Continental Philosophy

This workshop brings together an interdisciplinary set of speakers to look at the experience of bodily vulnerability and consider its implications for the understanding of embodiment and selfhood. The resources of phenomenology will be put into conversation with accounts of the lived experiences of those living with illness, pain or other kinds of bodily vulnerability. Contributions will be made from, philosophers, health practitioners, medics and others.

Papers:
Fredrik Svenaeus, “Illness as unhomelike being-in-the world: Heidegger and the phenomenology of medicine”
Katherine J. Morris, “Living the ambiguity of diagnosis: a case study”
Matthew Ratcliffe, “Phenomenology of Depression”
Lisa Folkmarson Käll, “Pain Embodied in Expressive Space”
Havi Carel, “The Phenomenology of Illness”
Deborah Padfield, “Bodies in Pain” (including slides of her work)
Jack Wilson, “Sartre: Illness and the experience of the body”
Carol Eastwood, “Towards a Phenomenology of Endometriosis”
Minae Inahara, “The Sound of Pain: Embodied Subjectivity and Onomatopoeic Expressions in Japanese”
Patricia McGettigan, “Falling: from the perspective of patients”
Julie Jomeen, “Women’s lived experience of their pregnant bodies”
Michael Gillan Peckitt, “Limping After Leder and House”
Annabel Howe, “‘I’ve been playing in the house of ages’: Dementia, Advance Decisions and Embodied Experience”
Lesley Jones & Robin Bunton, “Wounded or Warriors , deafness, technology and the body”
Diane Pitt, “The Role of Phenomenology in Clinical Diagnostics: the Experience of Women with Heart Disease”
Anthony Wilde, “Levinas and the Vulnerable Body”
Stephen Burwood, “Torture”
Visit the conference website here: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/fass/humanities/philosophy/research/centre-for-research-into-embod/workshops-and-conferences/phenomenology-of-ilness-may.aspx.

The Theory Reading Group at Cornell University invites submissions for its sixth annual interdisciplinary spring conference:

Form and Genesis

Featuring keynote speakers Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico) and Robert Kaufman (University of California, Berkeley)

Cornell University
Ithaca, New York

April 22-24, 2010

Increasingly it seems that contemporary thought is confronted with two ways of explaining its objects. On the one hand, a formal approach seeks to analyze the necessary structures or defining qualities that make
something what it is. On the other hand, a genetic or historical method aims to uncover the forces that give rise to form or structure in the first place. Do these modes of explanation disqualify one another, or are
there compelling prospects for their integration? For example, is it possible to understand how thought or rationality can grasp its own determining processes? Or, on the contrary, is thought structurally unable
to access a domain that is by nature exterior to reason, sense, or order?

Broadly understood, the formal approach tends to seek logical explanations, while the genetic approach looks to materialist or genealogical accounts. The relation between these two orders of explanation has wide implications. What is the connection between logical or normative form and its temporal, material, or historical genesis? Conversely, what might an analysis of the structure of genealogy or critique tell us about the latter? Does the political critique of form as an arbitrary convention mitigate its powers of normativity? What is the
relationship between form and history, or form and materiality in literary and aesthetic theory? What is the status of formalism, whether literary or logical-mathematical, in contemporary theory?

Suggested topics:

Speculation and critique
Formalisms and historicisms
The transcendental and the empirical
Limits of philosophy/limits of science
Form of the political
Originality
Events of reason
Condition and cause
Sense and nonsense
Form and genre
History and form in aesthetics
Breaking form: the sublime, the unrepresentable, the iconoclastic
Formation and deformation
The finite and the infinite
Forms of the event
Structure and drive (Freud, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari)
Form and interpretation (New Critics, Deconstruction)
History, genealogy, critique (Nietzsche, Foucault)
Marxism and form (Benjamin, Adorno, Jameson)
Forms of life (Wittgenstein, Arendt, Agamben)

Please limit the length of abstracts to no more than 250 words. The deadline for submission of 250-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations is March 1, 2010. Please include your name, e-mail address, and phone
number. Abstracts should be e-mailed to theory@cornell.edu. Notices of acceptance will be sent no later than March 6, 2010. For more information about the Cornell Theory Reading Group, visit

http://www.arts.cornell.edu/trg

Call for Papers

Duquesne University

4th Annual Graduate Philosophy Conference

Thinking Desire

Keynote Speaker:

Babette Babich

Fordham University

April 10, 2010

The general theme of this conference is “thinking desire.” On this topic, broadly understood, we welcome high quality submissions focusing on contemporary issues as well submissions drawing from any period in eastern or western philosophy. Comparative studies on desire from different historical periods and schools of philosophy as well as novel approaches to traditional themes are welcome.

