Continental Philosophy

In terms of the history of western philosophy, the philosophy of embodiment is relatively recent. For much of this history the body has been conceptualised as simply one biological object among others, part of a biological nature which our rational faculties set us apart from, as well as an instrument to be directed and a possible source of disruption to be controlled. Problematically for feminists, the opposition between mind and body has also been correlated with an opposition between male and female, with the female regarded as enmeshed in her bodily existence in a way that makes attainment of rationality questionable. “Women are somehow more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men” (Grosz 14). Such enmeshment in corporeality was also attributed to colonised bodies and those attributed to the lower classes (McClintock 1995, Alcoff 2006, 103). Challenging such assumptions required feminists to confront corporeality in order to elucidate and confront constructions of sexual difference.

via Feminist Perspectives on the Body (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Open Court’s Popular Culture and Philosophy book series (http://www.opencourtbooks.com/) is currently accepting Abstracts and Proposals for Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy, edited by Josef Steiff, for publication in late 2011. Your proposal can address any iteration of Sherlock Holmes, including works by creators other than Doyle, and use any approach that seems relevant or is exciting to you.

Our goal is to be first and foremost a book about Sherlock Holmes. To this end, we will use philosophy, literary theory and/or media theory with philosophical underpinnings as a tool to create a deeper and more thoughtful exploration and understanding of issues raised by Sherlock Holmes as a character or a narrative. You may examine a specific story or book, multiple stories or editions, any of the characters (major or minor), thematic or contextual analysis, works by other writers in which Holmes or Watson appear, even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself or any of the people who have adapted his material (most recently, Guy Ritchie).

We want to include analysis of short stories, novels, plays, movies, comics, anime as well as material inspired by (or making sly reference to) Sherlock Holmes. For example, this could include analysis specific to the recent films or the 1930s silent film adaptation of the stage play or specific TV adaptations or even TV series like House or Monk.

Please submit your initial proposal or expression of interest to Josef Steiff at ocbook@gmail.com by August 15; query regarding late proposals after that date. Final drafts will be due February 2011.

Good for student readers.

Link

Gary Overvold, Editor’s Note
James R. Mensch, The Phenomenological Status of the Ego
Christopher Arroyo, The Role of Feelings in Husserl’s Ethics
Tracy Colony, Concerning Technology
Maria Granik, Mary Troxell, The Autonomy of Art in Heidegger and Schopenhauer
Emilia Angelova, A Continuity Between the A and B Deductions of the Critique
Lisa Folkmarson Käll, Expression Between Self and Other
Elena Ficara, Hegel’s Dialectic in Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy
Jennifer Holt, Nihilistic Praxis
Farhang Erfani, We Are Not Saints, But We Have Kept Our Appointment
Christopher Lauer, Kierkegaard and Aristophanes on the Suspension of Irony
Jacob M. Held, Marx via Feuerbach
Dwayne A. Tunstall, Transcendental Pragmatisms

Link

Architecture+Philosophy 2011
Boston University, Department of Philosophy
Boston, MA
April 8-9, 2011

Thinking about architecture has long been an enterprise of philosophers and architects alike, but in recent years there has been a growing divergence between them over terminological and methodological issues. Philosophers charge architects with mishandling texts and architects charge philosophers with mishandling buildings.

But there are also other divisions among contemporary architectural theorists themselves. Some theorists concern themselves with the human experience, with ethical and poetical questions, and with sensory and aesthetic explorations of architecture and its environment. Other theorists are bent on treating architecture as a form of knowledge that takes shape as a formal and socio-political practice through tools such as language, algorithms, and diagrams. Still other theorists see their task as navigating among these sometimes quite distinct approaches.

Keynotes

Dr. Alberto Pérez-Gómez :: Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture
McGill University :: School of Architecture

Dr. Karsten Harries :: Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Philosophy
Yale University :: Department of Philosophy

Call for Papers

The Boston University Department of Philosophy invites submissions from professionals and graduate students in philosophy, architecture, and other related discplines. Topics may be from any point of view, including the so-called phenomenological and critical, modern and postmodern, postcritical and projective, and urban and sustainable approaches to architecture.

The Architecture+Philosophy 2011 conference aims to provide an arena for careful clarification of current trends in architectural thought. Send complete papers (3,000-5,000 words) with a 150 word abstract, formatted for blind review, to architecture.philosophy@gmail.com by January 15, 2011.

