CFP: The Future(s) of Critical Theory Conference 2009, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

The Future(s) of Critical Theory
First Graduate Conference in Frankfurt am Main, 19.-21 March 2009

Call for Papers

Whether or not “critical theory” constitutes a well-defined, easily identifiable and self-contained school of thought has been a matter of debate. For the organizers of this conference, given the plurality of theoretical projects that consider themselves in the tradition of the “Frankfurt School,” critical thinking cannot be reduced to one academic ‘camp’ in any meaningful way. Rather than representing one coherent philosophical paradigm, ‘critical theory’ embodies a diverse set of practices of radical questioning exercised in various discourses including that of arts, social and political sciences as well as radical political debate. Moreover critical theory is a highly self-reflexive process. Thus, rather than being a sign of crisis or lack of orientation, the increasing number of publications about the meaning and significance of “critique” and “critical theory” in recent years point to a vibrant and diverse intellectual community constituted around similar theoretical and political commitments. The existence of different theoretical positions and disagreements within that community can be best interpreted as an invitation to reconsider one’s own stance in relation to other ways of critical thinking and to reflect on common grounds.

“The Future(s) of Critical Theory” Graduate Conference in Frankfurt aims to serve as a forum for this ongoing debate. We invite PhD students and postdocs from the humanities and the social sciences to discuss their work in relation to the challenges posed by the current debates on the status of critical theory today. Critical theory proves itself only in relation to its concrete object of investigation. We are therefore equally looking forward to the presentation of empirical research as to theoretical reflections.

Contributions may include – but need not be limited to – the following themes:

__What is Critique? What makes critical theories critical? How critical is Critical Theory?

__C/critical Theory(ies): 1,2,3…many Generations of critical theory(ies); Critical Theory and Post/structuralism; Critique, Genealogy, Deconstruction; Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche; Postcolonial Studies, Feminism, queer.

__Methodologies of critique: Theory and Practice; Philosophy and Sociology; Knowledge and Human Interest; Militant Investigation, Collective Theorization.

__Critique and the Good Life: Desire, Love, Intimacy, Affect, ‘The Private’ and of course Friendship.

__Critical Theory, The Political and Politics: Democracies, Socialisms, Liberalisms; Power and/or Domination; Law, State, Police and Sovereignty.

__Theorizing Capitalism: (Ir)rationality, Alienation and Reification; Old and New Spirit of Capitalism; Redistribution or Expropriation; Reform or Revolution.

__Cultures of Critique: Sub-, Pop- and Mainstream- Culture (industries); Media and Cultural Studies; Hegemony and Discourse; Narratology, Semiotics and Rhetoric.

Submission Information

Please submit abstracts of a maximum of 300 words to the following e-mail address: info@graduateconferencefrankfurt.de. We accept proposals until the 31 November 2008. Languages of the conference will be German and English, abstracts can be submitted in either language. Papers presented at the conference should not exceed the duration of twenty minutes and will be followed by a brief discussion.
Papers will be selected through a blind review process therefore please do not mark your name or other indications of the author on abstracts and make sure to clearly state the title of your proposal in the email.
Candidates will be informed by January 1st whether their paper has been accepted for presentation.

The publication of a selection of conference papers is intended.

Keynote speakers

Keynote speakers are Bonnie Honig (Chicago), Axel Honneth (Frankfurt) and Emmanuel Renault (Paris/Lyon).

Contact

For further information see www.graduateconferencefrankfurt.de

CFP: Greenscapes ~ Sense and Meaning: Fields of Dreams (Landscapes of Myth and Imagination) Conference 2009CFP: Greenscapes ~ Sense and Meaning: Fields of Dreams (Landscapes of Myth and Imagination) Conference 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS
Greenscapes ~ Sense and Meaning: Fields of Dreams (Landscapes of Myth and Imagination)
October 1-3, 2009, Brock University, Ontario, CANADA

Our landscapes have long been the unconscious repository of cultural hopes, fears and desires. From the Garden of Eden to aboriginal Dreamtime, societies have perceived their surrounding natural environment to express cultural values reflected in their myths, legends, sacred texts and belief systems. The occupation, transition, or representation of landscape constitutes an imaginative exercise for both subject and object. Yet imagination is not a consciously controllable process, and dreams can be unsettling portents as well as expressions of wish-fulfilment. We welcome papers that explore landscapes of myth and imagination in real and virtual sites, literary texts, images, and installations and invite proposals on the following topics:

Landscapes of allusion (texts, myths, folktales, legends)
Sacred and Secular Utopias

Profane imagination: ruin, decay and social transgression

Gardens of the ‘first time’: origin myths and social legends

Dream landscapes: fear, desire, and exploring the unconscious

Please send abstracts (up to 250 words) and a brief biography to greenscapes@brocku.ca by January 5, 2008.

The conference will take place at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario.

Giles Blunt, author of Forty Words for Sorrow, The Delicate Storm, and Black Fly Season, will deliver the opening keynote on the subject of landscape and fiction.