This conference has been organized by the Duquesne Graduate Students in Philosophy (GSIP), with support from Duquesne University Philosophy, and the Dean of the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts.

Please note: living arrangements with the graduate students in the philosophy department of Duquesne University will be organized and provided for the speakers upon request to help offset travel costs.

Submission Deadline: February 1st 2010

Submission Guidelines:

Submit papers by email to duqgradconf2010@hotmail.com
All papers must be submitted in blind review format: papers should not include the author’s name or any other identifying information. All personal and contact information (with paper title) should be included in the body of the email.
Papers should not exceed 3,000 words and should include an abstract of no more than 300 words.
Papers must be in either Word or PDF electronic formats.
For further information, questions, or problems with submissions contact Clancy Smith, at smithc4@duq.edu.

Globalized Capital: Subjects, Spaces, and Critical Responses

April 10th & 11th, 2010

Keynote Speaker: Bruno Bosteels

Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University

Questioning capitalism is no easy enterprise. Discourses interrogating capitalism have mirrored the trajectory of capitalism itself, proliferating in a variety of directions and spawning new conceptual and historical problems with each new decade of confrontation. This conference aims to open up a space of convergence and dialogue for disparate trajectories of critical reflection and practical response. Its title aims to emphasize not only capitalism’s global character—its relentless expansion beyond various geographical, cultural, and political “limits”—but at the same time its particularized and often discontinuous local effects—the subjects, practices, and increasingly micro-managed spaces it carves out en route.

We would like to solicit papers dealing with a broad range of topics including, but not limited to:

Legacies and Boundaries of Expansion: Inside, outside, and beyond the capitalist Nation-State. Alterity, subalternity, and critiques from the margins. Postcolonialism, decolonization, and anti-colonial resistance. The metropolis and the collapse of the city/countryside dialectic. Historical and conceptual origins of capitalist economic thought.

Collectivities and Communes in Resistance: Communism. From parties to groups, from crowds to constituent power. Capitalism and Internationalism. Partisanship and/or universalism. Spaces of work and labors of thought: “immaterial labor”, intellectual culture, and the marketplace of ideas.
Subjects, Selfhood and Culture: Entrepreneurialist cultures of selfhood. Consumerist ethics and the conscience market. Neo-archaisms: the role of tradition and faith under capitalism. Counter-conducts, indocility, and strategies for “de-individualizing” and “decapitalizing” the self.
Images, Representations, and Symbols: Ideology and ‘ideology critique’. Narratives and mythologies of capitalism in cinema, art, architecture, and literature. The semiotics of capital.

Power and Neoliberal Governmentality: Biopower and biopolitical economy. Marxist critique in a paradigm of perpetual crisis management. “Total Governance”: from managerial rationalities to the management of life itself. Counter-insurgency, preventative war, and the securitization of liberty.

Submission Deadline: January 15, 2009

Call for Papers
17th Annual DePaul University
Philosophy Graduate Student Conference

GLOBALIZED CAPITAL: SUBJECTS, SPACES, AND CRITICAL RESPONSES
April 10th & 11th, 2010

Keynote Speaker: Bruno Bosteels
Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University

Questioning capitalism is no easy enterprise. Discourses interrogating capitalism have mirrored the trajectory of capitalism itself, proliferating in a variety of directions and spawning new conceptual and historical problems with each new decade of confrontation. This conference aims to open up a space of convergence and dialogue for disparate trajectories of critical reflection and practical response. Its title aims to emphasize not only capitalism’s global character-its relentless expansion beyond various geographical, cultural, and political “limits”-but at the same time its particularized and often discontinuous local effects-the subjects, practices, and increasingly micro-managed spaces it carves out en route.
We would like to solicit papers dealing with a broad range of topics including, but not limited to:
Legacies and Boundaries of Expansion: Inside, outside, and beyond the capitalist Nation-State. Alterity, subalternity, and critiques from the margins. Postcolonialism, decolonization, and anti-colonial resistance. The metropolis and the collapse of the city/countryside dialectic. Historical and conceptual origins of capitalist economic thought.

Collectivities and Communes in Resistance: Communism. From parties to groups, from crowds to constituent power. Capitalism and Internationalism. Partisanship and/or universalism. Spaces of work and labors of thought: “immaterial labor”, intellectual culture, and the marketplace of ideas.

Subjects, Selfhood and Culture: Entrepreneurialist cultures of selfhood. Consumerist ethics and the conscience market. Neo-archaisms: the role of tradition and faith under capitalism. Counter-conducts, indocility, and strategies for “de-individualizing” and “decapitalizing” the self.

