ignorance. The ultimate goal is to make a significant contribution to this new kind of enquiry.
Speakers will include historians Norton Wise (UCLA), Naomi Oreskes (San Diego), Peter Galison (Harvard), and Robert Proctor (Stanford); sociologists Peter Weingart (Bielefeld) and Stefan Böschen (Augsburg); neurobiologist Stuart Firestein (Columbia); mathematician/philosopher of science Daniel Andler (Sorbonne); and philosophers Nancy Cartwright (LSE and San Diego), Philip Kitcher (Columbia), Pat Kitcher (Columbia), Hugh Lacey (Swarthmore and São Paulo), Kevin Elliott (South Carolina), Torsten Wilholt (Bielefeld), Martin Carrier (Bielefeld), and Janet Kourany (Notre Dame). The program will also feature a screening of Peter Galison and Robb Moss’s documentary film “Secrecy.”
Speakers will include historians Norton Wise (UCLA), Naomi Oreskes (San Diego), Peter Galison (Harvard), and Robert Proctor (Stanford); sociologists Peter Weingart (Bielefeld) and Stefan Böschen (Augsburg); neurobiologist Stuart Firestein (Columbia); mathematician/philosopher of science Daniel Andler (Sorbonne); and philosophers Nancy Cartwright (LSE and San Diego), Philip Kitcher (Columbia), Pat Kitcher (Columbia), Hugh Lacey (Swarthmore and São Paulo), Kevin Elliott (South Carolina), Torsten Wilholt (Bielefeld), Martin Carrier (Bielefeld), and Janet Kourany (Notre Dame). The program will also feature a screening of Peter Galison and Robb Moss’s documentary film “Secrecy.”
Pub: Jeremy Dunham, et al. IDEALISM: THE HISTORY OF A PHILOSOPHY.
Dunham, Jeremy, Ian Hamilton Grant, and Sean Watson. Idealism: the History of a Philosophy. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2011.
Contents:
Introduction: Why Idealism Matters Part 1: Ancient Idealism 1. Parmenides and the Birth of Ancient Idealism 2. Plato and Neoplatonism Part 2: Early Modern Idealism 3. Phenomenalism and Idealism I: Descartes and Malebranche 4. Phenomenalism and Idealism II: Leibniz and Berkeley Part 3: German Idealism 5. Immanuel Kant: Cognition, Freedom and Teleology 6. Fichte and the System of Freedom 7. Philosophy of Nature and the Birth of Absolute Idealism: Schelling 8. Hegel and Hegelianism: Mind, Nature and Logic Part 4: British Idealism 9. British Absolute Idealism: From Green to Bradley 10. Personal Idealism: From Ward to McTaggart 11. Naturalist Idealism: Bernard Bosanquet 12. Criticisms and Persistent Misconceptions of Idealism 13. Actual Occasions and Eternal Objects: The Process Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Part 5: Contemporary Idealisms 14. Autopoiesis: Idealist Biology I 15. Autonomous Agents: Idealist Biology II 16. Contemporary Philosophical Idealisms
Contents:
Introduction: Why Idealism Matters Part 1: Ancient Idealism 1. Parmenides and the Birth of Ancient Idealism 2. Plato and Neoplatonism Part 2: Early Modern Idealism 3. Phenomenalism and Idealism I: Descartes and Malebranche 4. Phenomenalism and Idealism II: Leibniz and Berkeley Part 3: German Idealism 5. Immanuel Kant: Cognition, Freedom and Teleology 6. Fichte and the System of Freedom 7. Philosophy of Nature and the Birth of Absolute Idealism: Schelling 8. Hegel and Hegelianism: Mind, Nature and Logic Part 4: British Idealism 9. British Absolute Idealism: From Green to Bradley 10. Personal Idealism: From Ward to McTaggart 11. Naturalist Idealism: Bernard Bosanquet 12. Criticisms and Persistent Misconceptions of Idealism 13. Actual Occasions and Eternal Objects: The Process Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Part 5: Contemporary Idealisms 14. Autopoiesis: Idealist Biology I 15. Autonomous Agents: Idealist Biology II 16. Contemporary Philosophical Idealisms
Arrow, Ruaridh. "Gene Sharp: Author of the NONVIOLENT REVOLUTION RULEBOOK." BBC NEWS February 21, 2011.
In an old townhouse in East Boston an elderly stooped man is tending rare orchids in his shabby office. His Labrador Sally lies on the floor between stacks of academic papers watching him as he shuffles past. This is Dr Gene Sharp the man now credited with the strategy behind the toppling of the Egyptian government.
Gene Sharp is the world's foremost expert on non-violent revolution. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages, his books slipped across borders and hidden from secret policemen all over the world.
As Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine fell to the colour revolutions which swept across Eastern Europe, each of the democratic movements paid tribute to Sharp's contribution, yet he remained largely unknown to the public.
Despite these successes and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2009 he has faced almost constant financial hardship and wild accusations of being a CIA front organisation. The Albert Einstein Institution based on the ground floor of his home is kept running by sheer force of personality and his fiercely loyal Executive Director, Jamila Raqib.
In 2009 I began filming a documentary following the impact of Sharp's work from his tranquil rooftop orchid house, across four continents and eventually to Tahrir square where I slept alongside protesters who read his work by torchlight in the shadow of tanks. . . .
Read more here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12522848.
Gene Sharp is the world's foremost expert on non-violent revolution. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages, his books slipped across borders and hidden from secret policemen all over the world.
As Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine fell to the colour revolutions which swept across Eastern Europe, each of the democratic movements paid tribute to Sharp's contribution, yet he remained largely unknown to the public.
Despite these successes and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2009 he has faced almost constant financial hardship and wild accusations of being a CIA front organisation. The Albert Einstein Institution based on the ground floor of his home is kept running by sheer force of personality and his fiercely loyal Executive Director, Jamila Raqib.
In 2009 I began filming a documentary following the impact of Sharp's work from his tranquil rooftop orchid house, across four continents and eventually to Tahrir square where I slept alongside protesters who read his work by torchlight in the shadow of tanks. . . .
Read more here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12522848.
Cfp: "Empowerment and the Sacred," Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Leeds, June 24-26, 2011.
Keynote Speakers:
Kim Knott (University of Leeds);
Bart Moore-Gilbert (Goldsmith’s University);
Neil L. Whitehead (University of Wisconsin)
Discussing international responses to the ‘resurgence of religion’ in our time, Talal Asad has argued: ‘If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable’ (Asad, 2006). In the ‘straightforward narratives’ of which Asad talks – and in Enlightenment discourses of ‘reason’, ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ more generally - religion, spirituality and the sacred have customarily been pitted against empowerment and emancipation, in political, cultural and intellectual terms. At this present historical juncture, then - when the secularist orientation of global futures is increasingly being called into question - a vital need presents itself for cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary debate about the role that the sacred has, does and can play in our understanding of the possibilities of personal and collective agency, power and change.
This conference will bring together scholars, professionals and arts-practitioners to investigate the ways in which sacred traditions - in diverse cultural and historical contexts - have shaped discourses, practices and narratives of empowerment, emancipation, social change, resistance and survival. We ask: How do different sacred discourses and practices frame and/or extend the possibilities of agency - socially, spiritually, imaginatively and corporeally? What variant conceptions of the spheres of activity have they produced – whether temporal, spatial, cultural, cosmic, public and/or private? And what role have religious and spiritual traditions played in political discourses and counter-discourses of class, gender, race, sexuality, cultural identity, humanism and human rights? Where sacred traditions have challenged the limits of secular reason, what alternatives have they suggested for cognition, representation, and even rationality? And how have they ‘empowered’ different artistic practices? Does the ‘commitment to social justice’ necessitate the ‘translation’ of sacred realities into ‘disenchanted histories’, in order to maintain dialogue with modern institutions (Dipesh Chakrabarty)? Or does a ‘conception of creativity in dialogue with the sacred’ enable an interrogation of ‘forbidden territories within ourselves’ as well as ‘the sacrosanct territories of our institutions’ (Wilson Harris)? Do sacred traditions themselves provide the premises for imaginations of cross-cultural and inter-faith community that differ from secular multiculturalism?
We welcome papers, especially from postgraduates and early career researchers, that address issues of the sacred and empowerment inrelation to topics which may include, but are by no means limited to:
•Concepts of agency: God, gods, spirits and the divine; thehuman/extra-human; identity and ‘imagined communities’; actors,heroes/anti-heroes, role-models and leaders; somatic/spiritual powers.
•Performances of power: artistic, cultural, political, ritual; protest and activism; violence/non-violence.
•Histories and historiography: colonialism and the postcolonial; globalization; materialism; memory.
•Sacred texts and authority: interpretation, translation,intertextuality; secular/religious criticism; freedom of speech, blasphemy, and taboo.
•Place, space and environment: sacred sites and land rights; nature, geography, topography, archaeology.
•Difference and dialogue: orthodoxy/the unorthodox; syncretism, inter-faith and cross-culturalism.
•Justice and judgment: ethics, morality, legality; sacred-secular/inter-faith arbitration.
•Secular/sacred powers and the state: private/public spheres; policy-making and pedagogy.
•Re/conceptualizations: ‘sacred’, ‘secular’, ‘post-secular’, ‘religion’, ‘magic’, ‘spirituality’, ‘myth’ etc.
•Action, motivation and practice: choice, desire, sacrifice and faith; freedom/constraint.
•Epistemologies and aesthetics: faith, rationalism and science; representation and the unrepresentable.
Please submit 300 word abstracts, accompanied by a 100 word biography, for 20 minute papers to the conference organisers, Shivani Rajkomar and Lori Shelbourn, atorganisers@empowermentandthesacred.com.
The deadline for submissions has been extended to the 30th of March 2011. Further details can be found on our website: http://www.empowermentandthesacred.com/.
Kim Knott (University of Leeds);
Bart Moore-Gilbert (Goldsmith’s University);
Neil L. Whitehead (University of Wisconsin)
Discussing international responses to the ‘resurgence of religion’ in our time, Talal Asad has argued: ‘If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable’ (Asad, 2006). In the ‘straightforward narratives’ of which Asad talks – and in Enlightenment discourses of ‘reason’, ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ more generally - religion, spirituality and the sacred have customarily been pitted against empowerment and emancipation, in political, cultural and intellectual terms. At this present historical juncture, then - when the secularist orientation of global futures is increasingly being called into question - a vital need presents itself for cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary debate about the role that the sacred has, does and can play in our understanding of the possibilities of personal and collective agency, power and change.
This conference will bring together scholars, professionals and arts-practitioners to investigate the ways in which sacred traditions - in diverse cultural and historical contexts - have shaped discourses, practices and narratives of empowerment, emancipation, social change, resistance and survival. We ask: How do different sacred discourses and practices frame and/or extend the possibilities of agency - socially, spiritually, imaginatively and corporeally? What variant conceptions of the spheres of activity have they produced – whether temporal, spatial, cultural, cosmic, public and/or private? And what role have religious and spiritual traditions played in political discourses and counter-discourses of class, gender, race, sexuality, cultural identity, humanism and human rights? Where sacred traditions have challenged the limits of secular reason, what alternatives have they suggested for cognition, representation, and even rationality? And how have they ‘empowered’ different artistic practices? Does the ‘commitment to social justice’ necessitate the ‘translation’ of sacred realities into ‘disenchanted histories’, in order to maintain dialogue with modern institutions (Dipesh Chakrabarty)? Or does a ‘conception of creativity in dialogue with the sacred’ enable an interrogation of ‘forbidden territories within ourselves’ as well as ‘the sacrosanct territories of our institutions’ (Wilson Harris)? Do sacred traditions themselves provide the premises for imaginations of cross-cultural and inter-faith community that differ from secular multiculturalism?
We welcome papers, especially from postgraduates and early career researchers, that address issues of the sacred and empowerment inrelation to topics which may include, but are by no means limited to:
•Concepts of agency: God, gods, spirits and the divine; thehuman/extra-human; identity and ‘imagined communities’; actors,heroes/anti-heroes, role-models and leaders; somatic/spiritual powers.
•Performances of power: artistic, cultural, political, ritual; protest and activism; violence/non-violence.
•Histories and historiography: colonialism and the postcolonial; globalization; materialism; memory.
•Sacred texts and authority: interpretation, translation,intertextuality; secular/religious criticism; freedom of speech, blasphemy, and taboo.
•Place, space and environment: sacred sites and land rights; nature, geography, topography, archaeology.
•Difference and dialogue: orthodoxy/the unorthodox; syncretism, inter-faith and cross-culturalism.
•Justice and judgment: ethics, morality, legality; sacred-secular/inter-faith arbitration.
•Secular/sacred powers and the state: private/public spheres; policy-making and pedagogy.
•Re/conceptualizations: ‘sacred’, ‘secular’, ‘post-secular’, ‘religion’, ‘magic’, ‘spirituality’, ‘myth’ etc.
•Action, motivation and practice: choice, desire, sacrifice and faith; freedom/constraint.
•Epistemologies and aesthetics: faith, rationalism and science; representation and the unrepresentable.
Please submit 300 word abstracts, accompanied by a 100 word biography, for 20 minute papers to the conference organisers, Shivani Rajkomar and Lori Shelbourn, atorganisers@empowermentandthesacred.com.
The deadline for submissions has been extended to the 30th of March 2011. Further details can be found on our website: http://www.empowermentandthesacred.com/.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Cfp: "Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics? Locations, Scholarship, and Discourse," Eighth Biennial Conference on Feminisms and Rhetorics, Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, University of Minnesota, Mankato, October 12-15, 2011.
The conference committee is strongly interdisciplinary and therefore our theme seeks to recognize the spaces between disciplines and communities. The conference theme is meant to acknowledge the academic and socio-discursive spaces that feminisms, and rhetorics on or about feminisms, inhabit. Major political, religious and social leaders have recently discussed feminism, including the Dalai Lama, but the discussion seems to revolve around cultural or essentialized discourses of feminism.
This spotlight on feminism is, of course, not new, and they ways feminism is engaged in public discourse is much different than that of academic discourse. However, in Rhetoric and Composition, we have seen many significant publications lately focusing on what it means to be a woman in the field, how to be a successful woman in the field, and the connections between feminist theory and feminist pedagogy.