Conference organizers: Keri Cronin (Visual Arts, Brock University), David Galbraith (Royal Botanical Gardens), Sharilyn J. Ingram (School of Fine and Performing Arts, Brock University), Leah Knight (English Language and Literature, Brock University), Katharine T. von Stackelberg (Classics, Brock University).

For more information see: http://www.brocku.ca/greenscapes/

Katharine T. von Stackelberg
Assistant Professor
Department of Classics
Brock University
St Catharines
Ontario, L2S 3A1
Canada

Tel: 905 688 5550 ext. 5374
Fax: 905 984 4859

CFP: Columbia/NYU 9th Graduate Conference in Philosophy 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS

COLUMBIA/NYU 9th GRADUATE CONFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

To be held March 7th 2009 at New York University

Keynote Speaker: KAREN BENNETT (Cornell University)

The graduate students and faculty of the Philosophy Departments of Columbia and New York Universities invite papers by all graduate students in any area of philosophy.

Papers will be accepted until DECEMBER 31st 2008

Papers must meet the following requirements:

1. All papers must be between 3,000 and 5,000 words in length and suitable for a presentation of 30-40 minutes.

2. Papers must be submitted with an abstract no longer than 300words.

3. Papers must be submitted electronically in blind-review format to: www.philcolumbia.com/gradconf. No submissions by mail or e-mail will be accepted

For more information please visit our website at www.philcolumbia.com or email us at: pal305@nyu.edu

CFP: Integrated History and Philosophy of Science Conference 2009

&HPS2 – Integrated History and Philosophy of Science
University of Notre Dame
March 12-15, 2009

Call for Papers

We invite the submission of individual paper abstracts for &HPS2, the second in what is to be a series of international conferences under the general heading of “Integrated History and Philosophy of Science.”

The intended scope and character of the scholarship we solicit for &HPS2 is well described by the “manifesto” for the whole series:

&HPS is distinctive in that it is both historical and philosophical at the same time. Good history and philosophy of science is not just history of science into which some philosophy of science may enter, or philosophy of science into which some history of science may enter. It is work that is both historical and philosophical at the same time. The founding insight of the modern discipline of HPS is that history and philosophy have a special affinity and one can effectively advance both simultaneously.
What gives HPS its distinctive character is the conviction that the common goal of understanding of science can be pursued by dual, interdependent means. This duality may be localized in a single work. Or it may be distributed across many works and many scholars, with parts locally devoted just to historical or philosophical analysis. Intellectual history, for example, serves this purpose. What unifies this local scholarship into an HPS community is the broader expectation that all the work will ultimately contribute to the common goal.
There is no distinct methodology that is HPS. Doing HPS does not confer a free pass to suspend the standards of one field to advance the other. It must be good history of science and philosophy, in that its claims are based on a solid grounding in appropriate sources and are located in the relevant context. And it must be good philosophy of science, in that it is cognizant of the literature in modern philosophy of science and its claims are, without compromise, articulated simply and clearly and supported by cogent argumentation.

&HPS1 was hosted in October 2007 by the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science. Please visit the web site for that meeting for a sampling of the work presented there:

http://www.pitt.edu/~pittcntr/Events/All/Conferences/others/other_conf_2007-08/andHPS/andHPS.htm

The deadline for submission of abstracts and symposium proposals for &HPS2 will be December 1. Decisions will be announced by January 12, 2009. In order to enable the program committee to make more informed decisions, we request somewhat longer and more detailed abstracts, on the order of 1000 words. Also, if you are aware of other submitters whose work might well be grouped with yours in a symposium session, please alert us to that fact.

Please direct your submissions to: andhps@nd.edu. Please note that we especially encourage submissions from graduate students and younger scholars. Limited financial support for graduate students and younger scholars presenting work at &HPS2 might be available.

For further information about &HPS2, please visit the conference website:

http://www.nd.edu/~andhps

Questions can be directed to andhps@nd.edu or to:
Don Howard
dhoward1@nd.edu
574-631-7547

CFP: Evidence, Science and Public Policy (Sydney 2009)

Sydney-Tilburg conference on
EVIDENCE, SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY
Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science
26-28 March 2009

Conference website:
http://sydcfs.org.au/

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Mark Burgman (University of Melbourne), John Quiggin (University of Queensland) and John Worrall (London School of Economics)

ORGANISERS: Mark Colyvan (Sydney), Stephan Hartmann (Tilburg), James Justus (Sydney) and Jan Sprenger (Tilburg)

The relationship between science and public policy is complex. Good public policy on matters such as the environment, climate change, health, the economy, and justice must be informed by good science. But this science needs to be conducted in ways amenable to the needs of the policy makers and the results communicated in ways accessible to both the policy makers and the public at large. Public policy issues might even impinge on the science itself. For example, acceptable levels of error might be thought to be determined by the consequences of the decisions to be made using the scientific findings. This raises many interesting philosophical questions about the relationship between science, evidence and public policy. Should science remain independent of policy decisions and concern itself only with evidence? Is this possible? What is evidence-based medicine and does it live up to its advertising? What is evidence-based public policy and what does it offer above standard policy making? Our goal in this conference is to bring together philosophers of science, political philosophers, policy makers, and other researchers interested in the science-policy interface. We welcome papers on any of the above questions as well as papers on broader issues concerning evidence, especially in applied contexts (e.g. legal, medical, and environmental).

