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.

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.

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.

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.

In the past, these conferences, which have provided a forum for the most influential philosophers, theologians, and cultural theorists to interact, have consisted solely of several keynote speakers. This conference will be different. It will feature three plenary speakers and offer multiple concurrent sessions devoted to papers submitted on a diversity of issues relating to the primary theme. This call for papers is deliberately open, befitting the conference’s animating concern with the future. Papers are invited that address questions like (but not limited to) the following. What now, or what comes next—specifically, after the death, if not of God, at least of the generation consisting of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Levinas, etc.? This question concerns not only the future after those significant theorists, but also the future after-life of these eminent minds who have left such a deep impact on Continental philosophy of religion. What is the future of Kant and German Idealism, of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in Continental philosophy of religion? What remains for the future of phenomenology? Of the “theological turn” in the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion and others? Of Gadamer, Ricoeur and philosophical hermeneutics? Of apophatic or mystical theology? What is the future of feminism and Continental philosophy of religion? What are the status and future of the new trinity of Agamben, Badiou and Zizek? What relevance do the political interpretations of Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and the more recent Continental philosophers such as François Laruelle and Catherine Malabou have to philosophy of religion and political theology? What about the future of sovereignty, of money and capitalism, as in the work of Philip Goodchild? What is the future of the movements of Radical Orthodoxy and of radical death of God theology, whether in their original or contemporary manifestations? What about the new sciences of information and complexity in thinkers like Mark C. Taylor and Michel Serres? What about Continental philosophy of religion and our “companion species” in Donna Haraway? What about “Post-Humanism”? What is the future of Continental Philosophy of religion and Judaism? And Islam? Or world religions generally? What is the relationship between postmodernism, religion and postcolonialism? What role can Continental philosophy play in the future of religion? In the professional study of religion? How does Continental philosophical theology relate to the ethnological and empirical-scientific study of religion? How does Continental philosophy of religion differ from traditional philosophy of religion? Or from analytic philosophy of religion? What is continental philosophy of religion anyway?
Instructions: Submit electronic copies of completed papers (up to 3000 words). Abstracts cannot be considered. Papers will be subject to a double blind review by a selection committee. Include your name, paper title and contact information on a separate page. Include the paper title but not your name on a header or footer on each numbered page of the paper itself. The papers must be previously unpublished in any format. The Conference reserves the right of first refusal of the submitted paper for inclusion in a projected volume to be based upon the conference. Paper submissions are due by December 15, 2010 and acceptances will be made by February 15, 2011. Send your papers to: pcrconf@syr.edu.

Coordinator: John D. Caputo, Watson Professor of Religion, Syracuse University

For further information contact pcrconf@syr.edu or visit http://pcr.syr.edu.

Guest Editors: COSTICA BRADATAN (The Honors College, Texas Tech University) & AURELIAN CRAIUTU (Department of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington)

“The European Legacy” invites contributions to a special issue devoted to the study of marginality, broadly defined. The issue will feature at the outset a conversation on marginality with WENDY DONIGER (Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions, University of Chicago), RAMIN JAHANBEGLO (Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto), GORDON MARINO (Professor of Philosophy, St Olaf College) and GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA (Sterling Professor of the Humanities for Italian, Yale University).

“The European Legacy,” published by Routledge, is the official journal of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas:

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10848770.asp

This special issue is scheduled for 2012.

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Academic disciplines have been routinely dominated, both in terms of research agendas and dissemination practices, by a concentration on a relatively small number of “canonical” thinkers and writings. A tacitly accepted “principle of economy” makes that, in our research, we (almost) always gravitate toward “canonical” authors, texts, and themes. Teachers, for instance, tend to persuade their students to pay attention to the “central” aspects of any given problem and stay away from the allegedly “marginal” or “peripheral” ones, which are thus deemed to be either too risky or otherwise unworthy of sustained consideration. Not surprisingly, we end up spending most of our time concentrating on what the academic community considers to be the “core-issues” in various academic disciplines, just as we tend to focus our projects on the study of various “mainstream” authors, “central” themes and “canonical” texts. As a result, our systems of reference – in scholarship, but also in every-day life, morality, art, politics and religion – have come to rely heavily on the assumption of an intrinsic superiority of the “center,” the “canonical” and the “mainstream,” to such an extent that “marginal” and “peripheral” are epithets customarily used with (and perceived as carrying) pejorative connotations.