Please visit http://philarch.wordpress.com for more information and a pdf of the Call for Papers.

A Life Worth Living: Part II
Simon Glendinning
In the first part of this discussion about the meaning of life I suggested that the recent absence of reflection on this question was due in large part to a general acceptance by European intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries of “the secularisation thesis”. Writings taking up themes related to the significance of our lives were framed by an assumption that the historical movement of modernity was forging a transition from a society dominated by magic, myth, superstition and religion, into one with a cognitively superior outlook in which these things are disclosed as illusions and delusions which we shed in the name of reason, criticism and science. Classic questions concerning the meaning of life seemed to be wrapped up with ideas of providence that had no place in a rational and scientific age.

Link

Lady Power

By NANCY BAUER
Nancy Bauer is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Tufts University.

If you want to get a bead on the state of feminism these days, look no further than the ubiquitous pop star Lady Gaga. Last summer, after identifying herself as a representative for “sexual, strong women who speak their mind,” the 23-year-old Gaga seemed to embrace the old canard that a feminist is by definition a man-hater when she told a Norwegian journalist, “I’m not a feminist. I hail men! I love men!” But by December she was praising the journalist Ann Powers, in a profile in The Los Angeles Times, for being “a little bit of a feminist, like I am.” She continued, “When I say to you, there is nobody like me, and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves.” Apparently, even though she loves men — she hails them! — she is a little bit of a feminist because she exemplifies what it looks like for a woman to say, and to believe, that there’s nobody like her.

The rest

A review of Santiago Zabala’s The Remains of Being, over at The Church and Postmodern Culture

Link

Men With Balls: The Art of the 2010 World Cup
Curated by Simon Critchley

June 10 – July 11, 2010
Opening reception: June 10, 6-8pm

LIVE screening of matches at apexart
June 11 – July 11 (see schedule)

More details!

CALL FOR PAPERS: ‘Myth’. DEADLINE: 1 AUGUST 2010

Contributions are now invited for the 2010 issue of the MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, an international, refereed online journal aimed at postgraduate and early-career researchers.

‘Writing begins, this is its condition, with the effacement or the disappearance of mythical names’ (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe). We should like to propose this statement as a starting point for a collective reflection on myth. For Lacoue-Labarthe, then, myth is excluded or overcome at the point in human history when art and culture emerge. However, one wonders how far it might be possible to stretch such a myth-busting model: for instance, could it be applied to the notion of mythlessness on which it relies? This question recalls a second understanding of art’s relation to myth, which sees art not as an effacement of myth, but rather as myth in its turn. Such has been the position both of those who have denounced art as ‘a thing of the past’ (Hegel), and of those who have sought to revitalize it, thereby creating new possibilities and new practices. We seek to publish articles engaging with these questions; with what they assume or distort; or with topics of the author’s choosing. Some suggestions are:

- The absence or interruption of myth
- Literature between muthos and logos
- The alterity of myth
- Myth for structuralism, anthropology, psychoanalysis
- Art as (new) myth
- Mythologization and the political
- Mythological woman; gender challenges to myth
- The timeless, the eternally recurring, the pre- or post-historic
- Mythological figures
- (Self-)mythologizing authors
- Myth and collective or anonymous authorship

Papers, of up to 3,000 words in length, may come from any field in the ‘modern humanities’, which include the modern and medieval languages, literatures, and cultures of Europe (including English and the Slavonic languages, and the cultures of the European diaspora). History, library studies, education and pedagogy, and the medical application of linguistics are excluded.

In order to submit a paper, you are kindly requested to register as an author at http://mhra.org.uk/ojs/index.php/wph/user/register. Any informal queries can be directed to the editors at postgrads@mhra.org.uk.

From Ohio University Press: Dead Letters to Nietzsche, or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy (Series In Continental Thought)

Dead Letters to Nietzsche examines how writing shapes subjectivity through the example of Nietzsche’s reception by his readers, including Stanley Rosen, David Farrell Krell, Georges Bataille, Laurence Lampert, Pierre Klossowski, and Sarah Kofman. More precisely, Joanne Faulkner finds that the personal identification that these readers form with Nietzsche’s texts is an enactment of the kind of identity-formation described in Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalysis. This investment of their subjectivity guides their understanding of Nietzsche’s project, the revaluation of values.