Images, Representations, and Symbols: Ideology and ‘ideology critique’. Narratives and mythologies of capitalism in cinema, art, architecture, and literature. The semiotics of capital.

Power and Neoliberal Governmentality: Biopower and biopolitical economy. Marxist critique in a paradigm of perpetual crisis management. “Total Governance”: from managerial rationalities to the management of life itself. Counter-insurgency, preventative war, and the securitization of liberty.
Submission Deadline: January 15, 2009

Authors should email their submissions to depaulgraduatestudents@gmail.com. Papers should not exceed 3000 words and should contain a short abstract. As all papers are subject to anonymous review, papers should not include your name or any other identifying marks. Your paper title and personal information (name, institutional affiliation, and phone contact) should be included in the body of the email.
For further information and updates on the conference, if you have any questions or problems regarding submissions, or in the event that you do not receive a confirmation email, please contact Neal Miller at zzerohourr@gmail.com

CALL FOR PAPERS

WAITING FOR THE POLITICAL MOMENT

Utrecht & Rotterdam, June 17-19, 2010

‘Hamm: What’s happening?

Clov: Something is taking its course.’

Beckett, Endgame

Over the last decades, several political and cultural theorists have argued that the domain of politics, and even the very idea of the political, has been hollowed out. Politics today appears to have lost its proper status or has been submerged in the more powerful and encompassing infrastructures of late capitalism. Instead of frantically affirming or denying the emptying-out of the political, this conference traces the appropriation of the political by apparatuses of state, church, capitalism and media in modernity to look for ways to reinvigorate it. To do so, the conference focuses on a key concept: the political moment – the moment in which political agency becomes possible, as well as the formative role of the moment in politics.

To get to grips with the political moment we not only need to understand our current moment; we need to have an idea of how it developed over time. Not considering the political moment from an exclusively contemporary point of view, this conference also calls for proposals that focus on the formation of the political in relation to its emptying-out from the late Middle Ages to the present.

Contributions in the form of a 4000 words positioning paper distributed in advance and to be discussed in a seminar setting could address (but are not limited to) the following issues: what is a political moment? What does the emptying-out of the political imply? How has the appropriation of the political by state, religion or media shaped the conditions of possibility of the political? What is the role of the moment in politics?

Confirmed speakers include: Mieke Bal, Bruno Bosteels, Rosi Braidotti, Simon Critchley, Martin van Gelderen, Olivier Marchart, Patchen Markell, Benjamin Noys, and Alberto Toscano.

If you are interested in participating, please send in a 300-words paper proposal and a short résumé of your current research by January 15 2010 to Frans-Willem Korsten, Professor of Literature and Society, Erasmus University Rotterdam, email: korsten@fhk.eur.nl; and/or to Bram Ieven, lecturer in comparative literature at Utrecht University, email: b.k.ieven@uu.nl.

For more information see: www.waitingforthepoliticalmoment.org

Sixth Annual Philosophy Graduate Student Conference
University of Memphis
February 12-13, 2010
Submission Deadline: January 08, 2010
Keynote Speaker:
Daniel W. Smith (Purdue University)

“What is the postmodern [or contemporary philosophy]? …
It is undoubtedly part of the modern” — Jean-François Lyotard

Lyotard claims that contemporary philosophy has not gone beyond the tradition which was inaugurated by Descartes. As we stand at the beginning of a new century, we wish to inquire into the ways in which philosophy today is a confrontation with modern problems—either by providing solutions to the problems or by undoing the problems themselves. The aim of the conference is to consider the significance of grasping anew modern philosophers and/or their respective problems as they are discussed and rethought by contemporary philosophers.

We invite submissions of philosophical papers by graduate students focusing on any problem, question, concept, or figures, in which there is a clear focus on the relation between modern and contemporary philosophy. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following philosophical problems:

- Rethinking transcendental philosophy.
- The human/animal divide.
-? The question of world, the role of representation, and/or the place of the subject.
- ?The possibility of metaphysics or ontology.
- Philosophy of embodiment or the importance of the body.

Deadline for submission of papers is January 08, 2010. Papers should not exceed twelve double-spaced pages. Papers should be prepared in Word and made suitable for blind review. Also, please provide a separate cover page which includes the following information: paper title; university affiliation; email address; telephone number; abstract (200 words maximum). Title the attachment containing your paper with your paper’s title. Title the attachment containing your cover page with your last name followed by “cover page”. Email both files as separate attachments to all three members of the co-organizing and reviewing committee: Nicolás Garrera (ngarrera@memphis.edu), Arsalan Memon (amemon@memphis.edu), and Maia Nahele (mkhffwen@memphis.edu). Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact any one of the co-organizing/reviewing committee officers.