This special issue of The European Legacy seeks to challenge this assumption. We surmise that there is a great deal of vitality and richness to be found both at the margins – wherever they may be and wherever they may be placed in relation to the centers of power – and in theorizing on marginality as a philosophical, literary, political, and hermeneutic trope. The center (or the core) exists only in relation to the margins: it is in fact from the margins that the center receives its recognition (there can be no center without margins), just as it is from the vitality of the margins that the center extracts its resources. Therefore, it is only by looking at things (events, cultures, ideas, texts, political and social processes) dialectically – that is, from both the perspective of the center and that of the margins, and especially as a result of the center-periphery dynamic – that we can better understand their role in the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

The central aim of this project is to offer a reconceptualization of marginality, by exploring how it is perceived, constructed, and deconstructed, and by examining the role it plays in the dynamic of knowledge production across humanistic disciplines. We propose to consider marginality in a broad sense, e.g., the marginality of an idea, of a scholarly topic or theme of research, of a methodology or way of thinking, as well as in relation to “marginal” thinkers, cultures and schools of thought. In proposing this reconsideration of marginality we also hope: 1) to cast new light on marginality as a philosophical theme in its in own right – that is, as a subject worthy of sustained theoretical reflection; 2) to revive interest in some key themes and authors of great merit whose rediscovery or retrieval from oblivion might enrich and enliven debates in fields such as philosophy, comparative literature, political theory, sociology, history, anthropology, and religious studies; and 3) to challenge the “centro-centric” obsessions and parochial self-sufficiency that sometimes creep into the academic literature produced within these fields.

We believe that a critical and interdisciplinary study of marginality (broadly defined) can contribute to the emergence of a new epistemic ecumenism allowing us to understand the multifarious ways in which our knowledge of the world is produced, structured and disseminated. The reconsideration of marginality – of marginal themes, authors and texts, of non-canonical ways of thinking, methodologies and epistemic cultures – can also help us better understand ourselves as members of various scholarly communities. Finally, in the long run, a sustained engagement with marginality can make us intellectually richer, culturally more open, and politically more tolerant.

Here are some of the questions that we invite potential contributors to consider: What is marginality and how should this concept be studied? How, and on what grounds, something comes to be considered “marginal” or “central”? Is marginality (or centrality, for that matter) some “quality” intrinsic to an idea, topic or author? If yes, what is it exactly? If not, is marginality (centrality) a matter of context and circumstance, or something else? How is it that an originally “marginal” idea, theme or author come to acquire mainstream status? Is it simply a matter of “passing the test of time,” of chance, a matter of “the right time and the right place”? Is the fact due to some form “epistemic luck”? Reversely, how exactly do ideas, topics, and authors go “out of fashion” and become marginal? How does one’s “anxiety of marginality” shape one’s thinking? What is the role of marginality in the formation of the epistemic canon? How do the center and the margin communicate with each other? How exactly does the periphery change, challenge and redefine the body of knowledge that is produced by/at the center?

We invite submissions addressing several modes of marginality:

• epistemic marginality (the marginality of an idea, concept, theory, methodology)
• auctorial marginality (marginality of an author in relation to the mainstream)
• cultural marginality (local research cultures, marginal research programs/agendas)
• geographic marginality (peripheral places/cultures and their relationship to the metropolitan centers).

SUBMISSIONS GUIDELINES:

Deadline for submissions: March 31, 2011

Length: 6000 words (including notes)

After an initial editorial screening, all articles and reviews submitted to “The European Legacy” will undergo a peer-review evaluation. Manuscripts, typed double-spaced, should be submitted to the Guest Editors as e-mail attachments. The author’s full address should be supplied as a footnote to the title page. Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition.