We seek proposals that speak to the challenges and diversities of feminist rhetoric and discourse, in public and private life, in the academy, and in the media. We welcome proposals on topics that significantly engage disciplines other than Rhetoric and Composition, and that have consequences for communities located outside of the academy.
Questions to consider include:
What are the discourses of feminism?
Where are they located?
What does feminist scholarship look like in the 21st century? What is the politic of feminist scholarship?
How does feminist inquiry impact our understanding of scholarship?
What are the challenges faced by feminists inside and outside of the academy? Where do we find feminist rhetorics?
How do we understand the function of feminist rhetoric?
How has interdisciplinarity impacted the feminist agenda?
How do we understand the politics of inclusion in 21st century feminism?
How might we add to Joanna Russ’ invective: “She wrote it, BUT.?”
In the past few years, women have made, yet again, publicly recognized strides in breaking through a variety of glass ceilings, however, current events in places like Arizona, illustrate the necessity of a renewed feminist politic. The recursive nature of feminism is not new, and is, in fact, embodied in the rhetorical struggle for place in dominant discourse.
Visit: http://femrhet.cwshrc.org/.
This spotlight on feminism is, of course, not new, and they ways feminism is engaged in public discourse is much different than that of academic discourse. However, in Rhetoric and Composition, we have seen many significant publications lately focusing on what it means to be a woman in the field, how to be a successful woman in the field, and the connections between feminist theory and feminist pedagogy.
We seek proposals that speak to the challenges and diversities of feminist rhetoric and discourse, in public and private life, in the academy, and in the media. We welcome proposals on topics that significantly engage disciplines other than Rhetoric and Composition, and that have consequences for communities located outside of the academy.
Questions to consider include:
What are the discourses of feminism?
Where are they located?
What does feminist scholarship look like in the 21st century? What is the politic of feminist scholarship?
How does feminist inquiry impact our understanding of scholarship?
What are the challenges faced by feminists inside and outside of the academy? Where do we find feminist rhetorics?
How do we understand the function of feminist rhetoric?
How has interdisciplinarity impacted the feminist agenda?
How do we understand the politics of inclusion in 21st century feminism?
How might we add to Joanna Russ’ invective: “She wrote it, BUT.?”
In the past few years, women have made, yet again, publicly recognized strides in breaking through a variety of glass ceilings, however, current events in places like Arizona, illustrate the necessity of a renewed feminist politic. The recursive nature of feminism is not new, and is, in fact, embodied in the rhetorical struggle for place in dominant discourse.
Visit: http://femrhet.cwshrc.org/.
Cfp: "Hegel and Capitalism," 22nd Biennial Meeting, Hegel Society of America, DePaul University, October 5-7, 2012.
The conference will cover all aspects of the theme “Hegel and Capitalism,” broadly understood. We invite papers that address this theme historically, systematically, or with reference to current questions and issues. Papers that interpret, engage, or apply Hegel are welcome. Papers that investigate the conference topic in new ways are encouraged.
Submitted papers are limited to 6,000 words, and should be formatted for blind review and accompanied by an abstract of no more than 300 words. Papers must be submitted at this length and later adjustments must remain within this limit. Papers submitted must be complete essays; proposals are not acceptable. All papers should be in English. Although papers presented at meetings of the Hegel Society of America are usually published as a collection of essays, publication cannot be guaranteed. By submitting a paper, however, an author of a paper accepted for the program agrees to reserve publication for the HSA proceedings. Final decision as to publication remains dependent on the results of peer and publisher review.
Please send papers to: Andrew Buchwalter, Program Chair, abuchwal@unf.edu.
Submitted papers are limited to 6,000 words, and should be formatted for blind review and accompanied by an abstract of no more than 300 words. Papers must be submitted at this length and later adjustments must remain within this limit. Papers submitted must be complete essays; proposals are not acceptable. All papers should be in English. Although papers presented at meetings of the Hegel Society of America are usually published as a collection of essays, publication cannot be guaranteed. By submitting a paper, however, an author of a paper accepted for the program agrees to reserve publication for the HSA proceedings. Final decision as to publication remains dependent on the results of peer and publisher review.
Please send papers to: Andrew Buchwalter, Program Chair, abuchwal@unf.edu.
Fallon, Stephen M. Review of Sanford Budick, KANT AND MILTON. NDPR (April 2011).
Budick, Sanford. Kant and Milton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010.
You may be one of the many readers who do a double-take when encountering the title of Sanford Budick's Kant and Milton. I predict that Kant scholars will put down the book convinced that Milton is a seminal figure for Kant, and Miltonists will put it down heartened by this evidence of the poet's influence and armed with a new way of thinking about one of the central debates in Milton studies today, concerning the meaning of Samson Agonistes. (A preliminary word to philosophers: caveat emptor; as a Milton scholar with an interest in the history of philosophy, I cannot claim anything like Budick's intimate knowledge of Kant.)
Budick, a prominent, highly regarded Milton scholar, demonstrates an impressive philosophical sophistication. The second surprise, after the title, is that Budick, a professor of English at Hebrew University, engages intensively with Kant scholarship and only minimally with Milton scholarship. He argues that Kant, who along with other eighteenth-century German intellectuals knew Milton well and valued him highly, singles out the poet as the preeminent poet of the sublime and, as such, as a crucial predecessor making possible Kant's understanding and articulation of the attainment of freedom and moral autonomy. For Budick's Kant, aesthetics and ethics are closely related. If Budick's arguments are right, then Kant's readers will have a new resource for tracing the development of the categorical imperative, and Miltonists will have a new and powerful lens to understand Milton.
In six chapters Budick traces the development of Kant's moral and aesthetic thought as it develops out of the crucible of the constellation of German Miltonism (Budick employs a methodology of Konstellationsforschung pioneered by Dieter Heinrich), particularly in agonistic dialogue with Herder. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23249.
You may be one of the many readers who do a double-take when encountering the title of Sanford Budick's Kant and Milton. I predict that Kant scholars will put down the book convinced that Milton is a seminal figure for Kant, and Miltonists will put it down heartened by this evidence of the poet's influence and armed with a new way of thinking about one of the central debates in Milton studies today, concerning the meaning of Samson Agonistes. (A preliminary word to philosophers: caveat emptor; as a Milton scholar with an interest in the history of philosophy, I cannot claim anything like Budick's intimate knowledge of Kant.)
Budick, a prominent, highly regarded Milton scholar, demonstrates an impressive philosophical sophistication. The second surprise, after the title, is that Budick, a professor of English at Hebrew University, engages intensively with Kant scholarship and only minimally with Milton scholarship. He argues that Kant, who along with other eighteenth-century German intellectuals knew Milton well and valued him highly, singles out the poet as the preeminent poet of the sublime and, as such, as a crucial predecessor making possible Kant's understanding and articulation of the attainment of freedom and moral autonomy. For Budick's Kant, aesthetics and ethics are closely related. If Budick's arguments are right, then Kant's readers will have a new resource for tracing the development of the categorical imperative, and Miltonists will have a new and powerful lens to understand Milton.
In six chapters Budick traces the development of Kant's moral and aesthetic thought as it develops out of the crucible of the constellation of German Miltonism (Budick employs a methodology of Konstellationsforschung pioneered by Dieter Heinrich), particularly in agonistic dialogue with Herder. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23249.
"Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine," Uppsala University, May 18-21, 2011.
Phenomenology and much feminist theory and philosophy investigate lived experiences and affirm the role of embodiment for human meaning-making. Furthermore, both unveil and scrutinize taken-for-granted and in this sense ‘hidden’ assumptions, beliefs and norms that we live by, that we strengthen by repeated actions and that we also resist, challenge and question. Whereas there is a growing area of feminist phenomenology dealing with concrete issues of embodiment and situatedness surprisingly little work focuses on topics/phenomena related to medicine and health. Whereas phenomenologists have made valuable contributions to the analysis of the nature of medicine, the meaning of illness and health as well as clinical practice, there have been comparably few analyses of such issues that combine insights from feminist theory and philosophy with phenomenology.
This conference is based on the conviction that facticities of human life, such as birth, illness, sex and death benefit from being examined in the light of feminist theory and phenomenology. More and more often, these facticities are managed in medicine, through medical treatment and medical technology. We want to approach both the facticities of human existence and the different ways in which these are being medicalized through the perspectives of feminist phenomenology. By doing this we want to bring to light the role of bodies in different human experiences and in subjective and intersubjective meaning-making. We want to examine taken-for-granted assumptions about bodies that inform and structure medical practices and lived experiences in medicine as well as in everyday life. We further want to raise questions of how the relation between phenomenology and feminism can be understood in a fruitful and mutually enriching way and how phenomenon such as birth, illness, sex and ageing can and does inform feminist phenomenology as a theoretical framework.
We welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives dealing with the overarching topic of feminist phenomenology and medicine. Topics can include (but are not limited to) phenomenological analyses and/or approaches to:
- ethics
- suffering and pain
- disability
- birth and death
- embodiment of subjectivity
- sexualities and sexual identities
- medical practices
- medical diagnosis
- bodily movement
- health
Visit: http://www.genna.gender.uu.se/conferences-events/conferences-workshops/femphenmed/.
This conference is based on the conviction that facticities of human life, such as birth, illness, sex and death benefit from being examined in the light of feminist theory and phenomenology. More and more often, these facticities are managed in medicine, through medical treatment and medical technology. We want to approach both the facticities of human existence and the different ways in which these are being medicalized through the perspectives of feminist phenomenology. By doing this we want to bring to light the role of bodies in different human experiences and in subjective and intersubjective meaning-making. We want to examine taken-for-granted assumptions about bodies that inform and structure medical practices and lived experiences in medicine as well as in everyday life. We further want to raise questions of how the relation between phenomenology and feminism can be understood in a fruitful and mutually enriching way and how phenomenon such as birth, illness, sex and ageing can and does inform feminist phenomenology as a theoretical framework.
We welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives dealing with the overarching topic of feminist phenomenology and medicine. Topics can include (but are not limited to) phenomenological analyses and/or approaches to:
- ethics
- suffering and pain
- disability
- birth and death
- embodiment of subjectivity
- sexualities and sexual identities
- medical practices
- medical diagnosis
- bodily movement
- health
Visit: http://www.genna.gender.uu.se/conferences-events/conferences-workshops/femphenmed/.
Gooding-Williams, Robert. Review of Paul S. Loeb, THE DEATH OF NIETZSCHE'S ZARATHRUSTRA. NDPR (April 2011).
Loeb, Paul S. The Death of Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Cambridge: CUP, 2010.
Paul Loeb's The Death of Nietzsche's Zarathustra is a superb contribution to the philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche's notoriously most inaccessible book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (hereafter TSZ). Through careful exegesis of some of TSZ's most complicated and densely symbolic passages, and through rigorous, critical analysis of all the important secondary literature on the thought of the eternal recurrence, Loeb's book presents an ingeniously argued and richly insightful interpretation of Nietzsche's literary fiction that pointedly and often persuasively takes issue with each of the major TSZ commentaries to have been published within the last twenty-five years or so.
Loeb's central project is twofold: first, to advance a "performative understanding" of the "clue" Nietzsche offers his readers for interpreting TSZ -- namely, that the thought of eternal recurrence is the book's fundamental conception[2]; and second, to rely on that clue to solve four of TSZ's most prominent "riddles" or "interpretive difficulties" (1, 6).
By "performative understanding," Loeb has in mind the thesis that the narrative of TSZ embodies and enacts the thought of recurrence and, more specifically, that it displays "the unconditioned and endlessly repeated circular course of Zarathustra's life" (2). On the basis of this understanding, the riddles Loeb purports to solve include 1) the question of the relative significance of Parts III and IV of TSZ; 2) the difficulty of making sense of the various dreams, visions, allegories, and symbols that animate TSZ; 3) the problem of understanding the relationship between Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and his concepts of the superhuman and the will to power; and, finally, the issue of whether the thought of recurrence is to be understood as a thought of total, unconditional affirmation, or as a selective thought that excludes the recurrence of the so-called "small man."
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23270.
Paul Loeb's The Death of Nietzsche's Zarathustra is a superb contribution to the philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche's notoriously most inaccessible book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (hereafter TSZ). Through careful exegesis of some of TSZ's most complicated and densely symbolic passages, and through rigorous, critical analysis of all the important secondary literature on the thought of the eternal recurrence, Loeb's book presents an ingeniously argued and richly insightful interpretation of Nietzsche's literary fiction that pointedly and often persuasively takes issue with each of the major TSZ commentaries to have been published within the last twenty-five years or so.
Loeb's central project is twofold: first, to advance a "performative understanding" of the "clue" Nietzsche offers his readers for interpreting TSZ -- namely, that the thought of eternal recurrence is the book's fundamental conception[2]; and second, to rely on that clue to solve four of TSZ's most prominent "riddles" or "interpretive difficulties" (1, 6).
By "performative understanding," Loeb has in mind the thesis that the narrative of TSZ embodies and enacts the thought of recurrence and, more specifically, that it displays "the unconditioned and endlessly repeated circular course of Zarathustra's life" (2). On the basis of this understanding, the riddles Loeb purports to solve include 1) the question of the relative significance of Parts III and IV of TSZ; 2) the difficulty of making sense of the various dreams, visions, allegories, and symbols that animate TSZ; 3) the problem of understanding the relationship between Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and his concepts of the superhuman and the will to power; and, finally, the issue of whether the thought of recurrence is to be understood as a thought of total, unconditional affirmation, or as a selective thought that excludes the recurrence of the so-called "small man."
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23270.
"Creation, Creatureliness, and Creativity: the Human Place in the Natural World," Annual Conference, Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology, Loyola Marymount University, April 20-22, 2012.
Keynote Speakers:
Bruce Foltz (Eckerd College)
Janet Martin Soskice (Cambridge University)
Norman Wirzba (Duke Divinity School)
SCPT's 2012 conference takes today’s ecological crises as its point of departure. We invite theological and philosophical contributions informed by continental traditions such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, eco-feminism, post-structuralism, post-colonial studies, deconstruction, and social and deep ecology that help us understand and implement a sustainable future together. Authors may submit papers that address ecological issues head on, as well as those that tackle philosophical and theological themes that underlie these issues.
The Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology seeks to promote inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and theology. For more information about SCPT, visit http://www.scptonline.org/.
Bruce Foltz (Eckerd College)
Janet Martin Soskice (Cambridge University)
Norman Wirzba (Duke Divinity School)
SCPT's 2012 conference takes today’s ecological crises as its point of departure. We invite theological and philosophical contributions informed by continental traditions such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, eco-feminism, post-structuralism, post-colonial studies, deconstruction, and social and deep ecology that help us understand and implement a sustainable future together. Authors may submit papers that address ecological issues head on, as well as those that tackle philosophical and theological themes that underlie these issues.
The Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology seeks to promote inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and theology. For more information about SCPT, visit http://www.scptonline.org/.
Copenhagen Summer School in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind, Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, August 8-12, 2011.
This summer school is an initiative of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology. The course will provide essential insights into central themes within the philosophy of mind, viewed from a phenomenological perspective. Topics include: transcendental philosophy, intentionality, perception, empathy, and the enactive mind. The course will consist of a mixture of lectures and seminars (25 hours total), aimed at advanced MA students and PhD students.
Speakers include: Prof. Jocelyn Benoist (Sorbonne, Paris), Prof. Shaun Gallagher (Memphis), Prof. Camilla Serck-Hanssen (Oslo), Prof. Dan Zahavi (Copenhagen), Dr. Søren Overgaard (Copenhagen)
Visit http://cfs.ku.dk/summerschool/.
Speakers include: Prof. Jocelyn Benoist (Sorbonne, Paris), Prof. Shaun Gallagher (Memphis), Prof. Camilla Serck-Hanssen (Oslo), Prof. Dan Zahavi (Copenhagen), Dr. Søren Overgaard (Copenhagen)
Visit http://cfs.ku.dk/summerschool/.
Cfp: "German Idealism Today," Sixth international Conference, Nordic Network for German Idealism (NNGI), Aarhus University, October 31-November 2, 2011.
Speakers:
Marcus Gabriel (Universität Bonn)
Sebastian Gardner (University College London)
Arne Grøn (University of Copenhagen)
Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Stephen Houlgate (University of Warwick)
Axel Hutter (Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität, München)
Terry Pinkard (Georgetown University)
Robert Pippin (University of Chicago)
Sebastian Rödl (Universität Basel)
Camilla Serck-Hansen (University of Oslo)
Günther Zöller (Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität, München)
Alenka Zupančič (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana)
Visit: http://nngi.org/?p=434.
Marcus Gabriel (Universität Bonn)
Sebastian Gardner (University College London)
Arne Grøn (University of Copenhagen)
Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Stephen Houlgate (University of Warwick)
Axel Hutter (Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität, München)
Terry Pinkard (Georgetown University)
Robert Pippin (University of Chicago)
Sebastian Rödl (Universität Basel)
Camilla Serck-Hansen (University of Oslo)
Günther Zöller (Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität, München)
Alenka Zupančič (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana)
Visit: http://nngi.org/?p=434.
Speight, Allen. Review of Benjamin Rutter, HEGEL ON THE MODERN ARTS. NDPR (April 2011).
Rutter, Benjamin. Hegel on the Modern Arts. Cambridge: CUP, 2010.
Hegel's aesthetics has, especially since Henrich and Danto, often been viewed as heralding the "end of art." Those who have taken pains to look more carefully at the text of Hegel's Lectures on Fine Arts have rightly pointed out that Hegel's claims seem to be more precise than this -- that Hegel does not in fact declare the "end of art" in the sense of its death but rather insists that (in T. M. Knox's translation) "the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit." The modern aesthetic issue of concern for an Hegelian then, presumably, is not a matter of art's ceasing to exist (although Hegel does sometimes make it sound as though he might think this is not an impossibility -- as for example, when he huffs that with the German poet Jean Paul "art actually ends"), but whether art can matter any longer for those of us who inhabit a modern, rationalistic and bourgeois age.
But those who have attempted to rescue a Hegel whose aesthetics might still be philosophically relevant for at least some of the significant developments in art and literature since his death in 1831 have not always taken up the broader philosophical question about how and why art can still matter (or even -- as is the bolder claim of this book -- be indispensable) for Hegel. And Hegel's defenders as well as his critics have also had the further limitation of resting their claims about what Hegel actually said in his lectures on what remains to this day an unclear textual basis. The most widely used published English version of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics is Knox's two-volume Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, but Knox relied on an edition prepared by Hegel's student H. G. Hotho, and contemporary scholars have been at pains to use the existing transcriptions of those lectures in an effort to pare off the authentic words of Hegel himself from the accretions of his disciple.
English-speaking philosophers interested in Hegel's various Berlin lecture series on topics in the philosophy of spirit have had access for years to good translations of the various Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, thanks to the editorial work of Jaeschke, Hodgson, and others, but there exists to this day no such opportunity for those interested in Hegel's aesthetics. (The situation is in fact worse than this, since not even all of the aesthetics lecture series transcripts have been published yet in German.)
One of the best features of Benjamin Rutter's new book on Hegel's aesthetics is that he has taken care to examine the development of Hegel's views about modern art over the series of lectures Hegel gave on the topic during the 1820s. The conclusions Rutter draws based on his textual work with the German transcripts of the lectures -- that Hegel, for example, was more pessimistic about art's role in modern life in the early part of that decade but tended to soften his views in the final lecture series -- are, moreover, importantly situated in the context of a fine-grained account of Hegel's treatment of various achievements within the artistic genres that he thought mattered most in modernity (certain forms of lyric poetry and Dutch genre painting, especially). . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23290.
Hegel's aesthetics has, especially since Henrich and Danto, often been viewed as heralding the "end of art." Those who have taken pains to look more carefully at the text of Hegel's Lectures on Fine Arts have rightly pointed out that Hegel's claims seem to be more precise than this -- that Hegel does not in fact declare the "end of art" in the sense of its death but rather insists that (in T. M. Knox's translation) "the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit." The modern aesthetic issue of concern for an Hegelian then, presumably, is not a matter of art's ceasing to exist (although Hegel does sometimes make it sound as though he might think this is not an impossibility -- as for example, when he huffs that with the German poet Jean Paul "art actually ends"), but whether art can matter any longer for those of us who inhabit a modern, rationalistic and bourgeois age.
But those who have attempted to rescue a Hegel whose aesthetics might still be philosophically relevant for at least some of the significant developments in art and literature since his death in 1831 have not always taken up the broader philosophical question about how and why art can still matter (or even -- as is the bolder claim of this book -- be indispensable) for Hegel. And Hegel's defenders as well as his critics have also had the further limitation of resting their claims about what Hegel actually said in his lectures on what remains to this day an unclear textual basis. The most widely used published English version of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics is Knox's two-volume Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, but Knox relied on an edition prepared by Hegel's student H. G. Hotho, and contemporary scholars have been at pains to use the existing transcriptions of those lectures in an effort to pare off the authentic words of Hegel himself from the accretions of his disciple.
English-speaking philosophers interested in Hegel's various Berlin lecture series on topics in the philosophy of spirit have had access for years to good translations of the various Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, thanks to the editorial work of Jaeschke, Hodgson, and others, but there exists to this day no such opportunity for those interested in Hegel's aesthetics. (The situation is in fact worse than this, since not even all of the aesthetics lecture series transcripts have been published yet in German.)
One of the best features of Benjamin Rutter's new book on Hegel's aesthetics is that he has taken care to examine the development of Hegel's views about modern art over the series of lectures Hegel gave on the topic during the 1820s. The conclusions Rutter draws based on his textual work with the German transcripts of the lectures -- that Hegel, for example, was more pessimistic about art's role in modern life in the early part of that decade but tended to soften his views in the final lecture series -- are, moreover, importantly situated in the context of a fine-grained account of Hegel's treatment of various achievements within the artistic genres that he thought mattered most in modernity (certain forms of lyric poetry and Dutch genre painting, especially). . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23290.
Cfp: "Between Reason and Unreason: Nietzsche – The Enlightenment – Romanticism," Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations, Queen Mary College, University of London, September 9–11, 2011.
18th International Conference, Friedrich Nietzsche Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
According to some critics, Nietzsche opts out of the dialectic of Enlightenment and appeals in Romantic fashion to the Other of reason, whether in the form of the ancient Greek Dionysian or archaic ideals of nobility. Others highlight the ways in which Nietzsche’s unique style of critique deploys reason against the claims of Enlightenment reason, undermining the latter from within so as to extend our concept of reason. The purpose of this conference is to examine the place of Nietzsche’s thought between Reason and Unreason by focusing on its relation to the modern traditions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. What is Nietzsche’s relation to the Enlightenment in the different phases of his work? Is he, as critic of Enlightenment reason, a representative of the counter-Enlightenment – or rather of an intensified form of Enlightenment critique? In what sense(s) can Nietzsche be characterised as a Romantic? Is his recourse to art an appeal to Other of reason – or is art rather the medium in which the claims of Enlightenment reason can be realised? In line with the venue of the conference at the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations, special attention will be given to Nietzsche’s relations to the German and Anglo-Saxon traditions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
The 2011 conference will follow the standard FNS conference format of five parallel sessions and five plenary sessions with well-known speakers in the field. In addition, it will include the 2nd international workshop on Nietzsche and Kant, on the topic "Nietzsche and Kantian Aesthetics". This will involve invited speakers, but there will also be space for other relevant papers submitted through this call for papers.
Confirmed plenary speakers:
Marco Brusotti (TU Berlin / Università del Salento, Lecce, Italy)
Rüdiger Görner (Director of Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations, Queen Mary)
Beatrix Himmelmann(University of Trømso, Norway)
Nicholas Martin (University of Birmingham)
The Friedrich Nietzsche Society welcomes proposals for 30-minute papers on all topics bearing on the conference theme, including the following:
* Nietzsche and Reason / Nietzsche and the Irrational
* Nietzsche’s relation to both the Enlightenment and Romanticism
* Nietzsche and the Enlightenment / Nietzsche contra the Enlightenment
* Nietzsche and Romanticism / Nietzsche as Romantic
Email: friedrich.nietzsche.society@gmail.com.
According to some critics, Nietzsche opts out of the dialectic of Enlightenment and appeals in Romantic fashion to the Other of reason, whether in the form of the ancient Greek Dionysian or archaic ideals of nobility. Others highlight the ways in which Nietzsche’s unique style of critique deploys reason against the claims of Enlightenment reason, undermining the latter from within so as to extend our concept of reason. The purpose of this conference is to examine the place of Nietzsche’s thought between Reason and Unreason by focusing on its relation to the modern traditions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. What is Nietzsche’s relation to the Enlightenment in the different phases of his work? Is he, as critic of Enlightenment reason, a representative of the counter-Enlightenment – or rather of an intensified form of Enlightenment critique? In what sense(s) can Nietzsche be characterised as a Romantic? Is his recourse to art an appeal to Other of reason – or is art rather the medium in which the claims of Enlightenment reason can be realised? In line with the venue of the conference at the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations, special attention will be given to Nietzsche’s relations to the German and Anglo-Saxon traditions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
The 2011 conference will follow the standard FNS conference format of five parallel sessions and five plenary sessions with well-known speakers in the field. In addition, it will include the 2nd international workshop on Nietzsche and Kant, on the topic "Nietzsche and Kantian Aesthetics". This will involve invited speakers, but there will also be space for other relevant papers submitted through this call for papers.
Confirmed plenary speakers:
Marco Brusotti (TU Berlin / Università del Salento, Lecce, Italy)
Rüdiger Görner (Director of Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations, Queen Mary)
Beatrix Himmelmann(University of Trømso, Norway)
Nicholas Martin (University of Birmingham)
The Friedrich Nietzsche Society welcomes proposals for 30-minute papers on all topics bearing on the conference theme, including the following:
* Nietzsche and Reason / Nietzsche and the Irrational
* Nietzsche’s relation to both the Enlightenment and Romanticism
* Nietzsche and the Enlightenment / Nietzsche contra the Enlightenment
* Nietzsche and Romanticism / Nietzsche as Romantic
Email: friedrich.nietzsche.society@gmail.com.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Mendieta, Eduardo. Review of David Ingram, HABERMAS. NDPR (February 2011).
Ingram, David. Habermas: Introduction and Analysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010.
David Ingram is no neophyte to either Habermas or Frankfurt School Critical Theory. A very good argument can be made, in fact, that Ingram belongs to what has been called 'Third Generation Critical Theory.' His 1987 book, Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason, was indispensable for a new generation of scholars trying to make sense of Habermas' two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1984). Over the last two decades, in addition to editing volumes of the key writings by Frankfurt School critical theorists, he has written a series of books on democracy, rights, globalization, and cosmopolitanism that have traced a distinctive contribution to a more radical understanding of deliberative democracy. Such a sustained engagement with Habermas' work, in particular, and Critical Theory, in general, explains why this book is not simply an introduction.
In fact, more than an "introduction and analysis," it can be said that it is also an immanently critical assessment of Habermas' transformation of Critical Theory. In this sense, in as much as Critical Theory is a tradition whose major task is the immanent critique of reason, Ingram's book is also a contribution to the Critical Theory tradition. Ingram's book is without question the most comprehensive presentation of Habermas' corpus to date. The book is made up of eleven dense yet also clear chapters on different aspects of Habermas' thinking. Ingram is right to claim that at the heart of Habermas' system is his conception of universal pragmatics (p. 72). Universal pragmatics is the caldron in which the linguist turn of early twentieth-century philosophy was melted with action theory and functional systems analysis to provide us with a thoroughly linguistic understanding of reason. At the heart of universal pragmatics is Habermas' analysis of speech acts and the different validity claims that are raised in their performance. The chapters in which Ingram explains and reconstructs Habermas' analysis of the linguistic character of human rationality are surely some of the best I have read, not simply for how comprehensive they are but also because they do not shy away from explicit discussion of objections and problems that Habermas has either failed to address or has subsequently addressed. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22890.