Not only does this work make a provocative contribution to Nietzsche scholarship, but it also opens in an original way broader philosophical questions about how readers come to be invested in a philosophical project and how such investment alters their subjectivity.

JBSP: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Volume 41 – No 2 – May 2010: Confrontations

TRACY COLONY: A Matter of Time: Stiegler on Heidegger and Being Technological
ERNST WOLFF: The Quest for a Post-Metaphysical Access to the Human:
From Marcel to Heidegger
CHAD ENGELLAND: The Phenomenological Kant: Heidegger’s Interest in Transcendental Philosophy
NIALL KEANE: Interpreting Plato Phenomenologically: Relationality and Being in Heidegger’s Sophist
ADAM GONYA: Assertion and Receptivity: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Poet’s Redemptive Utterance
LESTER EMBREE: Wisdom more than Knowledge and more than Loved: Dorion Cairn’s Revision of Husserl’s Philosophic Ideal

Postmodernism, Culture and Religion 4
“The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion”
Syracuse University
April 7-9, 2011

Plenary Speakers:
JOHN D. CAPUTO
Watson Professor of Religion and Philosophy
Syracuse University (http://religion.syr.edu/Caputo.html)

PHILIP GOODCHILD
Professor of Theology and Religious Studies
University of Nottingham (UK) (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/Theology/People/philip.goodchild)

CATHERINE MALABOU
Professor of Philosophy
University of Paris-X, Nanterre (http://www.u-paris10.fr/10980645/0/fiche_EE8__pagelibre/)

CALL FOR PAPERS
Paper submissions are invited on the topic “The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion,” its past and present, its history and its prospects, in the widest possible terms, addressing the whole range of its implications—politics, feminism, constructive theology, philosophy, history, literature, interfaith dialogue, and the hermeneutics of sacred texts.
Read the rest of this entry »

Most important one: Save Middlesex Philosophy
Facebook
The petition

Please keep up with John Protevi’s incredible blogposts.

I have added a banner of support on the top right and will continue keeping it in solidarity. If others wish to use it, you can have the code here. The code easily works for wordpress and blogger. I don’t know about typepad. It would be good to have one banner to display across all supporting blogs.

Text of the speech

NY Times has an article on the new translation of the Second Sex, and some gems about the previous one:

In her splendid introduction to this new edition, Judith Thurman notes that Blanche Knopf, wife of Beauvoir’s American publisher, heard about the book on a scouting trip to France and was under the impression that it was a highbrow sex manual. Knopf asked for a reader’s report from a retired zoologist, Howard M. Parshley, who was then commissioned to do the translation. Knopf’s husband urged Parshley to condense it significantly, noting that Beauvoir seemed to suffer from “verbal diarrhea.” Parshley complied, providing the necessary Imodium by cutting 15 percent of the original 972 pages. And so it was this truncated text, translated by a scientist with a college undergraduate’s knowledge of French, that ushered two generations of women into the universe of feminist thought, inspiring pivotal later books like Betty Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique” and Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics.”

via Book Review Preview – Book Review – The Second Sex – By Simone de Beauvoir – NYTimes.com.

Europe is a dead political project

This is the beginning of the end for the EU unless it can find the capacity to start again on radically new bases

via Europe is a dead political project | Étienne Balibar | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

(H/t:  Jodi)

Towards the end of his life, Aimé Césaire has declared that the question he and his friend Léopold Sédar Senghor came to raise after they first met was: “Who am I? Who are we? What are we in this white world?” And he commented: “That’s quite a problem” (Césaire 2005, 23). “Who am I?” is a question Descartes posed, and a reader of the French philosopher naturally understands such a question to be universal, and the subject who says “I” here to stand for any human being. But when “who am I?” has to be translated as “who are we?” everything changes especially when the “we” have to define themselves against a world which leaves no room for who and what they are because they are black folks in a world where “universal” seems to naturally mean “white”.

“Négritude”, or the self-affirmation of black peoples, or the affirmation of the values of civilization of something defined as “the black world” as an answer to the question “what are we in this white world?” is indeed “quite a problem”: it poses many questions that will be examined here through the following headings:

via Négritude (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).