We invite submissions of extended abstracts of up to 1000 words by 1 December 2008. Decisions will be made by 15 January 2009.

James Justus
Philosophy Department
Assistant Professor, Florida State University
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Sydney
http://www.fsu.edu/~philo/new%20site/staff/justus.html

CFP: Short Conference on Hume and the Enlightenment 2009 in Adelaide, Australia

Call for Papers:
Short Conference on Hume and the Enlightenment
13 and 14 July 2009
Adelaide, Australia

Keynote Speaker: Dr Stephen Buckle (Australian Catholic University).

Dr Buckle, an internationally renowned Hume scholar, is the author of Hume’s Enlightenment Tract (Oxford University Press, 2001) and editor of Hume’s An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Conference Theme:

Hume continues to have a profound influence on philosophical thought and ideas. Yet Hume’s influence extends well beyond philosophy to a range of others disciplines including politics, history, literature and economics. While Hume is now widely regarded as the most significant of British philosophers, he was in his day counted a significant essayist and historian. Further, the influences of Hume’s empiricism stretch from encouraging the exploration of sentiment in literature to being a precursor to the new discipline of cognitive science. Taking recent work on Hume – including Hume’s Enlightenment Tract – as a starting point, this conference aims to examine Hume’s thought and influence not just on philosophy but on a range of other disciplines.

We are currently calling for papers on Hume’s philosophical and other writings, and for papers focused on Enlightenment ideas as they may relate to Hume and his intellectual influence in the broadest sense.

Offers of papers including a 250 word abstract should be sent to:

Philosophy Department
Flinders University
GPO Box 2100 Adelaide, SA 5001

Abstracts may alternatively be emailed to:
Craig.Taylor@flinders.edu.au

Deadline for submissions: 19 December 2008

Sponsored by Flinders Humanities Research Centre, Flinders University, Adelaide Australia

Dr. Craig Taylor
Head of Department &
Lecturer
Philosophy Department
School of Humanities
Flinders University
GPO Box 2100, Adelaide SA5001

Ph.: (+61 8) 8201 3962
Fax: (+61 8) 8201 2784

PhD and MA studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand

The University of Auckland Philosophy Department is offering up to two ($25,000 3-year) PhD and four ($5,000 one-year) MA scholarships commencing in 2009.

Teaching assistantships may also be available, subject to scholarship and immigration restrictions.

The Department is internationally renowned for its research, and has consistently ranked well in the Philosophical Gourmet Report. Our graduates have gone on to higher degrees and academic positions in top international universities.

Deadlines for applications are December 1st for PhD scholarships and December 1st and May 30th for MA scholarships.

Further information about the Department can be found at http://www.auckland.ac.nz/philosophy

For further information, contact:

philosophy@auckland.ac.nz

+64 9 373 7599 ext 87491

or

Tim Dare
Head of the Department of Philosophy
t.dare@auckland.ac.nz

Interesting result from Google Trends

What is Google Trends?

“With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most” (from Google Trends About Page).

When you type the word “philosophy” on the Search Trends box (http://www.google.com/trends) then hit enter, the result shows that most requests for the word “philosophy” come from the Philippines:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=philosophy

Perhaps statistics, indeed, does not really map out with reality, given the so called “eclipse” of philosophy in the Philippines.  It would be interesting to read different opinions on this.  Cheers!

Philosophy 101 #1

Philosophy of Mind: Personal Identity

Logic: On Ambiguity

The Meaning of Life

New Open Access title from re.press: Reading Hegel: The Introductions

From re.press, Melbourne, Australia, free OA title:

Reading Hegel: The Introductions

edited and introduced by Aakash Singh and Rimina Mohapatra

Bringing together for the first time all of G.W.F. Hegel’s major Introductions in one place, this book ambitiously attempts to present readers with Hegel’s systematic thought through his Introductions alone. The Editors articulate to what extent, precisely, Hegel’s Introductions truly reflect his philosophic thought as a whole. Certainly each of Hegel’s Introductions can stand alone, capturing a facet of his overarching idea of truth. But compiled all together, they serve to lay out the intricate tapestry of Hegel’s thought, woven with a dialectic that progresses from one book to another, one philosophical moment to another.

Hegel’s reflections on philosophy, religion, aesthetics, history, and law—all included here—have profoundly influenced many subsequent thinkers, from post-Hegelian idealists or materialists like Karl Marx, to the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre; from the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl to Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and other post-moderns, to thinkers farther afield, like Japan’s famous Kyoto School or India’s Aurobindo. This book provides the opportunity to discern how the ideas of these later thinkers may have originally germinated in Hegel’s writings, as well as to penetrate Hegel’s worldview in his own words, his grand architecture of the journey of the Spirit.

To support the novel vision of re.press, please request your university library to purchase the print versions of the books.  This can be done through their website (http://www.re-press.org/content/view/12/27/).  Many thanks!