Continental Philosophy

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The ego, the Other and the primal fact — Toru Tani

Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and the critique of naturalism — Dermot Moran

Some differences between Kant’s and Husserl’s conceptions of transcendental philosophy — Thomas J. Nenon

Heidegger in Mexico: Emilio Uranga’s ontological hermeneutics — Carlos Alberto Sanchez

A non-Bergsonian Bachelard — Jean François Perraudin

Laughing at finitude: Slavoj Žižek reads Being and Time — Thomas Brockelman

Ricoeur and the pre-political — Farhang Erfani and John F. Whitmire

As you make your wishes for the new year, remember Lacan (via Kevin Spacey):

(h/t: the one and only Peter)

Call for Submissions
Religion and Popular Culture
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture
Deadline: 15 May 2009

At a time when many in the U.S. and around the world encounter religion as a polarizing subject, one especially revered by some and utterly contested by others, this issue of Reconstruction seeks to explore questions arising at the intersection of religious experience and popular culture. To engage the relationship of religion and popular culture requires discipline-based, trans-disciplinary, and inter-disciplinary approaches in order to interpret these broad ranges of human experience.

Over the past three decades, scholarship in the Humanities evaluating the relationships between religion and popular culture has increased dramatically. This particular issue seeks a broad array of perspectives that explore, analyze, and/or interpret the myriad interrelations and interactions that exist between religion and popular culture. Despite some recent attention, the role popular culture plays in religious experience is often undervalued. Popular culture not only presents and portrays religious ideas and norms, it also operates as both a vehicle and medium through which religious meaning is communicated and understood. Submissions need not be directed toward any particular religious tradition or geared for any single definition of religion. Instead, religion might be imagined in any (or none) of the following ways: as an expression of doctrinal beliefs and/or core values, as an on-going movement between an individual or community and a larger socio-cultural matrix, or as essentially a cultural construction. Theological investigations that engage cultural studies from a faith perspective are certainly encouraged. We also welcome perspectives that interrogate the stability of meaning(s) assigned to such terms (“culture,” “religion,” “popular,” etc.) and their complex inter-relations.

Specifically, submissions should be framed with at least one of the following four rubrics in mind: religion within popular culture, popular culture within religion, religion as popular culture (and vice versa), or religion in tension with popular culture.

We welcome manuscripts that produce conversations engaging historical, ethnographic, normative, literary, anthropological, philosophical, artistic, political or other terms that elaborate a relationship between religion and popular culture. For example, submissions might investigate religious expression(s) in relation to any of the following realms of contemporary popular culture:

Note: This list is representative, but certainly not exhaustive.

Please send proposals, abstracts, completed essays, multimedial performances, etc. to Nate Hinerman and Michael Benton at religionculture_at_gmail.com by 15 May 2009. We are happy to consider abstracts and proposals prior to this date. Publication is expected in the first quarter of 2010. All submissions are refereed. Papers must follow the Reconstruction guidelines for submission <http://reconstruction.eserver.org/guidelines.shtml>.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture <http://reconstruction.eserver.org> (ISSN: 1547-4348) is an innovative online cultural studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies. Reconstruction publishes three themed issues and one open issue quarterly. Reconstruction is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

This year it is exactly 60 years since the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Krisis’ new issue is therefore dedicated to philosophy and human rights. Regina Kreide, Ernst van den Hemel and Marc de Wilde write about a wide range of philosophical issues connected with human rights, and Thomas Poell and Sudeep Dasgupta review two recent publications about human rights.