David Ingram is no neophyte to either Habermas or Frankfurt School Critical Theory. A very good argument can be made, in fact, that Ingram belongs to what has been called 'Third Generation Critical Theory.' His 1987 book, Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason, was indispensable for a new generation of scholars trying to make sense of Habermas' two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1984). Over the last two decades, in addition to editing volumes of the key writings by Frankfurt School critical theorists, he has written a series of books on democracy, rights, globalization, and cosmopolitanism that have traced a distinctive contribution to a more radical understanding of deliberative democracy. Such a sustained engagement with Habermas' work, in particular, and Critical Theory, in general, explains why this book is not simply an introduction.
In fact, more than an "introduction and analysis," it can be said that it is also an immanently critical assessment of Habermas' transformation of Critical Theory. In this sense, in as much as Critical Theory is a tradition whose major task is the immanent critique of reason, Ingram's book is also a contribution to the Critical Theory tradition. Ingram's book is without question the most comprehensive presentation of Habermas' corpus to date. The book is made up of eleven dense yet also clear chapters on different aspects of Habermas' thinking. Ingram is right to claim that at the heart of Habermas' system is his conception of universal pragmatics (p. 72). Universal pragmatics is the caldron in which the linguist turn of early twentieth-century philosophy was melted with action theory and functional systems analysis to provide us with a thoroughly linguistic understanding of reason. At the heart of universal pragmatics is Habermas' analysis of speech acts and the different validity claims that are raised in their performance. The chapters in which Ingram explains and reconstructs Habermas' analysis of the linguistic character of human rationality are surely some of the best I have read, not simply for how comprehensive they are but also because they do not shy away from explicit discussion of objections and problems that Habermas has either failed to address or has subsequently addressed. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22890.
Snow, Dale E. Review of Yolanda Estes, et al., eds. J. G. FICHTE AND THE ATHEISM DISPUTE. NDPR (March 2011).
Estes, Yolanda, and Curtis Bowman, eds. J. G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798-1800). London: Ashgate, 2010.
The atheism dispute (Atheismusstreit) riveted all of learned Germany in 1799, and its consequences reverberated for many more years. The precipitating event seems curiously out of proportion to the response it engendered: Fichte, who was co-editor of the Philosophisches Journal, agreed to print an essay by F. K. Forberg entitled "On the Concept of Religion." Fearing that readers could misunderstand Forberg's ideas as an expression of his views, Fichte included an essay of his own, "On the Ground of Our belief in a Divine World-Governance." As a direct result, the journal was put under an edict of confiscation; Fichte was accused of atheism, officially censured by the authorities, and ultimately resigned from his professorship at the University of Jena.
It was in all likelihood the anonymous publication of a widely circulated pamphlet, "A Father's Letter to his Student Son about Fichte's and Forberg's Atheism," which initially drew public attention to the essays. The editors describe it accurately as "a maudlin tract" (7). It contains a litany of accusations of the ways in which Fichte's and Forberg's ideas were certain to result in corruption of the youth: they stood for atheism, political rebelliousness, and even moral licentiousness. This unfavorable publicity was more than sufficient to touch off a firestorm of criticism of Fichte, his philosophy, and his person. Fichte thought of and presented himself as Kant's heir, and for many Kant's signature achievement had been the overturning of the traditional relationship between faith and reason. This made it plausible to quickly extend the suspicion of atheism to Fichte's best-known work, The Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) as well. Numerous publications for and against Fichte appeared in rapid succession, including F. H Jacobi's notorious "open letter to Fichte," which declared Fichte's philosophy to be tantamount to "nihilism." This is thought to be the first use of this term. The larger significance of the atheism dispute, then, can be seen in the way in which it led into a debate over the values of the German Enlightenment itself, much as the pantheism controversy of the 1780s had done.
For both Fichte's contemporaries and today's scholars, the atheism dispute and its aftermath threatened to overshadow all the other achievements of Fichte's Jena period. A recent remark of Allen Wood's is typical of this view: "The 1790s were for Fichte (and modern philosophy) a brief era of astonishing philosophical achievement. But the tale as a whole is far darker and more troubling, even tragic." Daniel Breazeale presents a more measured account in his Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings; however, his book, focused as it is on the Jena Wissenschaftslehre, contains none of the atheism controversy texts. Thus there is a real need for the collection and translation of the relevant materials necessary for the comprehension of this extraordinary episode in the history of philosophy. Even in German, it is difficult to find a readily accessible comparable compilation.
The present volume is a near-masterpiece of careful reconstruction and contextualization of the unfolding of the atheism dispute as reflected in the essays, letters, edicts, and petitions which combine to tell this remarkable story. All of the texts in this volume are appearing in English translation for the first time. The only major atheism controversy text which previously existed in English translation is Jacobi's "open letter" to Fichte. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22911.
The atheism dispute (Atheismusstreit) riveted all of learned Germany in 1799, and its consequences reverberated for many more years. The precipitating event seems curiously out of proportion to the response it engendered: Fichte, who was co-editor of the Philosophisches Journal, agreed to print an essay by F. K. Forberg entitled "On the Concept of Religion." Fearing that readers could misunderstand Forberg's ideas as an expression of his views, Fichte included an essay of his own, "On the Ground of Our belief in a Divine World-Governance." As a direct result, the journal was put under an edict of confiscation; Fichte was accused of atheism, officially censured by the authorities, and ultimately resigned from his professorship at the University of Jena.
It was in all likelihood the anonymous publication of a widely circulated pamphlet, "A Father's Letter to his Student Son about Fichte's and Forberg's Atheism," which initially drew public attention to the essays. The editors describe it accurately as "a maudlin tract" (7). It contains a litany of accusations of the ways in which Fichte's and Forberg's ideas were certain to result in corruption of the youth: they stood for atheism, political rebelliousness, and even moral licentiousness. This unfavorable publicity was more than sufficient to touch off a firestorm of criticism of Fichte, his philosophy, and his person. Fichte thought of and presented himself as Kant's heir, and for many Kant's signature achievement had been the overturning of the traditional relationship between faith and reason. This made it plausible to quickly extend the suspicion of atheism to Fichte's best-known work, The Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) as well. Numerous publications for and against Fichte appeared in rapid succession, including F. H Jacobi's notorious "open letter to Fichte," which declared Fichte's philosophy to be tantamount to "nihilism." This is thought to be the first use of this term. The larger significance of the atheism dispute, then, can be seen in the way in which it led into a debate over the values of the German Enlightenment itself, much as the pantheism controversy of the 1780s had done.
For both Fichte's contemporaries and today's scholars, the atheism dispute and its aftermath threatened to overshadow all the other achievements of Fichte's Jena period. A recent remark of Allen Wood's is typical of this view: "The 1790s were for Fichte (and modern philosophy) a brief era of astonishing philosophical achievement. But the tale as a whole is far darker and more troubling, even tragic." Daniel Breazeale presents a more measured account in his Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings; however, his book, focused as it is on the Jena Wissenschaftslehre, contains none of the atheism controversy texts. Thus there is a real need for the collection and translation of the relevant materials necessary for the comprehension of this extraordinary episode in the history of philosophy. Even in German, it is difficult to find a readily accessible comparable compilation.
The present volume is a near-masterpiece of careful reconstruction and contextualization of the unfolding of the atheism dispute as reflected in the essays, letters, edicts, and petitions which combine to tell this remarkable story. All of the texts in this volume are appearing in English translation for the first time. The only major atheism controversy text which previously existed in English translation is Jacobi's "open letter" to Fichte. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22911.
Brownlee, Timonthy. Review of David V. Ciavatta, SPIRIT, THE FAMILY AND THE UNCONSCIOUS IN HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (March 2011).
Ciavatta, David V. Spirit, the Family, and the Unconscious in Hegel's Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009.
In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel famously argues that self-consciousness depends essentially on the recognition of others and that active engagement in practices of recognizing and being recognized by others is a necessary condition for being an agent or a self. In recent years, interpreters have worked to couple Hegel's early treatment of reciprocal recognition with the account of rational institutions that Hegel offers in The Philosophy of Right by arguing that recognition in fact requires institutional mediation. One of the primary virtues of David V. Ciavatta's Spirit, the Family, and the Unconscious in Hegel's Philosophy is that it provides a concrete account of how one particular institution, that of the family, provides an enduring framework for recognition between subjects. Indeed, Ciavatta contends that the family constitutes, for Hegel, the "most foundational, comprehensive . . . form of recognition" structuring and informing our experience of ourselves, others, and the world, and he demonstrates that this recognition is importantly unique, insofar as it is primarily unreflective and unconscious, the product more of affective relations than of reflective endorsement. (2). Ciavatta's book will be of interest to students of Hegel's practical philosophy and German idealism, to phenomenologists (especially those concerned with embodiment, intersubjective relations and sociality, and identity), and to those with interests in the intersections between philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Methodologically, Ciavatta's work falls within a long phenomenological tradition of interpreting Hegel, and he stresses "Hegel's unswerving commitment to describing the concrete, lived experience of human practical existence on its own terms" (2). Thematically, he demonstrates that Hegel shares the view, common among phenomenologists, that the unreflective and affective dimensions of our experience disclose "certain truths about our relation to the world that can only be appreciated in [an] unreflective, lived way" (10). At the same time, Ciavatta argues that, in place of a transcendental ego, Hegel conceives of the self who experiences as essentially social and, in fact, constituted through concrete relations of recognition. By consequence, he stresses that, for Hegel, intersubjective relations inform not only our identities as selves, but even our most basic perceptual experiences. Drawing on the account of mastery and slavery in the Phenomenology as exemplary, Ciavatta claims that the slave's "very contact with the concrete world is informed and contextualized on all sides by the presence of the master, and, in particular, by his recognition of the master as the only true center of experience." (34) It is in this sense that "spirit," which Ciavatta takes to consist in "the concrete practices of recognition that join selves concretely to one another," indelibly informs and shapes our experiences of ourselves, others, and the world (37). However, Ciavatta stresses that these enduring patterns of recognition themselves depend essentially on unreflective habits and customs, which are expressed just as much in immediate affects and feelings as they are in explicit and reflected beliefs and convictions. Ciavatta therefore argues that the habitual and customary domain of "ethical life" (Sittlichkeit) informs not merely our practical relations to one another, but also our own sense of self and our relationship to the world we encounter through perception. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22969.
In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel famously argues that self-consciousness depends essentially on the recognition of others and that active engagement in practices of recognizing and being recognized by others is a necessary condition for being an agent or a self. In recent years, interpreters have worked to couple Hegel's early treatment of reciprocal recognition with the account of rational institutions that Hegel offers in The Philosophy of Right by arguing that recognition in fact requires institutional mediation. One of the primary virtues of David V. Ciavatta's Spirit, the Family, and the Unconscious in Hegel's Philosophy is that it provides a concrete account of how one particular institution, that of the family, provides an enduring framework for recognition between subjects. Indeed, Ciavatta contends that the family constitutes, for Hegel, the "most foundational, comprehensive . . . form of recognition" structuring and informing our experience of ourselves, others, and the world, and he demonstrates that this recognition is importantly unique, insofar as it is primarily unreflective and unconscious, the product more of affective relations than of reflective endorsement. (2). Ciavatta's book will be of interest to students of Hegel's practical philosophy and German idealism, to phenomenologists (especially those concerned with embodiment, intersubjective relations and sociality, and identity), and to those with interests in the intersections between philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Methodologically, Ciavatta's work falls within a long phenomenological tradition of interpreting Hegel, and he stresses "Hegel's unswerving commitment to describing the concrete, lived experience of human practical existence on its own terms" (2). Thematically, he demonstrates that Hegel shares the view, common among phenomenologists, that the unreflective and affective dimensions of our experience disclose "certain truths about our relation to the world that can only be appreciated in [an] unreflective, lived way" (10). At the same time, Ciavatta argues that, in place of a transcendental ego, Hegel conceives of the self who experiences as essentially social and, in fact, constituted through concrete relations of recognition. By consequence, he stresses that, for Hegel, intersubjective relations inform not only our identities as selves, but even our most basic perceptual experiences. Drawing on the account of mastery and slavery in the Phenomenology as exemplary, Ciavatta claims that the slave's "very contact with the concrete world is informed and contextualized on all sides by the presence of the master, and, in particular, by his recognition of the master as the only true center of experience." (34) It is in this sense that "spirit," which Ciavatta takes to consist in "the concrete practices of recognition that join selves concretely to one another," indelibly informs and shapes our experiences of ourselves, others, and the world (37). However, Ciavatta stresses that these enduring patterns of recognition themselves depend essentially on unreflective habits and customs, which are expressed just as much in immediate affects and feelings as they are in explicit and reflected beliefs and convictions. Ciavatta therefore argues that the habitual and customary domain of "ethical life" (Sittlichkeit) informs not merely our practical relations to one another, but also our own sense of self and our relationship to the world we encounter through perception. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22969.
Cfp: The Rhetoric of Religion, MEMPHIS THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY JOURNAL (Spring 2012).
The Memphis Theological Seminary Journal is seeking papers for its Spring 2012 issue. The theme of the issue is Rhetoric and Religion. We seek submissions that examine the relationships and intersections of rhetoric and religion. This includes but not limited to:
The theory and practice of rhetoric and religion
Forms of communication addressed to gods or God or gods
The religious rhetoric of any religious or non-religious (secular) tradition
God talk among different groups, cultures, or within institutions
The role of religious discourse in the public arena
The relationship between speaker and audience within a religious context
The role of rhetoric in the religious studies curriculum
Rhetorical analysis of certain religious texts, such as scripture, sermons, and theological writings
Religious rhetoric and the role of power
Rhetorical histories of any tradition, event, or time period
Rhetoricaltrajectories of religious leaders
Prophetic rhetoric
Religious rhetoric and the role of women
The deadline for submissions is June 30, 2011.
Please send all essays to Andre E. Johnson at rhetoricandreligion@gmail.com.
The theory and practice of rhetoric and religion
Forms of communication addressed to gods or God or gods
The religious rhetoric of any religious or non-religious (secular) tradition
God talk among different groups, cultures, or within institutions
The role of religious discourse in the public arena
The relationship between speaker and audience within a religious context
The role of rhetoric in the religious studies curriculum
Rhetorical analysis of certain religious texts, such as scripture, sermons, and theological writings
Religious rhetoric and the role of power
Rhetorical histories of any tradition, event, or time period
Rhetoricaltrajectories of religious leaders
Prophetic rhetoric
Religious rhetoric and the role of women
The deadline for submissions is June 30, 2011.