Contributions should be submitted via e-mail to: bradatan@hotmail.com and acraiutu@yahoo.com (with “For the marginality special issue” in the subject line). Please allow approx. 4 months for the review process and editorial decisions. Receipt of materials will be confirmed by email. Unless otherwise noted in this Call for Papers, the Instructions for Authors on the journal’s webpage are adopted for this issue:

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1084-8770&linktype=44

We look forward to your submissions!

Sincerely,

Costica Bradatan & Aurelian Craiutu

(October 29-30 Goldsmiths, University of London)

Is a form of discourse, philosophical or otherwise, conceivable without a relation to error: the errors it considers potentially amendable, the errors it seeks to distinguish itself from, or the errors it inadvertently generates? If this relation is neither uniform nor stable, if the status, value, and identity ascribed to error may vary across disciplines or even within a single philosophical corpus itself, what does this variability express? And what consequences will the transformations in philosophy’s understanding of error have for its procedure in general? This two-day international conference, organized by INC, the Research Group in Continental Philosophy at Goldsmiths, University of London, aims to ascertain the meaning and function of error for philosophical thought today.

Researchers are invited to submit original papers of forty minutes reading time devoted to any aspect of the theme in question. Areas of research may concern (but are not limited to) the following.

Error and:

• Deception, ideology, and false consciousness

• Its relation to concept, category, or statement

• Methodologies of correction or adaptivity

• History (transmission and persistence of problems)

• Determinacy and indeterminacy

• Accountability

• (Un)predictability: the aleatory instant

• Reinventions of the truth-error relation (Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Canguilhem, Foucault)

• Being wrong or being right: logics of argumentation

• Wilful error (dissimulation, méconnaissance, detour, fabulation, etc.)

• Psychoanalysis: situating the subject in the “dimension of making a mistake”
SUBMISSIONS:

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words in length, along with your name, department, institution, and email address. Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2010 (You will be informed of our decision by 1 August 2010). Email abstracts to: d.a.smith@gold.ac.uk

For further details: http://www.gold.ac.uk/inc/

Contemporary political philosophy is marked by a deep distrust of the transcendent grounding of politics and, hence, by an effort to distance itself from “foundationalism,” replete with uncritical presuppositions regarding the very meaning of political ontology. Yet, post-foundational politics is but one facet of the shift beyond metaphysics in today’s thinking and action with their rejection of a transhistorical and objectively fixed notion of truth. Article submissions are invited for this special issue of Telos, seeking to outline the contours of post-metaphysical politics. The contributions to Politics After Metaphysics may be grounded in phenomenological, existentialist, hermeneutical, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive traditions. Some of the focal questions the articles may address include: What is the role of interpretation in contemporary political theory and practice? What is the meaning of the political and how do the very concepts of “meaning” and “truth” change at the dusk of metaphysics? Who are the subjects, cast into the limelight of post-metaphysical politics? How can we re-think the relation between ethics and politics from the post-metaphysical vantage point? What are the roles and functions of historical analysis, language, signification, and critique in post-metaphysical politics? Comparative analyses, juxtaposing post-metaphysical political thought to that of a figure in classical political philosophy, are also welcome.

Inquiries and submissions should be forwarded to Michael Marder at marderm@duq.edu.

The essays of a maximum 6,500 words (7,500 with footnotes) should follow Telos style and formatting guidelines. Deadline for submissions is October 1, 2011.

This collection aims to offer a sustained consideration of race in relation to philosophy and film. It will be broadly accessible and offer ways of thinking about race in conjunction with recent debates in philosophy and film.

The collection takes as its starting point Charles Mills’ claim that philosophy remains “one of the very ‘whitest’ of the humanities.” While Mills addresses the exclusion of race from a social/political philosophical perspective, his claim can be deployed to address ways in which United States-based academic philosophers have published many works pertaining to philosophy and film in recent years, yet little in this collective and developing body of work has been attentive to matters of race.

This essay collection rectifies this gap in the critical literature while at the same time aiming to remain accessible to students with one or more courses in philosophy. It presumes as its starting point that the “whiteness” of philosophy references not only the “whiteness” of many of its practitioners, but also the ways in which race “remains conceptually and theoretically residual,” and its continuing position in philosophy as “ostensibly raceless.” The volume focuses on the question: How would thinking in philosophy and film be transformed if race were formally incorporated and/or put at its center?