Roundtable on Marx’s Capital

Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, February 24-27, 2011

Our second Roundtable will explore Volume One of Marx’s Capital (1867). We chose this text because the resurgence in references to and mentions of Marx – provoked especially by the financial crisis, but presaged by the best-seller status of Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Marx’s surprising victory in the BBC’s “greatest philosopher” poll – has only served to highlight the fact that there have not been any new interpretive or theoretical approaches to this book since Althusser’s in the 1960s.

The question that faces us is this: Does the return of Marx mean that we have been thrust into the past, such that long “obsolete” approaches have a newfound currency, or does in mean, on the contrary, that Marx has something new to say to us, and that new approaches to his text are called for?

The guiding hypothesis of this Roundtable is that if new readings of Capital are called for, then it is new readers who will produce them.

Therefore, we are calling for applications from scholars interested in approaching Marx’s magnum opus with fresh eyes, willing to open it to the first page and read it through to the end without knowing what they might find. Applicants need not be experts in Marx or in Marxism. Applicants must, however, specialize in some area of social or political philosophy. Applicants must also be interested in teaching and learning from their fellows, and in nurturing wide-ranging and diverse inquiries into the history of political thought.

If selected for participation, applicants will deliver a written, roundtable-style presentation on a specific part or theme of the text. Your approach to the text might be driven by historical or contemporary concerns, and it might issue from an interest in a theme or a figure (be it Aristotle or Foucault). Whatever your approach, however, your presentation must centrally investigate some aspect of the text of Capital. Spaces are very limited.

Applicants should send the following materials as email attachments (.doc/.rtf/.pdf) to papers@sspp.us by September 15, 2010:

1. Curriculum Vitae
2. One page statement of interest in the Roundtable. (Please include a discussion of the topics you would be willing to explore in a roundtable presentation. Please also discuss the projected significance of participation for your research and/or teaching.)

Ben Fowkes’ translation of Capital (Viking/Penguin, 1976) is the official translation for the Roundtable, and should be used for page citations. However, applicants are strongly encouraged to review either the German text of Capital (the 2nd edition of 1873 is the basis for most widely available texts) or the French translation (J. Roy, 1872-5), which was the last edition Marx himself oversaw to publication; both of these are widely available on-line.

All applicants will be notified of the outcome of the selection process via email on or before October 15, 2010. Participants will be asked to send a draft or outline of their presentation to papers@sspp.us by January 15, 2011 so that we can finalize the program.

In order to participate in the Roundtable (but not to apply or to be selected), you must be a member of the Society in good standing. You can become a member of the Society by following the membership link at: http://www.sspp.us/

Call for Papers: 4th Biennial Philosophy and Literature Conference At Purdue University

“Deleuze: Ethics and Politics”

April 9-10, 2010

Purdue University, West Lafayette

Deadline for Paper Submission: January 15, 2010

The philosopher Michel Serres once described Gilles Deleuze as “an excellent example of the dynamic movement of free and inventive thinking.” Without a doubt, Deleuze was one of the most singular and prolific philosophers of the 20th century. It is no surprise then, that the impact of Deleuze’s thought continues to reverberate throughout a host of diverse disciplines including Philosophy, Literature, Political Theory, Law, Visual Arts, Film Studies, and Education. With recognition of Deleuze’s influence in these various fields, and in the spirit of Serres’ assessment, this conference seeks to motivate an exploration of Deleuze’s inventive thinking in the particular areas of politics and ethics.

Thus, this conference will serve as a platform, bringing together graduate students and faculty interested in engaging, developing, or critically examining the political and ethical dimensions of Deleuze’s work. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: immanent vs. transcendent criteria in ethics, political theory, law and jurisprudence; the role of the State in relation to capitalism; the possibility of social forms of organization radically exterior to the State forms; the positive or productive function of desire as a creative force directly invested in the social field; the problem of micro-fascism with respect to individual and collective processes of subjectivation; the forms of resistance enabled by minor literature and other processes of becoming-minor; the conception of cartography as a critical and transformative social analytic of power relations. This two-day conference will consist of four panels, each with three to four accepted graduate students presenting, three keynote addresses, and a wine and cheese reception.

Keynote Speakers

We will host three preeminent Deleuze scholars as keynote speakers: Daniel Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky, from Purdue University, and Eugene Holland, from Ohio State University. Dr. Smith is known for national and international projects including translations of Deleuze and Klossowski and several works on Deleuze leading up to the forthcoming publication of his book on Deleuze’s philosophical system. Dr. Holland specializes in social theory and modern French literature, history, and culture. He has published widely including a 1999 volume on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and a forthcoming book on Nomad Citizenship. Dr. Plotnitsky has contributed numerous publications on Deleuze and on the topics of science, literature, and philosophy. He is currently working on a book entitled Space-Time-Matter-Thought: Non-Euclideanism from Riemann and Deleuze, and Beyond.