Please send all essays to Andre E. Johnson at rhetoricandreligion@gmail.com.
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.
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: "Forms of Domination and Emancipation," Annual Studies in Social and Political Thought Conference, University of Sussex, June 16-17, 2011.
[T]he fact above all which so demoralizes the modern world [is] that the greater the efforts made, the more terrible are the new forms in which the old social problems reappear. (C. L. R. James)
Keynote speakers include Chris Arthur (ex-Sussex) on “Dialectic of Domination and Emancipation” and Stathis Kouvelakis (Kings College London) on "The Actuality of Revolution?”
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Forms of domination: Capital; (neo-)Liberalism; Patriarchy; Imperialism and (neo-)Colonialism; Hegemony; Ideology; Biopolitics; Discipline; Governmentality; Psychology and Psychoanalysis; Legality and Legitimacy.
Forms of emancipation: Communism and Communization; Radical Democracy; the State; Politics of Difference, Otherness, Non-Identity; Anarchism; Multitude; Psychology and Psychoanalysis; New Social Movements.
Possible thinkers include but are not limited to: Alain Badiou; Walter Benjamin; Judith Butler; Gilles Deleuze; Frantz Fanon; Michel Foulcault; Antonio Gramsci; G.W.F. Hegel; C.L.R. James; Freud and Lacan; Henri Lefebvre; Rosa Luxemburg; Karl Marx; Antonio Negri; Evgeny Pashukanis; Jacques Rancière; Edward Said; Early Frankfurt School; Neue Marx-Lektüre; Value-Form Theory; Théorie Communiste.
Some participants might also like to consider the relations between different thinkers and forms of domination and emancipation.
Abstracts or questions should be addressed to: sspt@sussex.ac.uk.
Keynote speakers include Chris Arthur (ex-Sussex) on “Dialectic of Domination and Emancipation” and Stathis Kouvelakis (Kings College London) on "The Actuality of Revolution?”
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Forms of domination: Capital; (neo-)Liberalism; Patriarchy; Imperialism and (neo-)Colonialism; Hegemony; Ideology; Biopolitics; Discipline; Governmentality; Psychology and Psychoanalysis; Legality and Legitimacy.
Forms of emancipation: Communism and Communization; Radical Democracy; the State; Politics of Difference, Otherness, Non-Identity; Anarchism; Multitude; Psychology and Psychoanalysis; New Social Movements.
Possible thinkers include but are not limited to: Alain Badiou; Walter Benjamin; Judith Butler; Gilles Deleuze; Frantz Fanon; Michel Foulcault; Antonio Gramsci; G.W.F. Hegel; C.L.R. James; Freud and Lacan; Henri Lefebvre; Rosa Luxemburg; Karl Marx; Antonio Negri; Evgeny Pashukanis; Jacques Rancière; Edward Said; Early Frankfurt School; Neue Marx-Lektüre; Value-Form Theory; Théorie Communiste.
Some participants might also like to consider the relations between different thinkers and forms of domination and emancipation.
Abstracts or questions should be addressed to: sspt@sussex.ac.uk.
Cfp: "New Perspectives on Hermeneutics in the Social Sciences and Practical Philosophy," International Conference on Ricoeur Studies, the Society for Ricoeur Studies and the Fonds Ricoeur, National Research University ‘Higher School of Economics,' Moscow, September 13–16, 2011.
This international conference builds on a tradition of Ricoeur scholarship established by the University of Kent conference ‘From Ricoeur to Action’ (June 2009) and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa conference ‘Reading Ricoeur Once Again: Hermeneutics and Practical Philosophy’ (July 2010). The spirit of this conference is to further promote the world-wide dialogue between academic communities and individuals studying Paul Ricoeur’s oeuvre.
The conference aims to analyze Ricoeur’s contribution to the social sciences and practical philosophy, in particular, the way hermeneutics constitutes new forms of exploration of human action and social life. The topics discussed at the conference may concern both epistemological and ontological issues of language, discourse, and textuality in contemporary social thought.
We welcome critical and constructive papers assessing the contributions of Ricoeurian philosophy in any one of these areas, including papers from scholars who are not specialists in Ricoeur and whose insights will help to interpret and rethink the perspectives of hermeneutical analysis. Areas of particular interest include but are not limited to:
Action Theory
Narrative Analysis
Event Theory
Memory Studies
Social Epistemology and Methodology
Phenomenology
Critical Theory
Political Theory and Identity
Social and Political Imaginary
Ideology and Utopia
Theology, Religion and Society
Hermeneutics and Law
Applied Ethics
Recognition Theory
Literary Theory and Self-Understanding
The Prospects for and Limits of Human Capability
For purposes of consideration, please submit an electronic abstract only (of roughly 300-500 words) and attach a separate title page that includes the paper's title, the author's name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and email address. Notification of acceptance will be given via email. Final papers should be thirty minutes when read aloud. Abstracts and queries should be sent to Anna Borisenkova. Email: RicoeurMoscow2011@gmail.com.
The conference aims to analyze Ricoeur’s contribution to the social sciences and practical philosophy, in particular, the way hermeneutics constitutes new forms of exploration of human action and social life. The topics discussed at the conference may concern both epistemological and ontological issues of language, discourse, and textuality in contemporary social thought.
We welcome critical and constructive papers assessing the contributions of Ricoeurian philosophy in any one of these areas, including papers from scholars who are not specialists in Ricoeur and whose insights will help to interpret and rethink the perspectives of hermeneutical analysis. Areas of particular interest include but are not limited to:
Action Theory
Narrative Analysis
Event Theory
Memory Studies
Social Epistemology and Methodology
Phenomenology
Critical Theory
Political Theory and Identity
Social and Political Imaginary
Ideology and Utopia
Theology, Religion and Society
Hermeneutics and Law
Applied Ethics
Recognition Theory
Literary Theory and Self-Understanding
The Prospects for and Limits of Human Capability
For purposes of consideration, please submit an electronic abstract only (of roughly 300-500 words) and attach a separate title page that includes the paper's title, the author's name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and email address. Notification of acceptance will be given via email. Final papers should be thirty minutes when read aloud. Abstracts and queries should be sent to Anna Borisenkova. Email: RicoeurMoscow2011@gmail.com.
Cfp: "Ethics, Identity and Recognition," Latin American Conference on Paul Ricoeur’s Thought, Catholic University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, November 28-30, 2011.
This Latin American Conference on Paul Ricoeur’s thought will take place at the Catholic University of Campinas (São Paulo, Brazil). It builds on the momentum created by the Conference that took place in Guadalajara last November. The main objective of this international meeting in Brazil is to invite the philosophical community to a renewed and innovative discussion around three of Ricoeur’s fundamental works: Time and Narrative, Oneself as Another, and The Course of Recognition. These three works converge on the basic question of the acting and suffering condition of the human being, which develops on the personal, interpersonal and institutional planes. This meeting intends to be a fruitful dialogue among professors and graduate students working on Ricoeur’s thought from multiple perspectives. Several national and international scholars will participate in the Congress and share their research with the Latin American community. Participants are invited to submit their abstracts according to the thematic presented above. Each submission will be evaluated through a blind reviewing process by specialists from the Conference’s Scientific Committee.
Main Subjects:
- Narrative, ethics and identity
- Ethical perspective of historical and fictional narratives
- Identity and recognition
- Ethical dimensions of recognition
- Recognition within institutions
- Institutional dimension of ethical praxis
- Otherness, ethics and recognition
- Friendship and solicitude
- Psychoanalysis and hermeneutics
- Personal identity and ethical building
- Hermeneutics of law
- Religious identity and recognition
- Philosophy and literature: time and narrative
Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Jeanne-Marie Ganegbin, PUC-SP, UNICAMP and Fonds Ricoeur (Brazil)
Prof. Richard Kearney, Boston College (USA)
Prof. Johann Michel, Université de Poitiers, EHESS(Paris) et Fonds Ricoeur (France)
Prof. Mario Presas, University of La Plata (Argentina)
Prof. Michel Renaud, University Nova de Lisboa (Portugal)
Prof. George Taylor, University of Pittsburgh and Society for Ricoeur Studies (USA)
Prof. Gilbert Vincent, Université de Strasbourg and Fonds Ricoeur (France)
Abstracts (around 300 words) can be submitted in either Portuguese, Spanish, French or English. They should be submitted through the Congress website (see below) using the “Abstract Submission” menu option by no later than May 31st, 2011.
Congress webpage: http://www.ricoeur-latam.org/.
Main Subjects:
- Narrative, ethics and identity
- Ethical perspective of historical and fictional narratives
- Identity and recognition
- Ethical dimensions of recognition
- Recognition within institutions
- Institutional dimension of ethical praxis
- Otherness, ethics and recognition
- Friendship and solicitude
- Psychoanalysis and hermeneutics
- Personal identity and ethical building
- Hermeneutics of law
- Religious identity and recognition
- Philosophy and literature: time and narrative
Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Jeanne-Marie Ganegbin, PUC-SP, UNICAMP and Fonds Ricoeur (Brazil)
Prof. Richard Kearney, Boston College (USA)
Prof. Johann Michel, Université de Poitiers, EHESS(Paris) et Fonds Ricoeur (France)
Prof. Mario Presas, University of La Plata (Argentina)
Prof. Michel Renaud, University Nova de Lisboa (Portugal)
Prof. George Taylor, University of Pittsburgh and Society for Ricoeur Studies (USA)
Prof. Gilbert Vincent, Université de Strasbourg and Fonds Ricoeur (France)
Abstracts (around 300 words) can be submitted in either Portuguese, Spanish, French or English. They should be submitted through the Congress website (see below) using the “Abstract Submission” menu option by no later than May 31st, 2011.
Congress webpage: http://www.ricoeur-latam.org/.
Cfp: "In the Aftermath of German Idealism," Bergische Universität Wuppertal, May 13-14, 2011.
Keynote speakers:
However, the history of German idealism did not in any way end there. In the 20th century we have seen seen a countless number of virulent attacks against “traditional” metaphysics arise as different philosophical schools demanded us to give up “dead” and “outdated” notions like system and totality, German Idealism often being seen the as the epitome of excessive, unbridled reason. Yet, in the face of these so-called “devastating” critiques, classical German philosophy has not been sentenced to death and banished to the abyssal forgetfulness of a forever lost past. Not only has there been an intense increase of secondary literature in the past decades, but a multitude of contemporary philosophers are returning to this moment in order to develop their own thought.
The status of German Idealism remains more ambiguous and uncertain than ever: even two centuries after its emergence, we find ourselves – still or again – in the aftermath of German Idealism and feel its effects deep within the internal pulsations of philosophy itself. Therefore, the goal of this conference is to open up an space within which one approach the reception of German Idealism and address its philosophical heritage. The unifying theme will be the following constellation of questions: Why do we constantly go back to German Idealism and cannot simply rid ourselves one and for all of its fundamental concepts? What could German Idealism teach us today? Are there still non-cultivated resources lurking within the thought of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling? Are we only able to unearth these resources today by passing through their internal and external critiques? Should we take the risk and plunge headfirst into the tradition in attempting to reactualize it?
Proposed topics are (but in no way limited to):
- The immediate reception of German Idealism (Jacobi, Reinhold, Schulze, Maïmon, Marx, the Schellingian, Feuerbachian, Kierkegaardian, Schopenhauerian or Marxist critique of Hegel)
- The tole of concepts such as “finitude,” “system,” “totality,” “liberty” or “subjectivity” in German Idealism and its reception
- The category of contingence in Schellingian and Hegelian dialectics
- Contemporary rereadings of Hegel (Frankfurt School, Butler, Jameson, Malabou, Nancy, Pippin, Žižek)
- The current resurgence of Schelling (Grant, Gabriel)
- The appropriation of Hegel by representatives of analytical philosophy searching for a new grounding for epistemology (McDowell and Brandom)
- Critique of the notion of history and post-Hegelian philosophies of history
- Contemporary usage of German Idealism in practical philosophy
- Critiques of German Idealism from within different philosophical movements (phenomenology, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze – and so on unto infinity)
- New interpretations of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel
Send a short abstract (200-400 words) for a 20-30 minute presentation to be given in English, French or German to Joseph Carew (jstephencarew@gmail.com) and Daniel Pucciarelli (arelli@gmail.com) by the 15th of April.
- Markus Gabriel, Universität Bonn, author of Der Mensch im Mythos and Transcendental Ontology(forthcoming by Continuum)
- Jean-Christophe Goddard, Université de Toulouse le Mirail, author of La philosophie fichtéenne de la vie: Le transcendantal et le pathologique
- Arnaud François, Université de Toulouse le Mirail, author of Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche: Volonté et réalité
- Sean McGrath, Memorial University of Newfoundland, author of The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (forthcoming by Routledge)
- Devin Shaw, Zane University of Ottawa, author of Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art
However, the history of German idealism did not in any way end there. In the 20th century we have seen seen a countless number of virulent attacks against “traditional” metaphysics arise as different philosophical schools demanded us to give up “dead” and “outdated” notions like system and totality, German Idealism often being seen the as the epitome of excessive, unbridled reason. Yet, in the face of these so-called “devastating” critiques, classical German philosophy has not been sentenced to death and banished to the abyssal forgetfulness of a forever lost past. Not only has there been an intense increase of secondary literature in the past decades, but a multitude of contemporary philosophers are returning to this moment in order to develop their own thought.
The status of German Idealism remains more ambiguous and uncertain than ever: even two centuries after its emergence, we find ourselves – still or again – in the aftermath of German Idealism and feel its effects deep within the internal pulsations of philosophy itself. Therefore, the goal of this conference is to open up an space within which one approach the reception of German Idealism and address its philosophical heritage. The unifying theme will be the following constellation of questions: Why do we constantly go back to German Idealism and cannot simply rid ourselves one and for all of its fundamental concepts? What could German Idealism teach us today? Are there still non-cultivated resources lurking within the thought of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling? Are we only able to unearth these resources today by passing through their internal and external critiques? Should we take the risk and plunge headfirst into the tradition in attempting to reactualize it?