Potential contributors are encouraged to consider particular films in the development of their abstracts and essays, which may serve as primary examples from which generalizations can be drawn. The approach of centering essays around particular films offers readers an opportunity to pair the collections’ essays with viewings of the films themselves. It also supports use of the collection in college and university classrooms, where discussions could be focused around presentations of racial matters in these films.

Proposals are welcome on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• particular films and characters vis-à-vis philosophical issues and race
• intersections of race with gender and/or sexuality in philosophy and film
• the incorporation of race into existing philosophical discussions of film(s)
• the complication posed by race to existing discussions in philosophy and film
• how race reinforces certain philosophical positions and topics reflected in film
• philosophical issues around representations of whiteness, blackness, and other races/conceptions of race in film

Those interested in contributing to this project should respond to the editors by August 15, 2010 with a brief abstract (approximately 500 words), accompanied by a 100-150-word author’s biography. Abstracts and author’s biographies should be sent electronically to both editors at: bloodswo@wsu.edu and dflory@montana.edu. E-mail Microsoft word attachments only please.

Third Workshop in Social and Political Thought at Michigan State University
with Andrew Feenberg, Donna Haraway, and Paul Thompson

October, 23/24, 2010

Saturday: 9am-6pm, Sunday: 9am-1pm

http://www.msu.edu/~lotz/workshop2010/index.htm

Description:
An important connection explored in the humanities concerns the degree to which technological rationality changes our lives, whether in terms of our behavior, our conceptions of who and what human animals and non-human animals are, or the goals we set for ourselves. What are some of the new ways of living brought on by these changes? Are such changes consistent with the precepts of an inclusive democracy? Or have they unacceptably commodified our social, political, and cultural relationships? Do we now live in a world where what is understood as a meaningful life is in peril because technology and commodification are all that remain? This workshop in social and political thought will be dedicated to bringing important contemporary scholarship to MSU to address these questions with keynote addresses, commentaries, and other workshop activities. It demonstrates that philosophy and the humanities are central in understanding the world we live in.

Speakers
Andrew Feenberg (Simon Fraser); Philosophy of Technology, Social-Political Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, author of Critical Theory of Technology (1991), Questioning Technology (1999), Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (2005)

Donna Haraway (University of California, Santa Cruz); Feminism, Science and Technology Studies; Animal Studies, author of A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (1985), Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), When Species Meet (2008)

Paul Thompson (Michigan State University), Social-Political Philosophy, Ethics and Agriculture, Philosophy of Technology, Continental Philosophy, Pragmatism, author of The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics (1995), The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism (2000), and The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics (2010).

Tamra Frei (Michigan State University); Ethics, Kant, Modern Philosophy

Todd Hedrick (Michigan State University); Critical Theory, Habermas, Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, author of Rawls and Habermas. Reason, Pluralism, and the Claims of Political Philosophy (forthcoming)

Hilde Lindemann (Michigan State University), Feminism, Bioethics, Moral Psychology; author of An Invitation to Feminist Ethics (2005), Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (2001)

Organization and RSVP
Prof. Christian Lotz
Prof. Kyle Whyte
Michigan State University
Dept. of Philosophy
503 South Kedzie Hall
East Lansing, MI 48824
517.355.4490 (Dept.)
lotz@msu.edu/kwhyte@msu.edu

goes to Chicago! (Northwestern University)

October 8-9, 2010

Keynote Speaker: Larry Blum, U. Massachusetts, Boston

Call for Papers

The California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race announces a call for papers for its seventh 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 (2-3 page) abstract, as an MS word.doc or .pdf file (please put your name on the file). To

organizer@caroundtable.org

Subject heading should read: (your last name) CRPR 10 Submission – Submission Deadline: April 30, 2010

See http://race.caroundtable.org for more information (Note new URL!)
For questions, please contact us at organizer@caroundtable.org

Organizers:
Darrell Moore, Philosophy, DePaul University
Mickaella Perina, Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Falguni A. Sheth, Social Science, Hampshire College

Guest Organizer: Charles Mills, Philosophy, Northwestern University