Ernst van den Hemel: ‘Included but not Belonging. Badiou and Rancière on Human Rights’.
In this article the standpoints on Human Rights by two contemporary French philosophers, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière are explored. Their criticalreading of the project of Human Rights moves away from the reading that we can see in the work of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben.Instead both Badiou and Rancière offer a critical version of Human Rights thatcan be subsumed under the phrase ‘included but not belonging’. Theirinterventions on Human Rights reveal, besides important similarities,significant differences. For Badiou, notions likehuman rights, and democracy, should be rejected altogether, whereas Rancièrestill sees critical potential for both the project of human rights and democracy.This difference can be attributed to the divergent notions of truth that thetwo philosophers apply. The article ends with a sketch of the critical andmilitant potential of the work of these two theorists.
http://krisis.eu/content/2008-3/2008-3-03-hemel.pdf

Regina Kreide: ‘Power and Powerlessness of Human Rights. The International Discourse on Human Rights’.
The goal of this article is to reconstruct the arguments brought forward in international political discourse and political theory discourse, and to present a suggestion for the conditions of a context-sensible foundation and juridification of human rights. In this course neither the objections of opponents of a universalistic human rights conception are overlooked, nor claims to universally valid human rights, equally effective for all humans, are given up.
http://krisis.eu/content/2008-3/2008-3-02-kreide.pdf

The British Society for Phenomenology

NIETZSCHE AND PHENOMENOLOGY

St Hilda’s College, Oxford, April 3rd – 5th 2009

Speakers

Ullrich Haase (Manchester Metropolitan University)
‘History: Heidegger on Nietzsche’s 2nd Untimely Meditation’

David Krell (Depaul University)
‘Nietzsche in Derrida’s Politiques de l’amitié’

Will McNeill (Depaul University)
‘The Descent of Philosophy: On the Nietzschean Legacy in Heidegger’s
Phenomenology’

Graham Parkes (University College Cork)
‘Nietzsche on Experiencing the Natural World – As It Really Is?’

Andrea Rehberg (Bilkent University)
‘Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty: Physiology, Body, Flesh’

John Sallis (Boston College)
‘Perspectives on Shining: Nietzsche and Beyond’

Jim Urpeth (Greenwich University)
‘The Phenomenology of Religious Life; Nietzsche and Bergson’

Book Discussion Session
Prof Douglas Burnham (Staffordshire University)and tbc will discuss Jill
Marsden’s book After Nietzsche (Palgrave)
Jill Marsden (University of Bolton) will respond.

Registration forms are available on the BSP web-site:
http://www.britishphenomenology.com, or from David Webb: d.a.webb@staffs.ac.uk

Bursary

Two Bursaries are available for post-graduate students to offset the cost of attending the conference. Each bursary will cover two nights B&B at St Hilda’s College and the cost of the main conference dinner. In return, the recipients of the bursaries are asked to assist at the registration desk at certain times throughout the conference and to prepare a report of the conference for the BSP web-site. There is still time to apply for a bursary. Please write a brief outline (400-600 words) of why attending the conference will be useful for you in your research, and send this to:
David Webb, Arts Media and Design, Staffordshire University, Stoke-on- Trent, ST4 2XW (d.a.webb@staffs.ac.uk) by 19th January 2009.

Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy

La société canadienne de philosophie continentale

The Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy will hold its annual conference on October 15 – 17, 2009, at King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario, London.

We invite papers or panels on any theme relevant to the broad concerns of continental philosophy. Please submit complete papers (no more than 4500 words) and a brief abstract (150 words). If you are submitting a panel proposal, send only a 750 word abstract for each paper. Please prepare your paper for blind review as an attachment in Word.

All submissions (in French or English) must be sent electronically by June 1, 2009, to:

Antonio Calcagno, CSCP Local Coordinator, acalcagn@uwo.ca

If you are a graduate student, please identify yourself as such in order to be eligible for the graduate student essay prize. The winner will be announced at the annual conference and considered for publication in the following spring issue of Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry for the absence. Done grading. Will be back with updates tomorrow

Standing outside a restaurant at lunch time, the black-clad members of Electric Touch look like a rock band. And onstage the Austin-based band’s members move around like classic rockers, spindly limbs kicking and flailing around their instruments.