Proposed topics are (but in no way limited to):
- The immediate reception of German Idealism (Jacobi, Reinhold, Schulze, Maïmon, Marx, the Schellingian, Feuerbachian, Kierkegaardian, Schopenhauerian or Marxist critique of Hegel)
- The tole of concepts such as “finitude,” “system,” “totality,” “liberty” or “subjectivity” in German Idealism and its reception
- The category of contingence in Schellingian and Hegelian dialectics
- Contemporary rereadings of Hegel (Frankfurt School, Butler, Jameson, Malabou, Nancy, Pippin, Žižek)
- The current resurgence of Schelling (Grant, Gabriel)
- The appropriation of Hegel by representatives of analytical philosophy searching for a new grounding for epistemology (McDowell and Brandom)
- Critique of the notion of history and post-Hegelian philosophies of history
- Contemporary usage of German Idealism in practical philosophy
- Critiques of German Idealism from within different philosophical movements (phenomenology, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze – and so on unto infinity)
- New interpretations of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel
Send a short abstract (200-400 words) for a 20-30 minute presentation to be given in English, French or German to Joseph Carew (jstephencarew@gmail.com) and Daniel Pucciarelli (arelli@gmail.com) by the 15th of April.
Pamental, Matthew. Review of Molly Cochran, ed. CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO DEWEY. NDPR (March 2011).
Cochran, Molly, ed. Cambridge Companion to Dewey. Cambridge: CUP, 2010.
John Dewey (1859-1952) was America's leading public philosopher for well over half a century. His collected writings take up thirty seven volumes, with several additional volumes devoted to lecture notes provided by his students, and three volumes of correspondence, all published by Southern Illinois University Press. Thus it is inevitable that any collection of writings about Dewey and his thought will be incomplete. In particular, while Dewey's engagement as a public philosopher is mentioned both in Robert Westbrook's intellectual biography and Richard Bernstein's and Molly Cochran's discussions of Dewey's vision of democracy, his public philosophy receives no sustained attention comparable to his epistemology and logic, for example. Given Dewey's commitment to the ideal of philosophy as a tool for resolving the "problems of men," this is a significant lacuna. That said, however, the collection of essays in Cochran's The Cambridge Companion to Dewey ranges impressively -- both widely and deeply -- over Dewey's corpus, including all of Dewey's major works, his intellectual development, and his significance as a philosopher of democracy. In what follows, I will lay out the themes discussed in each section and make a few critical remarks along the way.
Included in the present volume are an introduction by the editor and Westbrook's intellectual biography, followed by thirteen chapters. Cochran helpfully divides these chapters into five sections. The first section consists of chapters by Ruth Anna Putnam, Richard M. Gale, Isaac Levi, and J. E. Tiles, and investigates Dewey's naturalism and logic of inquiry. The second section consists of two essays, by Mark Johnson and Matthias Jung, on Dewey's philosophy of mind and action. In the third section, Jennifer Welchman and James Bohman treat Dewey's ethics, moral and social philosophy. The fourth section is a bit of a catch-all, including essays by Sami Pihlström on Dewey's naturalistic philosophy of religion, Richard Eldridge on Dewey's aesthetics, and Nel Noddings on Dewey's philosophy of education. The final section consists of essays by Bernstein and Cochran on Dewey's conception of democracy and its application to international affairs. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23029.
John Dewey (1859-1952) was America's leading public philosopher for well over half a century. His collected writings take up thirty seven volumes, with several additional volumes devoted to lecture notes provided by his students, and three volumes of correspondence, all published by Southern Illinois University Press. Thus it is inevitable that any collection of writings about Dewey and his thought will be incomplete. In particular, while Dewey's engagement as a public philosopher is mentioned both in Robert Westbrook's intellectual biography and Richard Bernstein's and Molly Cochran's discussions of Dewey's vision of democracy, his public philosophy receives no sustained attention comparable to his epistemology and logic, for example. Given Dewey's commitment to the ideal of philosophy as a tool for resolving the "problems of men," this is a significant lacuna. That said, however, the collection of essays in Cochran's The Cambridge Companion to Dewey ranges impressively -- both widely and deeply -- over Dewey's corpus, including all of Dewey's major works, his intellectual development, and his significance as a philosopher of democracy. In what follows, I will lay out the themes discussed in each section and make a few critical remarks along the way.
Included in the present volume are an introduction by the editor and Westbrook's intellectual biography, followed by thirteen chapters. Cochran helpfully divides these chapters into five sections. The first section consists of chapters by Ruth Anna Putnam, Richard M. Gale, Isaac Levi, and J. E. Tiles, and investigates Dewey's naturalism and logic of inquiry. The second section consists of two essays, by Mark Johnson and Matthias Jung, on Dewey's philosophy of mind and action. In the third section, Jennifer Welchman and James Bohman treat Dewey's ethics, moral and social philosophy. The fourth section is a bit of a catch-all, including essays by Sami Pihlström on Dewey's naturalistic philosophy of religion, Richard Eldridge on Dewey's aesthetics, and Nel Noddings on Dewey's philosophy of education. The final section consists of essays by Bernstein and Cochran on Dewey's conception of democracy and its application to international affairs. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23029.
Monday, March 07, 2011
Morgan, Michael L. Review of Sam B. Girgus, LEVINAS AND THE CINEMA OF REDEMPTION. NDPR (February 2011).
Girgus, Sam B. Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine. New ork: Columbia UP, 2010.
The question that I kept before me as I was reading this book and preparing to write this review is whether philosophers can learn anything valuable from it. After all, it is a book written by someone who has published extensively on film, it treats various Hollywood and European films that are classics and certainly worthy of attention, and it purports to engage with the work of an important twentieth-century philosopher as part of its project. To be sure, one can learn something even from a book that has significant deficiencies, but what I have been asking myself is something different. It is whether a philosopher could learn anything positive from the book. Does the book say helpful and interesting things about Emmanuel Levinas? Does it show us how to explore films in the light of Levinas's philosophical work? Does it read films in a way that is philosophically novel and interesting, about film itself or about these particular films? I wish that I could answer "yes" to one or more of these questions, but I cannot. The most I can say is that in the course of reading what Girgus has to say about Levinas and the nine or so films he discusses, one is provoked to reflect upon a number of problems and issues concerning Levinas and film, and although Girgus has nothing particularly helpful to say about most of them, it is worthwhile to have them called to our attention.
In the course of the book's seven chapters Girgus discusses: Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946); John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940); John Huston's The Misfits (1961); Robert Rossen's The Hustler (1961); Edward Zwick's Glory (1989); Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988); Federico Felini's La Dolce Vita (1959); and Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960). He also briefly comments on Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942), Rossen's Body and Soul (1947), and Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). He organizes his discussions of the films according to themes he finds in Levinas. For example, he uses the Capra films to show how the redemptive element in these films can be articulated using Levinas's notion of transcendence and responsibility to the other person, and he uses Levinas's notion of the face in order to clarify how to understand particular facial shots of Henry Fonda, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, and Denzel Washington. His treatment of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, La Dolce Vita, and L'avventura attempts to use Levinas in order to clarify what the films tell us about art, ethics, love, sexuality, and gender. His most detailed and most comprehensive commentaries on the films are the last three, the European films. Girgus's basic project, then, is to identify and clarify themes in Levinas's philosophy in certain American films and to show how these themes are represented in European films that are also examples of what Girgus calls a "cinema of redemption." . . .
Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22891.
The question that I kept before me as I was reading this book and preparing to write this review is whether philosophers can learn anything valuable from it. After all, it is a book written by someone who has published extensively on film, it treats various Hollywood and European films that are classics and certainly worthy of attention, and it purports to engage with the work of an important twentieth-century philosopher as part of its project. To be sure, one can learn something even from a book that has significant deficiencies, but what I have been asking myself is something different. It is whether a philosopher could learn anything positive from the book. Does the book say helpful and interesting things about Emmanuel Levinas? Does it show us how to explore films in the light of Levinas's philosophical work? Does it read films in a way that is philosophically novel and interesting, about film itself or about these particular films? I wish that I could answer "yes" to one or more of these questions, but I cannot. The most I can say is that in the course of reading what Girgus has to say about Levinas and the nine or so films he discusses, one is provoked to reflect upon a number of problems and issues concerning Levinas and film, and although Girgus has nothing particularly helpful to say about most of them, it is worthwhile to have them called to our attention.
In the course of the book's seven chapters Girgus discusses: Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946); John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940); John Huston's The Misfits (1961); Robert Rossen's The Hustler (1961); Edward Zwick's Glory (1989); Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988); Federico Felini's La Dolce Vita (1959); and Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960). He also briefly comments on Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942), Rossen's Body and Soul (1947), and Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). He organizes his discussions of the films according to themes he finds in Levinas. For example, he uses the Capra films to show how the redemptive element in these films can be articulated using Levinas's notion of transcendence and responsibility to the other person, and he uses Levinas's notion of the face in order to clarify how to understand particular facial shots of Henry Fonda, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, and Denzel Washington. His treatment of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, La Dolce Vita, and L'avventura attempts to use Levinas in order to clarify what the films tell us about art, ethics, love, sexuality, and gender. His most detailed and most comprehensive commentaries on the films are the last three, the European films. Girgus's basic project, then, is to identify and clarify themes in Levinas's philosophy in certain American films and to show how these themes are represented in European films that are also examples of what Girgus calls a "cinema of redemption." . . .
Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22891.
Cfp: Film-Philosophy Conference 2011, Liverpool John Moores University, July 6-8, 2011.
Film-philosophy continues to grow as an important discipline within the fields of both Film Studies and Philosophy. We invite researchers in this area to submit proposals for the 2011 Film-Philosophy Conference to be held in Liverpool, UK.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Professor Gregory Currie (University of Nottingham)
Dr. David Martin-Jones (University of St Andrews)
Dr. Lucy Bolton (Queen Mary, University of London)
Dr. Havi Carel and Dr. Greg Tuck (University of the West of England and editors of the book New Takes in Film-Philosophy)
We are open to any topics on the subject but would particularly welcome papers in the following areas:
- Film and phenomenology
- The ontology of fiction in film
- Fictionalism and film
- Significant auteurs
- New approaches to film and philosophy
- Considerations of individual films
- The debate between continental and analytic philosophy in relation to film
- Films about philosophy or philosophers
- Animals on film
- Science and film-philosophy
- The methodology of film-philosophy
- Philosophy of film adaptation
- Film-philosophy and computer games
- Cognitivism
- Film style
- Genre
- Media convergence
- Philosophy and film economics
Abstracts should be 200 - 300 words long and papers, including clips - which we strongly encourage - should not exceed 25 minutes. We accept panel submissions with a maximum of three speakers and a length of 90 minutes.
Deadline for proposals: 18 March 2011
Both individual and panel proposals must be submitted through the conference website (no initial cost involved): http://www.film-philosophy.com/conference/index.php/conf/2011/about/submissions.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Professor Gregory Currie (University of Nottingham)
Dr. David Martin-Jones (University of St Andrews)
Dr. Lucy Bolton (Queen Mary, University of London)
Dr. Havi Carel and Dr. Greg Tuck (University of the West of England and editors of the book New Takes in Film-Philosophy)
We are open to any topics on the subject but would particularly welcome papers in the following areas:
- Film and phenomenology
- The ontology of fiction in film
- Fictionalism and film
- Significant auteurs
- New approaches to film and philosophy
- Considerations of individual films
- The debate between continental and analytic philosophy in relation to film
- Films about philosophy or philosophers
- Animals on film
- Science and film-philosophy
- The methodology of film-philosophy
- Philosophy of film adaptation
- Film-philosophy and computer games
- Cognitivism
- Film style
- Genre
- Media convergence
- Philosophy and film economics
Abstracts should be 200 - 300 words long and papers, including clips - which we strongly encourage - should not exceed 25 minutes. We accept panel submissions with a maximum of three speakers and a length of 90 minutes.
Deadline for proposals: 18 March 2011
Both individual and panel proposals must be submitted through the conference website (no initial cost involved): http://www.film-philosophy.com/conference/index.php/conf/2011/about/submissions.
Hanson, Jeffrey. Review of Rick Furtak, ed. KIERKEGAARD'S CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT. NDPR (March 2011).
Furtak, Rick Anthony, ed. Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript: a Critical Guide. Cambridge: CUP, 2010.
One of the most noteworthy features of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript: A Critical Guide is that it lives up to its subtitle. This collection truly is a guide to the work as a whole. That it serves as such is no small achievement, and it is surely a credit to the editor, Rick Anthony Furtak, that he kept the contributors from niggling with details that could have only limited interest to the most specialized scholar of (Kierkegaard's pseudonym) Johannes Climacus' writings. The dozen essays collected here (none penned by a Dane, interestingly) speak to the largest themes of this notoriously difficult and overlong work and stay admirably focused on what the reader needs to keep in mind very generally to come to grips with the text. None of these essays is narrowly focused on any minor issue or local question; instead each one concerns a major point, generally one that has implications for understanding the Postscript as a whole or even more broadly, the Climacan authorship. In what follows I touch on some of the essays that resonated most powerfully on my reading, in part doubtless because they speak to my own interests in the text. Inability to address all of them does not imply any criticism of those that space demands I omit. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22910.
One of the most noteworthy features of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript: A Critical Guide is that it lives up to its subtitle. This collection truly is a guide to the work as a whole. That it serves as such is no small achievement, and it is surely a credit to the editor, Rick Anthony Furtak, that he kept the contributors from niggling with details that could have only limited interest to the most specialized scholar of (Kierkegaard's pseudonym) Johannes Climacus' writings. The dozen essays collected here (none penned by a Dane, interestingly) speak to the largest themes of this notoriously difficult and overlong work and stay admirably focused on what the reader needs to keep in mind very generally to come to grips with the text. None of these essays is narrowly focused on any minor issue or local question; instead each one concerns a major point, generally one that has implications for understanding the Postscript as a whole or even more broadly, the Climacan authorship. In what follows I touch on some of the essays that resonated most powerfully on my reading, in part doubtless because they speak to my own interests in the text. Inability to address all of them does not imply any criticism of those that space demands I omit. . . .
Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22910.
Cfp: "Literature as Communication," Philosophy of Communication Section, European Communication Research and Education Association and the Literary Communication Project, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland, September 2-3, 2011.