Conference Eligibility and Submission Process

We welcome submissions from graduate students of any discipline working on the political or ethical facets of Deleuze’s philosophy. Submissions will be accepted via email at phil-lit-conference@purdue.edu. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2010. Authors should attach both the paper and an abstract (500 word limit) as a Word document. The author’s name and affiliation should be omitted from the body of the paper. In addition, the author should include the text of the abstract in the body of the message. Be sure to include the following information in the email: full name, departmental affiliation, degree program, and the title of your paper. Accepted authors will receive notification no later than February 15, 2010.

Contact Information

For updates, please visit http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/idis/phil-lit/conference/. All additional questions can be directed to Erin Kealey or Rocky Clancy via email at: phil-lit-conference@purdue.edu.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture requests submissions for Issue 11.2 “Cultural Productions of 9/11”

Deadline for proposals: February 1, 2010 (final drafts of invited submissions will be due August 15, 2010)

How has the subject of “9/11” been produced? From the moments when people cried “too soon” to the gratuitous preying on the subject in the name of “9/11”—how has this date stamp affected cultural production?

This special issue of Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture will present a range of disciplinary responses to the aftereffects—as well as the affective hype—of the notoriously popular subject of 9/11. We mean the subject of 9/11 to register in least two senses: as the topic of myriad discourses, and also
as the individual liberal subjects who were (and still are) affected, traumatized, or otherwise interpellated by the effects and afterimages of 9/11. Therefore, we are not as interested in what really happened” on that day as much as we are interested in the cultural production(s) of 9/11—how “9/11” became a subject
as such. We hope to analyze how the events of 9/11 created a cause–effect reversal of sorts, and how by its very utterance, 9/11 can evoke affective trauma. We are also interested in the material implications for thinking that after 9/11, certain things in the world “had changed.”

We therefore solicit focused articles from divergent fields and disciplines that reconsider the subject of 9/11. We do not claim to know whether it is still “too soon” or whether the subject has had “enough time” to be thought about clearly; indeed, we hope to indicate the difficulty of such considerations in the issue. The
issue will thus seek to foster a dialogue wherein we might begin to gauge the mythological and affective reverberations of this strange moniker, “9/11.”

While there has been a staggering amount of work that has tried to make sense of this subject, from films to novels, from conspiracy theories to The 9/11 Commission Report, this special issue of Reconstruction will attempt instead to bracket the subject as a subject—that is, we seek essays that assess what trends have emerged and what gaps have been opened up by the cultural production(s) of this subject. We envision a series of scholarly articles, as well as a significant review section of cultural productions (in myths, medicine, advertising, music, movies, architecture) that may not warrant full-length essays, but still deserve critical notation in terms of the subject produced by “9/11.”

We invite work that focuses on the following topics:

The ‘subject’ of 9/11
The alleged singularity of 9/11
Collective responses to 9/11
“Security threat levels”
Trauma theory
Mourning
Commemoration
9/11’s visual culture
Law(s) produced by 9/11
Post-9/11 military technologies
Effects of “The War on Terror” in everyday life
Architectural responses to and challenges posed by 9/11
The post-9/11 novel
A 9/11 refrain: “It looked like a movie!”
Cultural imperialism and 9/11
The “other” 9/11
Music ‘inspired’ by 9/11
9/11 as a cause–effect reversal
9/11/2001 as the marker of a new phase or period
The mobilities of 9/11
Cultural productions of 9/11 deemed “too soon”
9/11 as the end of irony
Ecology after 9/11
9/11 and the clinic

This list of topics is representative but not exhaustive; please feel free to propose articles or reviews that are in line with the scope of the issue but whose contents may not appear above.

Send abstracts or proposals of no more than 300 words as well as a CV to co-editors Christopher Schaberg (schaberg@loyno.edu) and Kara Thompson (kara.thompson@oberlin.edu) no later than February 1, 2010 (final drafts of invited submissions will be due August 15, 2010). We are happy to answer queries concerning review pieces or other possible submissions.

Reconstruction articles are archived in the MLA database. All submissions
are refereed. Papers must follow the Reconstruction guidelines for
submission .

The term real usually refers to reality, the state of things as they actually exist. But in law, the word real means relating to a thing as distinguished from a person. The new topic of MONU magazine on urbanism will deal with the latter and particularly with real estate. Thus, Real Urbanism should be understood as Real Estate Urbanism and not as Actual or Factual Urbanism.