But the rock act sort of ends there. The expectation that bleary, red eyes are hidden behind sunglasses is quickly dashed. The four guys are chipper, chatty, clear-headed and in love with their jobs…

Leigh and Lawlor met in Austin through a mutual friend. “It wasn’t long before guitars came out and we started writing,” Lawlor says. “We had a blank canvas; we could make the band whatever we wanted. We decided it shouldn’t be too complicated and should include some positive messages about love and such. … We might read Sartre, but it’s not what we’re going to sing about.”

Link

The Experience of Freedom http://www.mediafire.com/?5cym1ntnoce

Hegel, The Restlessness of the Negative http://www.mediafire.com/?mxi2mgwpjjb

via ren yellam

Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts could be called a brief “guide for the perplexed.” The perplexed include scholars in many disciplines who encounter Adorno’s ideas. They also include a larger public that confronts the issues he addressed: cultural segmentation, ecological destruction, democratic deficits, and paradoxes of globalization. Reading Adorno raises questions about the prospects for a world in which economic exploitation and political violence threaten to make life impossible.

Adorno experienced these threats in a visceral way. Driven from Germany during the Nazi regime and writing his first mature books in American exile, he returned to become a leading philosopher and social critic in post-war Germany. From there the influence of his ideas has spread to diverse fields around the world. Yet the center of his work lies in philosophy, and it is in philosophy that his most important contributions must be assessed.

The book under review reflects these patterns. It begins with surveys of Adorno’s thought and its genealogy written by the editor, Canadian philosopher Deborah Cook. The next four chapters, by British and Norwegian philosophers, are on Adorno’s reflections concerning logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and moral philosophy — arguably the canonical core of modern philosophy. The last five chapters, written by American, British, and Irish scholars in sociology, German studies, English literature, and philosophy, address Adorno’s social philosophy, political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of culture, and philosophy of history.

The rest of the review

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Introduction: Recognition: Philosophy and Politics — Cillian McBride and Jonathan Seglow

Recognition, Needs and Wrongness: Two Approaches — Arto Laitinen

A Vital Human Need: Recognition as Inclusion in Personhood — Heikki Ikäheimo

Work and the Struggle for Recognition — Nicholas H. Smith

Rights, Contribution, Achievement and the World: Some thoughts on Honneth’s Recognitive ideal — Jonathan Seglow

Beyond Dignity and Difference: Revisiting the Politics of Recognition — Maeve Cooke

Demanding Recognition: Equality, Respect, and Esteem — Cillian McBride

Parity of Participation and the Politics of Status — Chris Armstrong and Simon Thompson

Recognition and Redistribution in Theories of Justice Beyond the State — Shane O’Neill and Caroline Walsh

Inside/Outside :An interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference hosted by the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University

April 2nd and 3rd, 2009

Keynote Speakers: Espen Hammer (University of Oslo/Essex) and Terry Pinkard (Georgetown University)

Foregrounding the relationship inside/outside, this conference seeks to consider the effects of this pervasive structuring relation across philosophy, literature, the human sciences, politics, and the arts. What work does this distinction do? How do we understand its ubiquity? Furthermore, what is our contemporary relation to this (perceived?) opposition: do we overcome, dissolve, ignore, work through, maintain, or dialectically negotiate this relationship? Papers exploring these and related questions are welcome.

Some suggestions: scheme and content, content and form, mind and world, interiority and exteriority, self and other, inclusion and exclusion, human and inhuman, literary, aesthetic, and political strategies and figures, historical investigations and genealogies, theological figurations and disfigurations, contemporary philosophical approaches (“continental” and “analytic”) to this question, etc.

Please send full papers (for a 45 minute presentation), abstract (300 words max.), and contact information (including institutional affiliation) to insideoutsideconference@gmail.com

Deadline for all submissions is January 15th, 2009.
www.insideoutsideconference.com

–
Martin Shuster / vanity at jhu dot edu

Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University

Lacan, Seminar XX, Encore

It seems that it changed address. Here is the new link

Link

(h/t: Marcus Leis Allion)

Call for Papers
Boston College Philosophy Department 10th Annual Graduate Student Conference
On Education
March 20-21 2009

Plato gave us a remarkable image: through the process of education, the student leaves behind the shackles and darkness of a cave and ascends to knowledge of the divine forms. That process has practical consequences, which the prisoner faces in returning to the cave and transforming the community.