Not only among literary theoreticians and critics, but also among students of rhetoric, communication and media, stylisticians, discourse and dialogue analysts, historians of the book, and social and cultural philosophers and historians, there is a growing tendency to see literary activity as one among other forms of human communication. The symposium will provide a forum in which to assess both the broader and more detailed implications of this trend for our understanding of literature’s place within the lives of individuals and communities.
The symposium will assume a nominalistic and broad definition of literature. Literature, that is to say, will be viewed as consisting of all those texts which, either now or in the past, have been referred to as literary, and as not necessarily restricted to merely poems, plays and novels.
Papers on the following kinds of topic will be especially welcome:
•Literary-communicational insights in current work within any of the disciplines mentioned above: new paradigms.
• Literary communication as community-making.
•Literary communication as philosophical reflection.
•Literary-communicational ethics; for instance, the relevance of Keats’s remark that “we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”.
• The communicational workings of implied writers and implied readers
•Communicational similarities and contrasts between singly, collectively and anonymously authored texts
•Manuscript culture, book culture, digital culture: the consequences for literary communication.
•The politeness (or otherwise) of literary writers
•The communicational dimensions of literary styles and / or genres
Visit: http://web.abo.fi/fak/hf/enge/ECREA/Papers.html.
The symposium will assume a nominalistic and broad definition of literature. Literature, that is to say, will be viewed as consisting of all those texts which, either now or in the past, have been referred to as literary, and as not necessarily restricted to merely poems, plays and novels.
Papers on the following kinds of topic will be especially welcome:
•Literary-communicational insights in current work within any of the disciplines mentioned above: new paradigms.
• Literary communication as community-making.
•Literary communication as philosophical reflection.
•Literary-communicational ethics; for instance, the relevance of Keats’s remark that “we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”.
• The communicational workings of implied writers and implied readers
•Communicational similarities and contrasts between singly, collectively and anonymously authored texts
•Manuscript culture, book culture, digital culture: the consequences for literary communication.
•The politeness (or otherwise) of literary writers
•The communicational dimensions of literary styles and / or genres
Visit: http://web.abo.fi/fak/hf/enge/ECREA/Papers.html.
"The Populist Front: On the Role of Myth, Storytelling and Imaginary in Populist Movements," Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, March 18, 2011.
Welcome & Introduction
Lunch break
Second panel: Imagery & Myth
Tea and coffee break
Presentation:
- Jorinde Seijdel - editor-in-chief Open: Cahier on Art and the Public Domain
- Merijn Oudenampsen - guest editor Open 20
- Rudi Laermans & Koen Abts - Sociologists, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, "The Populist Triangle: People, Leader, Establishment"
- Oliver Marchart - Political Theorist, Universität Luzern, "Populism in Political Theory and Visual Culture"
- Sara R. Farris - Political Theorist, Universität of Konstanz, "Populism Unveiled: The Defence of Women as the Founding Myth of the New-Right"
Lunch break
Second panel: Imagery & Myth
- John Kraniauskas - Latin American Studies, Birkbeck University London, "Eva Peron as the Image of Peronism"
- Sven Lütticken – Art Critic, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, "A Heteronomous Hobby: Report on the Netherlands"
- Aukje van Rooden - Philosopher / Literary Theorist, Universiteit Utrecht, "The Myth of Modern Politics"
Tea and coffee break
Presentation:
- Steve Lambert – Artist / Intelligent Troublemaker, "Constructing Small Scale Temporary Utopias"
- Screening of the film Museum Songspiel, Followed by Q & A with filmmakers Chto Delat – Art Collective, Sint Petersburg / Moscow
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
LaZella, Andrew. Review of Jon Stewart, IDEALISM AND EXISTENTIALISM. NDPR (February 2011).
Stewart, Jon. Idealism and Existentialism: Hegel and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century European Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2010.
The world of Continental philosophy has been shaped by two irreconcilable schools: German idealism on the one hand and phenomenology/existentialism on the other. If they can be called a tradition at all, it is not one of shared inheritance, but of continued revolt. Phenomenology/existentialism disdains German idealism's goal of seeking systematic totality insofar as it loses sight of the lived-experience of the individual human being. True, the idealist would argue that such lived-experience has not been lost, but preserved, albeit in a higher form and according to its immanent rational structure. For phenomenology/existentialism, however, such rational preservation renders inert and lifeless the very dynamism and spontaneity that characterized lived-experience in the first place. The distinction between the two can be simplified to various sets of irreconcilable dichotomies: systematicity vs. individuality, rational necessity vs. freedom, and so on.
This is the misconceived caricature that Jon Stewart's Idealism and Existentialism seeks to shatter. In this work, Stewart challenges this purported truism of irreconcilable antagonists by displaying the wealth of factors the two schools share, even if not always with the same intentions or toward the same results. The text is divided into three parts: The first covers Hegel and German idealism, exploring myths surrounding Hegel as an "arch-rationalist" in addition to more technical studies on the Phenomenology of Spirit. The second part takes up the relation between Hegelian idealism and the forms of proto-existentialism found in Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, targeting points of contact between supposed antagonists. The third part turns to a study of existentialism proper, with particular emphasis on the thought of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.
For reasons to be discussed below, the thesis proposed in the introduction does little to unite this work into an integrated whole, and instead the chapters remain a series of loosely related studies. Stewart himself notes: "While the individual chapters each pursue their own goals with respect to specific texts or concepts, they are united in their attempt to reveal in one way or another the long shadow cast by Kant and Hegel over the subsequent history of European thought" (2). At times, the thesis shines through the individualized studies. With all but one chapter having been published previously, however, these stand-alone studies only indirectly reinforce each other to form a unified project. Although various elements of the text succeed, the project of bringing the two traditions closer together remains underdeveloped, making for a somewhat loosely stitched-together patchwork whose overall contribution could be enhanced by greater communication among the chapters themselves. . . .
Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22810.
The world of Continental philosophy has been shaped by two irreconcilable schools: German idealism on the one hand and phenomenology/existentialism on the other. If they can be called a tradition at all, it is not one of shared inheritance, but of continued revolt. Phenomenology/existentialism disdains German idealism's goal of seeking systematic totality insofar as it loses sight of the lived-experience of the individual human being. True, the idealist would argue that such lived-experience has not been lost, but preserved, albeit in a higher form and according to its immanent rational structure. For phenomenology/existentialism, however, such rational preservation renders inert and lifeless the very dynamism and spontaneity that characterized lived-experience in the first place. The distinction between the two can be simplified to various sets of irreconcilable dichotomies: systematicity vs. individuality, rational necessity vs. freedom, and so on.
This is the misconceived caricature that Jon Stewart's Idealism and Existentialism seeks to shatter. In this work, Stewart challenges this purported truism of irreconcilable antagonists by displaying the wealth of factors the two schools share, even if not always with the same intentions or toward the same results. The text is divided into three parts: The first covers Hegel and German idealism, exploring myths surrounding Hegel as an "arch-rationalist" in addition to more technical studies on the Phenomenology of Spirit. The second part takes up the relation between Hegelian idealism and the forms of proto-existentialism found in Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, targeting points of contact between supposed antagonists. The third part turns to a study of existentialism proper, with particular emphasis on the thought of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.
For reasons to be discussed below, the thesis proposed in the introduction does little to unite this work into an integrated whole, and instead the chapters remain a series of loosely related studies. Stewart himself notes: "While the individual chapters each pursue their own goals with respect to specific texts or concepts, they are united in their attempt to reveal in one way or another the long shadow cast by Kant and Hegel over the subsequent history of European thought" (2). At times, the thesis shines through the individualized studies. With all but one chapter having been published previously, however, these stand-alone studies only indirectly reinforce each other to form a unified project. Although various elements of the text succeed, the project of bringing the two traditions closer together remains underdeveloped, making for a somewhat loosely stitched-together patchwork whose overall contribution could be enhanced by greater communication among the chapters themselves. . . .
Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22810.
Gauthier, Jeffrey A. Review of Kimberley Hutchings, et al., eds. HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY AND FEMINIST THOUGHT. NDPR (February 2010).
Hutchings, Kimberley, and Tuija Pulkkinen, eds. Hegel's Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone?. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.
Appearing some fifteen years after Patricia Mills's groundbreaking Feminist Interpretations of Hegel, this volume shows how far feminist scholarship on Hegel has progressed in that time. The anthology offers a diverse yet intersecting set of essays addressing both the significance of Hegel for feminist thought and the problems that his account of gender poses for feminists. While the earlier text brought together a set of previously published articles, Kimberley Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen's anthology consists almost entirely of new scholarship (only two articles were previously published, and only one before 2009). Moreover, with most of the contributors writing from a clearly continental approach to philosophy, and most having also been participants in two conferences dedicated to Hegel and feminist philosophy in 2003 and 2006, the new volume has a thematic unity that was lacking in the earlier anthology. The book is divided into two equal parts. The five essays of Part I engage the broad question of the relevance of Hegel for feminism, and those in Part II offer frameworks for interpreting Hegel's specific writings on women and gender in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The book concludes with the transcription of a brief e-mail discussion among Hutchings, Pulkkinen, Nancy Bauer, and Alison Stone on the significance of Hegel for feminist politics. . . .
Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22809.
Appearing some fifteen years after Patricia Mills's groundbreaking Feminist Interpretations of Hegel, this volume shows how far feminist scholarship on Hegel has progressed in that time. The anthology offers a diverse yet intersecting set of essays addressing both the significance of Hegel for feminist thought and the problems that his account of gender poses for feminists. While the earlier text brought together a set of previously published articles, Kimberley Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen's anthology consists almost entirely of new scholarship (only two articles were previously published, and only one before 2009). Moreover, with most of the contributors writing from a clearly continental approach to philosophy, and most having also been participants in two conferences dedicated to Hegel and feminist philosophy in 2003 and 2006, the new volume has a thematic unity that was lacking in the earlier anthology. The book is divided into two equal parts. The five essays of Part I engage the broad question of the relevance of Hegel for feminism, and those in Part II offer frameworks for interpreting Hegel's specific writings on women and gender in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The book concludes with the transcription of a brief e-mail discussion among Hutchings, Pulkkinen, Nancy Bauer, and Alison Stone on the significance of Hegel for feminist politics. . . .
Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22809.
Cfp: "Human Experience and Nature: Examining the Relationship between Phenomenology and Naturalism," University of the West of England, August 31-September 2, 2011.
This conference aims to bring together prominent thinkers from phenomenology and other fields in philosophy, to discuss the relationship between phenomenology and naturalism. This relationship may vary from one field to another. It may be that phenomenology is compatible with naturalism in the philosophy of science, while the two approaches are incompatible in ethics. It would be interesting to examine whether this is the case and if so, why?
The conference aims to capture phenomenology’s main ideas in an accessible and non-jargonistic way, in order to provide an introduction to this rich tradition to philosophers working in other traditions. The conference also aims to examine phenomenology’s metaphysical underpinnings. It will ask: does phenomenology have a metaphysical commitment, and if so, what kinds of metaphysical commitments are compatible with phenomenology? Is there a restriction on the type of metaphysical view one may hold while practising phenomenology?
A final theme in the conference will be the question whether phenomenology is compatible with naturalism. A case in point is cognitive science, where the application of phenomenology has recently become popular, sometimes without sufficient attention to what conflicts there might be between phenomenology and the naturalistic basis of cognitive science. The invited speakers hold very different views on this issue. The conference will close with a roundtable discussion of this issue.
Speakers:
•Prof Thomas Baldwin (York)
•Prof Rudolf Bernet (Leuven)
•Dr Eran Dorfman (Berlin)
•Dr Iain Grant (UWE)
•Prof James Lenman (Sheffield)
•Dr Michelle Montague (Bristol)
•Dr Darian Meacham (Leuven)
•Prof Dermot Moran (UCD)
•Dr Seiriol Morgan (Bristol)
•Prof David Morris (Concordia)
•Prof David Papineau (KCL)
•Prof Matthew Ratcliffe (Durham)
•Prof Galen Strawson (Reading)
•Prof Fredrik Svenaeus (Södertörn)
•Dr Jon Webber (Cardiff)
•Prof Michael Wheeler (Stirling)
•Prof Dan Zahavi (Copenhagen)
Visit: http://www1.uwe.ac.uk/cahe/hpp/newsandevents/events/humanexperienceandnature.aspx.
The conference aims to capture phenomenology’s main ideas in an accessible and non-jargonistic way, in order to provide an introduction to this rich tradition to philosophers working in other traditions. The conference also aims to examine phenomenology’s metaphysical underpinnings. It will ask: does phenomenology have a metaphysical commitment, and if so, what kinds of metaphysical commitments are compatible with phenomenology? Is there a restriction on the type of metaphysical view one may hold while practising phenomenology?
A final theme in the conference will be the question whether phenomenology is compatible with naturalism. A case in point is cognitive science, where the application of phenomenology has recently become popular, sometimes without sufficient attention to what conflicts there might be between phenomenology and the naturalistic basis of cognitive science. The invited speakers hold very different views on this issue. The conference will close with a roundtable discussion of this issue.
Speakers:
•Prof Thomas Baldwin (York)
•Prof Rudolf Bernet (Leuven)
•Dr Eran Dorfman (Berlin)
•Dr Iain Grant (UWE)
•Prof James Lenman (Sheffield)
•Dr Michelle Montague (Bristol)
•Dr Darian Meacham (Leuven)
•Prof Dermot Moran (UCD)
•Dr Seiriol Morgan (Bristol)
•Prof David Morris (Concordia)
•Prof David Papineau (KCL)
•Prof Matthew Ratcliffe (Durham)
•Prof Galen Strawson (Reading)
•Prof Fredrik Svenaeus (Södertörn)
•Dr Jon Webber (Cardiff)
•Prof Michael Wheeler (Stirling)
•Prof Dan Zahavi (Copenhagen)
Visit: http://www1.uwe.ac.uk/cahe/hpp/newsandevents/events/humanexperienceandnature.aspx.
Cfp: "The Ethical Challenge of Multidisciplinarity: Reconciling ‘the Three Narratives’ -- Art, Science, and Philosophy," 13th Conference, International Society for the Study of European Ideas, University of Cyprus, July 2–6, 2012.