In law, real estate is defined as a term that encompasses land along with anything permanently affixed to the land, such as buildings, specifically property that is fixed in location. Real estate is often considered synonymous with real property, in contrast with personal property, meaning movable property or any property that can be moved from one location to another.

MONU #12 seeks to explore how people in the real estates business perceive and conceive cities. What do cities look like in the eyes of real estate investors, property managers, and urban developers? What is a good and what is bad city according to real estate agents? This issue tries to illuminate the hidden forces that ultimately establish the physical reality of cities.

But this issue is not meant to be merely polemical and critical of financial forces and economic power that are related to real estate in cities – no Don-Quixotean anti-capitalistic battles shall be fought – but rather attempts will be made to reveal the particular interests of people involved in the real estate sector and their consequences on the built environment. What concerns us most is to put those topics on the agenda and to understand their impacts and dependencies. Nevertheless, radical critical texts are also very welcome.

This call for submissions invites sharp texts, significant and relevant projects, artistic reflections, but also applicable photography or illustrations on the topic of “Real Urbanism” for our next issue of MONU. Abstracts and ideas should be sent with a word count of 200 to 500 and images and illustrations in low resolution to info@monu-magazine.com by the end of November 2009. MONU #12 will be published in the winter of 2010.

Call for Papers 34th Annual Conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, May 24th-30th, 2010

Cultures of Differences: National, Indigenous, Historical

For submissions and more information, please visit http://iapl.info/

Deadline for Submissions: Oct. 15th, 2009

Call for Papers

Society for Student Philosophers Annual Conference
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas
April 9-11, 2010

Conference Theme: Philosophy & Communication

Keynote Speakers:

Dr. Larry A. Hickman
Department of Philosophy
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

Dr. Gerard A. Hauser
Department of Communication
University of Colorado at Boulder

The Society for Student Philosophers (SSP) invites the submission of papers for possible presentation at its 2010 conference at the University of Texas at Austin. We are especially interested in papers that touch on some topic connected to our conference theme??Philosophy and Communication.? Many topics in philosophy and communication have relevance to those in the other field, for example, topics in ethics, new technologies, aesthetics, art, the public sphere, free speech, the philosophy of language, rhetoric, metaphor, persuasion, issues of social/political philosophy, etc. While submissions do not need to focus specifically on ?philosophy and communication,? papers that have some relevance for both fields are especially encouraged. Other papers will still be considered.

The goal of this event is to start dialogues between those in philosophy and communication studies. While no one paper needs to exhaust this conversation, we envision individual papers as speaking to issues in philosophy or communication that will spark discussion among the multiple disciplines represented in our audience. Feel free to contact Dr. Scott Stroud at the email below with any questions you may have concerning your submission to this event.

Authors must be of on-going graduate or undergraduate student status (in philosophy, communication, or any other discipline) and papers must not be published or accepted for publication. Papers previously
presented at SSP events are excluded from submission. Papers should be suitable for a 25 minute presentation. Leave identifying references to the author out of the submitted paper, but include author information (address, department, institution, etc.) in the text of your email.

Please send your completed paper by November 2, 2009 to Dr. Scott R. Stroud, SSP Director, at: ssp_conference@hotmail.com

More details on the SSP can be found at: http://www.societyforstudentphilosophers.org/

A pdf version of this call can be found at: http://www.societyforstudentphilosophers.org/images/SSPUTACFP10.pdf

STYLE IN THEORY/STYLING THEORY (26-28 November, 2009)
Inaugural Event, International Literary Criticism and Theory Conference Series
University of Malta, Old University Building, Valletta, Malta

Confirmed Speakers:
Catherine Belsey
Simon Critchley
Stefan Herbrechter
Fiona Hughes
Giuseppe Mazzotta
Laurent Milesi
Jean-Michel Rabaté
Stuart Sillars

Organizers: Ivan Callus, James Corby, Gloria Lauri-Lucente

Contact E-Mail: styleintheory2009@um.edu.mt

Website: http://www.um.edu.mt/events/styleintheory2009

CALL FOR PAPERS:

“… one has to be in possession of literature.”
—Jean-Luc Nancy
“…truth demands a laborious science without style.”
—Jean-Luc Nancy
Read the rest of this entry »

The Department of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, IL will be hosting the fourth independent conference for the Hannah Arendt Circle April 16-18, 2010.

We invite individual submissions for papers on any aspect of Arendt’s work, including critiques and applications of her thinking.

Please send an abstract of the paper, by e-mail (750 word limit). Abstracts should be formatted for anonymous review and submitted to the program committee chair, Tama Weisman at tweisman@dom.edu on or before November 30th 2009.

