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.

Link to the Off Site Meeting

H/t: Gerard Kuperus

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

Thanks to David Vessey

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.

Philosophical hermeneutics, in the broadest sense of the term, has grown to signify a current within contemporary thinking loosely united by the insistence on the historical and linguistic nature of human existence and experience. As such, the primary object or concern of any philosophical-hermeneutical thinking seems to be the understanding and interpretative relations between man, language, and history – a concern that provides common ground for dialogue between a wide variety of thinkers, ranging at least from Nietzsche and Dilthey, through Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur to Derrida and Vattimo.

In dealing with understanding and interpretative relations, philosophical hermeneutics runs the risk of assigning unrestricted privilege to the relation itself at the expense of its individual terms. Since the advent of structural semantics, linguistics, and historiography, this risk has become even more apparent. One of the questions emerging in this regard concerns the status and role of the concept of responsibility within philosophical hermeneutics. This problematic contains at least two dimensions.

Firstly, in what sense can hermeneutical subjectivity be disclosed as being-responsible? Whether one turns to Nietzsche’s “second innocence”, Heidegger’s concept of conscience, Lévinasian substitution, or Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s separate re-interpretations of Aristotelian phronesis, this question seems to be central to any examination of hermeneutical subjectivity – a question becoming just the more pressing by the advent of structuralism, the alleged “death” of the subject, and the unclear status and role of philosophical anthropology within hermeneutics.

Secondly, in what sense can hermeneutics itself be posited as a responsibleway of thinking? This question pertains to the status of hermeneutical thinking within the more general field and tradition of philosophy. Can hermeneutics be construed as the responsible philosophy par excellence? Here, one might focus on Heidegger’s concept of Andenken, an ethically inspired or animated concept of deconstruction, or Vattimo’s articulation of hermeneutics as a response to a certain “nihilistic vocation”. At any rate,the question of responsibility here turns back upon itself, questions itself as a responsible way of thinking the question as such. In this regard, the question also becomes the more general question of the relation between philosophy and its “other”.

Aims and Topics:

The aim of the conference is to explore the status or role responsibility within philosophical hermeneutics. Participants may do this by discussing this concept within a philosophical-hermeneutical framework, focusing on the problem of responsible subjectivity, on the problem of responsible thinking, or on the relation between the two. Questions that can be addressed include,but are not limited to:
• What is the relation between responsiveness and responsibility?
• Are we compelled to defend a strong notion of subjectivity if we want to keep on considering ourselves as responsible persons?
• In what sense is responsibility connected to the concept of freedom, and what does a hermeneutical concept of freedom entail?
• Is there such a thing as a hermeneutical ethics?
• Is responsibility necessarily connected to our behavior towards other persons? In what sense can one be responsible for institutions, traditions or languages?
• What is the contribution of, say, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Vattimo, Levinas or Derrida to our understanding of responsibility?

For further information please contact Jon Utoft Nielsen (filjun@hum.au.dk).