Language—and by extension our story telling activities in general—enables us to confront the contingencies of life by answering the immediate question: what’s happening and what is going to happen next. Science also attempts to answer this question. However, there appears to be—at least in the western cultural tradition—a fundamental tension between the literary-artistic and the scientific projects: whereas the artist seeks to recreate human experience, thereby evoking basic ethical issues, the scientist seeks ethically-neutral, evidence-based facts, as the constituents of our knowledge of reality. It is thus left to others—to the philosopher, theologian, critic, or historian—to bridge the theoretical and ethical gaps between the world of ‘fiction’ and the world of ‘fact’, of art and science. Among other things, the ever increasing rate of production of scientific data in the modern age poses a new multidisciplinary challenge: how to address the unresolved/unresolvable tensions between the language of normativity and the language of facticity.
The organizers of the 13th ISSEI Conference invite scholars from various academic fields to discuss the ethical challenge of multidisciplinarity by characterizing the scope, effects and implications of the discontinuities among ‘the three narratives’: to consider how artists, scientists, and philosophers have articulated, explained and responded to them and/or have attempted to reconcile them.
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: http://issei2012.haifa.ac.il/.
The organizers of the 13th ISSEI Conference invite scholars from various academic fields to discuss the ethical challenge of multidisciplinarity by characterizing the scope, effects and implications of the discontinuities among ‘the three narratives’: to consider how artists, scientists, and philosophers have articulated, explained and responded to them and/or have attempted to reconcile them.
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: http://issei2012.haifa.ac.il/.
"Non-Human Narratives," Bournemouth University, April 27, 2011.
10.00-11.00 Panel 1: Negotiating the Posthuman Landscape
"Consuming the Climate: Re-thinking Meat and Dairy Consumption in the Politics of Climate Change" – Julie Doyle, University of Brighton
"The Machine Starts: Computers as Collaborators in Writing" – Joe Flintham, Bournemouth University
11.15-12.15 Panel 2: Extratextual Approaches to Nonhuman Narratives
"Costume as Character Arc" – Craig Batty, Bournemouth University
"Knit One, Bite One: Feminine Handicrafts and Vampire Fan Art" – Brigid Cherry, Saint Mary’s University College, London
12.15-1.15 Lunch
Exhibitions and workshops by members of Bournemouth University’s Narrative Research Group(NRG)
1.15-2.15 Plenary Address
"Stories, Minds, and Media: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives" – David Herman, Ohio State University
2.15-3.15 Panel 3: Animals in the Movies
"Will the Real Bonzo Please Stand Up: Making and Unmaking Animal Stars in Hollywood" – Claire Molloy, University of Brighton
"Animal Saintliness: Creaturely Life in the Films of Robert Bresson" – Anat Pick, University of East London
3.30-4.30 Panel 4: Inhuman Narratives
"Complexity and Ambiguity: An Examination of the Monster and the Monstrous within Contemporary ‘Neo-nasty’ Horror Films" – Shaun Kimber, Bournemouth University
"A Critical Stylistic Approach to True Crime Serial Killer Narratives" – Christiana Gregoriou, University of Leeds
"Consuming the Climate: Re-thinking Meat and Dairy Consumption in the Politics of Climate Change" – Julie Doyle, University of Brighton
"The Machine Starts: Computers as Collaborators in Writing" – Joe Flintham, Bournemouth University
11.15-12.15 Panel 2: Extratextual Approaches to Nonhuman Narratives
"Costume as Character Arc" – Craig Batty, Bournemouth University
"Knit One, Bite One: Feminine Handicrafts and Vampire Fan Art" – Brigid Cherry, Saint Mary’s University College, London
12.15-1.15 Lunch
Exhibitions and workshops by members of Bournemouth University’s Narrative Research Group(NRG)
1.15-2.15 Plenary Address
"Stories, Minds, and Media: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives" – David Herman, Ohio State University
2.15-3.15 Panel 3: Animals in the Movies
"Will the Real Bonzo Please Stand Up: Making and Unmaking Animal Stars in Hollywood" – Claire Molloy, University of Brighton
"Animal Saintliness: Creaturely Life in the Films of Robert Bresson" – Anat Pick, University of East London
3.30-4.30 Panel 4: Inhuman Narratives
"Complexity and Ambiguity: An Examination of the Monster and the Monstrous within Contemporary ‘Neo-nasty’ Horror Films" – Shaun Kimber, Bournemouth University
"A Critical Stylistic Approach to True Crime Serial Killer Narratives" – Christiana Gregoriou, University of Leeds
Meyer, Matthew. Review of Monika M. Langer, NIETZSCHE'S GAY SCIENCE. NDPR (February 2011).
Langer, Monika M. Nietzsche's Gay Science: Dancing Coherence. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
For many years, Nietzsche studies in the English-speaking world were populated by comprehensive interpretations that focused on concepts, such as the will to power, the overman, and the eternal return, that were thought to be central to Nietzsche's philosophical project. More recently, however, a handful of scholars have turned away from this thematic approach to Nietzsche's thought by focusing their scholarly efforts on the careful analysis of individual texts. The most notable example of this trend has been the recent explosion of work on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals by prominent scholars such as Daniel Conway, Lawrence Hatab, Christopher Janaway, Brian Leiter, and David Owen. In line with this movement, Monika Langer now offers a commentary on another of Nietzsche's more popular texts, The Gay Science (GS). Although Langer's work is a welcome addition to the secondary literature for its comprehensive, section-by-section approach to GS, her overly narrow focus on the contents of the individual aphorisms to the exclusion of broader reflections on the complex genesis of the text, the role the text plays in Nietzsche's free-spirit project, and the potential relationship of the text to his larger oeuvre compromises the depth and quality of her commentary. . . .
Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22771.
For many years, Nietzsche studies in the English-speaking world were populated by comprehensive interpretations that focused on concepts, such as the will to power, the overman, and the eternal return, that were thought to be central to Nietzsche's philosophical project. More recently, however, a handful of scholars have turned away from this thematic approach to Nietzsche's thought by focusing their scholarly efforts on the careful analysis of individual texts. The most notable example of this trend has been the recent explosion of work on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals by prominent scholars such as Daniel Conway, Lawrence Hatab, Christopher Janaway, Brian Leiter, and David Owen. In line with this movement, Monika Langer now offers a commentary on another of Nietzsche's more popular texts, The Gay Science (GS). Although Langer's work is a welcome addition to the secondary literature for its comprehensive, section-by-section approach to GS, her overly narrow focus on the contents of the individual aphorisms to the exclusion of broader reflections on the complex genesis of the text, the role the text plays in Nietzsche's free-spirit project, and the potential relationship of the text to his larger oeuvre compromises the depth and quality of her commentary. . . .
Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22771.
Hackett, Jeremiah. Review of Philip Tonner, HEIDEGGER, METAPHYSICS AND THE UNIVOCITY OF BEING. NDPR (February 2011).
Tonner, Philip. Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being. London: Continuum, 2010.
This book is a study of Heidegger's works, early and late, in the light of the idea of the univocity of being. The central thesis is that, allowing for differences of context, project, history, and the Kehre or turn in Heidegger's ways from Phenomenology to Thought, one can argue for the consistent presence of the notion of univocity of being in all of his works. "I aim to show that there is an underlying univocal sense of being in Heidegger's philosophy" (p. 65). This is the explicit thesis of the book, which is repeated in every chapter. It claims to be a radically new thesis. The evidence for this thesis is gathered from many of Heidegger's works, beginning with the Habilitation text and ending with the later works. There is an Introduction, a conclusion and an appendix. . . .
Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22751.
This book is a study of Heidegger's works, early and late, in the light of the idea of the univocity of being. The central thesis is that, allowing for differences of context, project, history, and the Kehre or turn in Heidegger's ways from Phenomenology to Thought, one can argue for the consistent presence of the notion of univocity of being in all of his works. "I aim to show that there is an underlying univocal sense of being in Heidegger's philosophy" (p. 65). This is the explicit thesis of the book, which is repeated in every chapter. It claims to be a radically new thesis. The evidence for this thesis is gathered from many of Heidegger's works, beginning with the Habilitation text and ending with the later works. There is an Introduction, a conclusion and an appendix. . . .
Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22751.
Pub: Goodfellow, Aaron, ed. Religion and Sexuality. BORDERLANDS 9.3 (2010).
INTRODUCTION
- Aaron Goodfellow, "Religion/Sexuality: Politics/Affects"
- Veena Das, "Sexuality, Vulnerability, and the Oddness of the Human: Lessons from the Mahabharata"
- Naveeda Khan, "Images That Come Unbidden: Some thoughts on the Danish cartoons controversy"
- Éric Fassin, "Celibate Priests, Continent Homosexuals: What the exclusion of gay (and gay-friendly) men from priesthood reveals about the political nature of the Roman Catholic Church"
- Deepak Mehta, "Self-Dissolution, Politics and the Work of Affect: The life and death of Sufi Baba"
- Bhrigupati Singh, "Asceticism and Eroticism in Gandhi, Thoreau and Nietzsche: An essay in geo-philosophy"
- François-David Sebbah, "Erotic Face and Ethical Face After Levinas"
- Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, "A Human Right to Stupidity" (Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign Volume 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009.)
- Vineeth Mathoor, (Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.)
- Guy Lancaster, "Promoting Conflict or Peace through Identity" (Nikki Slocum-Bradley (ed.), Promoting Conflict or Peace through Identity, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.)
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.
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: "TOTALITY AND INFINITY: a Work of Ruptures," Société Internationale de Recherches Emmanuel Levinas, Library of Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris, May 9-11, 2011.
Today it is universally acknowledged that Totality and Infinity is one of the most influential philosophical works of the 20th century. This can be ascribed to the twofold nature of the book itself. On the one hand, it engages resolutely in the debates sweeping the history of philosophical thought, in particular in the form it has taken in our times. On the other hand, it created an initial rupture in this tradition that extended rapidly to other domains well beyond the sole confines of philosophy, and defined Totality and Infinity as a work of ruptures –the title of this conference.
In Ethics and Infinity, Levinas acknowledges his debt to Rosenzweig, stating that "this is where I encountered a radical critique of totality for the first time". In Rosenzweig, Levinas explains that he discovered "a completely different path towards the search for what is meaningful". This initial rupture, the impetus for all the others, ascribes to ethics, defined on the basis of the relation to the Other and no longer as a search for perfection, the status of a "first philosophy", thus breaking with a tradition that since Aristotle had applied this term to general metaphysics or more specifically to ontology.
This led Levinas first to specify what he would retain and the ways in which he would depart from other philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Kant, Bergson, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Buber, to mention only a few of the key names that appear in Totality and Infinity.
Let us abandon pure philosophy: this rupture led Levinas to reject any form of theology which presents itself as a dogma, mysticism, or even as knowledge of God or an attempt to attain such knowledge. Theological statements are now only considered to have meaning when they apply to human relations.
The principles of the Rights of Man are no longer based on the notion that all human beings share a fundamental nature, a nature which must be respected and whose wellbeing must be protected, but rather on "the rights of the other man", with no reference to a shared concept encompassing the self and the other.
The prime essence of language does not reside in the exchange of information or even in its dimension as dialogue since this is where the dissymmetry in the relation to the Other is occluded, the Other who here is a formal You rather than an intimate You.
These are only a few examples of the ruptures, the outcomes of what could well be termed the 'revelation of the face' of the Other, to use Levinas' phrase. In fact, the entire set of notions describing what is human, underwent a transformation of its meaning and its relations, in particular in politics, science, technology, teaching, and love.
Speakers : Flora Bastiani, Benoît Chantre, Hugues Choplin, Cristian Ciocan, François Coppens, Pascal Delhom, Corinne Enaudeau, Arnaud François, Miguel Garcia Baro, Christian Godin, Georges Hansel, Joëlle Hansel, Eric Hoppenot, Malgorzata Kowalska, Robert Legros , Marie-Anne Lescourret, Nicolas Monseu, Yasuhiko Murakami, Michel Olivier, Jean-François Rey, Jean-Michel Salanskis, Jan Sokol, Jacques Taminiaux.
Visit: http://www.sirel-levinas.org/.
In Ethics and Infinity, Levinas acknowledges his debt to Rosenzweig, stating that "this is where I encountered a radical critique of totality for the first time". In Rosenzweig, Levinas explains that he discovered "a completely different path towards the search for what is meaningful". This initial rupture, the impetus for all the others, ascribes to ethics, defined on the basis of the relation to the Other and no longer as a search for perfection, the status of a "first philosophy", thus breaking with a tradition that since Aristotle had applied this term to general metaphysics or more specifically to ontology.
This led Levinas first to specify what he would retain and the ways in which he would depart from other philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Kant, Bergson, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Buber, to mention only a few of the key names that appear in Totality and Infinity.
Let us abandon pure philosophy: this rupture led Levinas to reject any form of theology which presents itself as a dogma, mysticism, or even as knowledge of God or an attempt to attain such knowledge. Theological statements are now only considered to have meaning when they apply to human relations.
The principles of the Rights of Man are no longer based on the notion that all human beings share a fundamental nature, a nature which must be respected and whose wellbeing must be protected, but rather on "the rights of the other man", with no reference to a shared concept encompassing the self and the other.
The prime essence of language does not reside in the exchange of information or even in its dimension as dialogue since this is where the dissymmetry in the relation to the Other is occluded, the Other who here is a formal You rather than an intimate You.
These are only a few examples of the ruptures, the outcomes of what could well be termed the 'revelation of the face' of the Other, to use Levinas' phrase. In fact, the entire set of notions describing what is human, underwent a transformation of its meaning and its relations, in particular in politics, science, technology, teaching, and love.
Speakers : Flora Bastiani, Benoît Chantre, Hugues Choplin, Cristian Ciocan, François Coppens, Pascal Delhom, Corinne Enaudeau, Arnaud François, Miguel Garcia Baro, Christian Godin, Georges Hansel, Joëlle Hansel, Eric Hoppenot, Malgorzata Kowalska, Robert Legros , Marie-Anne Lescourret, Nicolas Monseu, Yasuhiko Murakami, Michel Olivier, Jean-François Rey, Jean-Michel Salanskis, Jan Sokol, Jacques Taminiaux.
Visit: http://www.sirel-levinas.org/.
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