Since the concern in ancient philosophy for paideia, education has been central to philosophical attempts to discover what we can know and how we should live. Medieval reflection on the order of philosophical study gave birth to the university, which through the liberal arts prepares students to contemplate the highest truths. In modernity education is closely tied to the possibility of universal enlightenment. When challenging enlightenment ideals, contemporary philosophers reevaluate the goals of education and the institutions that house it.

What experiences are formative for the human person? Can those be taught? What is the proper method and goal of a philosophical education? Should such an education shape our political and social life? Or does it serve other ends? We invite papers that consider how these question have been addressed in the history of philosophy as well as what contemporary philosophy can contribute to the discourse on education.

Papers will be blind reviewed. Please limit submissions to approximately 4,000 words and attach a cover page including name, institution and contact information. The submission deadline is January 15th 2009

Email: philgrad@bc.edu
Mail: Attn: Graduate Conference Committee
Department of Philosophy
Boston College
140 Commonwealth Avenue
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3806

It has taken a few days to realize what has been nagging at me about Plaxico Burress’ tragic situation. … That was it! High school ninth grade English class, when we spent a couple of months knitting our brows being forced to read the sparse, depressing tomes of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre — in translation, of course. (You can imagine how long ago I went to high school.)

I can see him now, our English teacher, Mr. Berman, a diminutive, bow-tied, bespectacled fellow, writing and underlining this long, foreign, unfamiliar word on the blackboard: “EXISTENTIALISM.” We dutifully scribbled into our looseleaf notebooks.

“It’s a post-World War II French philosophy, boys” he explained quite solemnly. “An existentialist is the author of his future. You, and you alone,” and he pointed to us, “determine the course of your fate.You are responsible for the decisions you make, and the path you take. Indeed, you construct your life.”

Sounds like the plot of one of those arcane but impressive books I read all those years ago, like The Stranger, or The Plague or No Exit: A young, multimillionaire football star with the all the promise of a glorious professional future ahead of him leaves the remote safety of his gated country mansion, and crosses the broad river, into the sinful city for a night on the town. He brings a handgun into a crowded nightclub. It accidentally discharges and he is wounded. He is bleeding, panicked. A calm friend drives him to a hospital where he signs in under an alias which, in the end, will not protect him.

Say What??

Link

The 6th Annual

California Roundtable

on Philosophy and Race

October 2-3, 2009

HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE

Keynote Speaker: Charles Mills, Northwestern University

Call for Papers

The California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race announces a call for papers for its sixth annual roundtable. This roundtable brings together philosophers of race, and those working in related fields in a small and congenial setting to share their work and to help further this sub-discipline of philosophy.  Philosophical papers are invited on any issue regarding race, ethnicity, or racism, and including those that take up race in the context of another topic, such as feminism, political philosophy, ethics, justice, culture, identity, biology, phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, metaphysics, or epistemology.

Submissions are especially encouraged from junior scholars and philosophers of color. We seek to foster a productive and intellectually stimulating environment for those working in philosophy and race. The Roundtable also aspires to bring together junior and senior scholars to develop and enhance constructive mentoring relationships.

Papers should be no more than 30 minutes in length. Please attach a detailed abstract (3-4 pages including brief bibliography), as MS word.doc or .pdf file
to
organizer@caroundtable.org
Subject heading should read: (your last name) CRPR 09 Submission

Submission Deadline is April 1, 2009.

Co-Organizers
Mickaella Perina, U. Mass. Boston
Falguni A.Sheth, Hampshire College

Please see www.caroundtable.org for more information and last year’s program

For questions or a pdf copy of the flyer, please contact us at organizer@caroundtable.org