Please indicate “Arendt Circle submission” in the subject heading, and include the abstract as a “.doc” attachment to your message. Program decisions will be announced by the beginning of January.

Program Committee:
Tama Weisman, Dominican University
Sarah MacMillen, Duquesne University
Peg Birmingham, DePaul University

Our first three independent meetings were outstanding, and we are looking forward to the same camaraderie and intense discussion of Arendt’s work at this year’s conference. Each speaker will have approximately 35 minutes for paper presentation and discussion combined —papers should be a maximum of 3000 words (15-20 minutes).

DePaul University is located in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago.

Lodging has been reserved at the Willows Hotel.  The hotel is within walking distance or a short train ride to our meeting site at DePaul University.

Program and other information will be available no later than January 30, 2010 at:
www.thearendtcircle.com

Call For Papers – BACPA at the Pacific APA.

The newly founded Bay Area Continental Philosophy Association (BACPA) will meet at the Pacific APA in San Francisco, CA (March 31 – April 4, 2010). Everyone interested in continental thinking is invited to submit a paper related to the following topic: “The Beautiful.”

Please submit a complete paper of no more than 3000 words and prepared for blind review to: moele@usfca.edu.

Attach the paper as a Microsoft Word, RTF, or PDF file.

Include your contact information and institutional affiliation in the email.

The deadline is OCTOBER 1, 2009.

BACPA organizes colloquia in the San Francisco Bay Area in order to stimulate interaction between continental philosophers and to promote continental philosophy. For more information, please visit our website: http://www.usfca.edu/org/bacpa/

“Collectively” — 3rd Annual Philosophy and the Arts Conference at Stony Brook University Manhattan

Call for Papers and Artwork

Keynote Speaker: Simon Critchley (The New School for Social Research)
Date: March 26-27, 2010
Location: 401 Park Avenue South, 2nd Floor, Manhattan

The Masters program in Philosophy and the Arts at Stony Brook University in Manhattan studies the intersections of art and philosophy. In our efforts to further the dialogue between these complexly related fields, we offer this conference as an interdisciplinary event. We welcome participants working in a variety of disciplines and media to respond to this year’s topic:

“Collectively”

During a period marked by globalization, proliferating social networking sites and virtual forums, and a reissued political call for increased civic participation, investigating the nature of ‘the collective’ continues to be a vitally important project. The term ‘collective’ itself is heavily politicized, foregrounding the tension between the individual and the whole. While groups may capitalize upon collective force to secure political visibility and achieve goals, collectivization is often a vehicle of homogenization and silencing. Yet many collectives intentionally jeopardize individual visibility as a form of critique. Artists’ collectives like the Critical Art Ensemble and the Wooster Collective, and philosophical collaboratives such as Deleuze-Guattari, question the value of the singular and identifiable, as well as problematizing the market economy that sustains artistic and academic norms. In any case, the notion of the collective raises questions of authority and agency as they relate to knowledge, ownership, and intersubjectivity. What are the mechanisms through which collectives form, maintain their coherence, and engage with other entities? How do various types of collections—museum holdings, units of information, digital and material objects, or persons—relate to classificatory systems, globalized and virtual commerce, and rapidly evolving technologies?

As collectives arise and disperse, we often find ourselves with a dearth of criteria by which to judge their success and viability. This conference will investigate the forms, motivations, methods, justifications, and consequences of persons and things acting collectively. We encourage submissions from across the artistic and theoretical disciplines that approach these themes from practical and theoretical perspectives. Projects may be collaborative in nature, and may examine the collective as an entity or activity.

SUBMISSIONS:

We welcome the submission both of original academic papers and of artwork for exhibition or performance, relating to the above themes, from graduate students across disciplines. All submissions should be formatted for blind review, and suitable for a 20-minute presentation (approximately 3000 words or 8-11 pages). Please visit the Philosophy and the Arts Conference website at http://www.philosophyartconference.org for complete submission instructions, as well as information on past conferences and regular updates. All submissions must be received by January 13^th, 2010 in order to be considered by the conference review committee. Submitters will be notified of the committee’s decision regarding their work via email no later than February 4^th, 2010.

Feel free to contact the conference coordinator for help with additional questions at philosophyartconference@gmail.com.

The 2nd  *Derrida Today* – International Conference

To be held at: The British Academy, London – July 19 – 20, 2010

Hosted by: Kingston University (London) and Macquarie University (Sydney).

Keynote speakers include:
1) Geoffrey Bennington
2) Peggy Kamuf
3) Third Keynote to be confirmed

(Keep updated for further keynote and venue and registration information, by checking the Derrida Today Conference website at: www.derridatoday.org/ )

Due Date for Abstracts and Panel Proposals: 30th November 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS:

The Derrida Today Conference will focus on the ongoing value of Derrida’s work to the political-ethical, cultural, artistic and philosophical futures that confront us.

The conference will be broadly interdisciplinary and invites contributions from a range of academic and cultural contexts. We will accept papers and panel proposals on any aspect of Derrida’s work or
deconstruction in relation to various topics and contemporary issues, such as: philosophy and other theoretical/philosophical thinkers, literature, psychoanalysis, architecture and design, law, film and visual studies, haptic technologies, photography, art, music, dance, embodiment, feminism, race and whiteness studies, politics, ethics, sociology, cultural studies, queer theory, sexuality, education, science (physics, biology, medicine, chemistry), IT and multimedia, etc.

ABSTRACT DEADLINE AND INFORMATION:

Due Date for Abstracts and Panel Proposals: 30th November 2009

Individual Abstracts & Panel Proposals should be sent as an attachment to: derridatodayconference@gmail.com   All enquiries to this email address as well.

Individual Participants: submit 200 word abstract for a 20 minute paper (with 10 minute discussion time), please include a bio, affiliation and contact details.

Panel Proposals: Panels will consist of 3 papers of 20 minutes delivery and 10 minutes discussion time each. Panel organizers should submit an overall panel proposal of 100 -200 words, plus individual abstracts of 200 words for each paper, along with bios and contact details of each member of the panel. The panel organiser should also supply their bio and contact details.

For further information about the conference go to the conference website at: http://www.derridatoday.org

For further information about the Derrida Today Journal go to: http://www.eup.ed.ac.uk/journals/content.aspx?pageId=1&journalId=12856

Participants will be invited to submit article length versions of their papers for consideration for publication in the Derrida Today journal.

Organising Committee:

*       Martin McQuillan (Kingston University)
*       Nicole Anderson (Macquarie University)
*       Simon Morgan-Wortham (Kingston University)
*       Nick Mansfield (Macquarie University)
*       Stephen Barker (University of California, Irvine)
*       Eleanor Byrne (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Hegel After Spinoza: A Volume of Critical Essays

Call for Papers

The names Hegel and Spinoza have come to represent two irreconcilable paths in contemporary philosophy. This opposition has taken different forms, but has its roots in mid- to late-20th century French philosophy. Althusser announced that he required a “detour” away from Hegel and through Spinoza in order to arrive at a genuinely materialist Marxism. Pierre Macherey staged a careful deconstruction of Hegel’s claim to have superseded Spinoza’s system in Hegel ou Spinoza, which concomitantly served as a defence of Spinozism against the Hegelianism dominant in France in the 1960s and ‘70s. Among the most influential articulations of this antagonism are the polemics of Deleuze celebrating the immanent and vitalist thinking of a materialist tradition beginning with Lucretius and passing through Spinoza to the present, to which he opposes the logic of totality, negativity, and contradiction found in Hegel. Spinoza, for Deleuze and others, stands for a rejection of negativity and lack as the foundation of philosophical and political thought, and as a salutary alternative to the negativity (in both the logical and existential senses) associated not only with Hegel, but with Hobbes, Freud, Sartre, Heidegger, and Lévinas as well. Feminists have likewise celebrated Spinoza as providing a joyful alternative to a tradition that emphasizes anxiety, mortality, and combat. This opposition, in its various expressions, underscores that reading Hegel has always been and remains a political act.

We are seeking essays to contribute to an anthology on the relationship between Spinoza and Hegel that move beyond the stalemate of current debates in continental philosophy. The title we have proposed for this collection points toward a horizon that no longer opposes a “bad” Hegel to a “good” Spinoza; we seek essays that indicate how contemporary readings of Spinoza—no longer the thinker of absolute substance, but of immanent causality, singular connections, transindividuality, and the multitude—might illuminate otherwise less visible threads in Hegel’s thought, and open the way to a re-reading of Hegel, beyond the institutionalized figure we take for granted. How might a productive and mutually enlightening encounter be produced between these two great systematic thinkers? What political possibilities are opened up by reading Hegel and Spinoza as useful contrasts rather than moral alternatives? The anthology will be published in a series that treats historical topics in light of contemporary continental thought. We are open to a broad range of topics within this rubric, but are especially interested in new readings that avoid simply recapitulating either the pantheism controversy in 19th century Germany or the French polemics of the 20th century.

Please send papers of 7,500-10,000 words to

Hasana Sharp (hasana.sharp@mcgill.ca) or Jason Smith (Jason.Smith@Artcenter.edu)

By 15 June, 2010