Annual conference July 11-13 2008
The Conference calls for papers from all areas in the arts and humanities, the natural and social sciences. It invites participants from both within and outside critical realism who are interested to explore critical realist philosophy, method and practice, encouraging a broad focus on the nature and grounds of critique.
We live in a world of deep conflict, rapid change and flux, in which the problems facing human being and the natural world have never been greater. Challenges posed by techno-scientific fixes to the problems of nature and human nature; by the re-emergence of imperialist conflicts in the name of neo-liberal economics and politics; and by the re-assertion of the division between the secular and the spiritual as the form of modernity and the basis for taking sides in conflict: all provide ample grounds for critique. They also raise the crucial question: what are the grounds of critique at a time when, it is said, critical thinking has lost its way.
Questions of critique are central to critical realism. Whether it be immanent critique throughout its development, explanatory and emancipatory critique in its second phase, dialectical and meta-critique in its third, or the most recent assertion of the meta-real, critical realists have sought to be critical about critique. From these different standpoints, they have drawn on or built bridges to theorists as diverse as Plato and Aristotle, Hegel and Marx, Adorno, Habermas and Derrida. So broad a palette requires reflexivity: how do the different forms of critique relate to each other, what are their limits, how are they critically assessed? What is specific to critical realist critiques? How are critiques rooted in the western tradition assessed in the light of those from elsewhere in the world? How does critical realism deal with the ‘end of critique’? How does it shed light on problems of interdisciplinarity? How does it make emancipation possible?
Such questions lead us more concretely to ways of doing critique. What are our critical methods? How does critique inform normative theory and argument? How do we ‘do critique’ in relation to both the social and natural sciences and the world? How does it inform political activism and movements for emancipation, or policy formation and outcomes? How is critical realism ‘applied’, i.e., how does it engage with particular fields or objects, or establish research exemplars and examples? How does it approach, negotiate, challenge and overcome disciplinary boundaries?
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/law/events/iacr/
The deadline for receiving abstracts for papers is Friday 7 March 2008.
Saturday 7 June 2008
Avenue CampusUniversity of Southampton,
Southampton, UK
Keynote speaker: Stephen Mulhall (University of Oxford), ‘The Meaning of the Question of Being: Wittgenstein and Heidegger Converse’
The University of Southampton’s annual one-day Graduate Conference in Philosophy will this year be devoted to issues in and arising from German-speaking philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Academic staff and research students at Southampton have active interests in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Arendt. We welcome equally contributions on any philosophers and themes that fall within the scope of the conference title. Papers are invited from graduate students, and we are hoping to attract a wide external audience.Deadline for submission of papers: 4 May 2008
Papers should be not more that 3,000 words in length, suitable for a 20 minute presentation followed by discussion. Please submit papers to Professor Christopher Janaway at the address below, or preferably by email to: cjanaway@soton.ac.ukFor other inquiries and registration, please contact Adam Dunn or Dan Clifford.Philosophy, School of Humanities, Avenue Campus, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BF, UK
Theme Issue for Angelaki: journal of theoretical humanities
Edited by:Frida Beckman – The University of Uppsala
Charlie Blake – Liverpool Hope University
Proposed publication date: April 2009
This collection intends to address recent and contemporary reconfigurations of Sadism and Masochismin philosophical, literary and image-based expressions of identity. How can theoretical approaches to Sadismand Masochism assist our understanding of technologiesof self and other today? What are the philosophical,political and creative implications of these‘perversions’ in contemporary discourse, culture and media?In the second thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer famously argue that the illumination and liberation signalled by the Kantian enlightenment will inevitably decay into the inhumangeometry of the Sadeian enlightenment. This is a realm in which any conventional notion of the “good” is either utterly corrupted or divorced from all rational ends and replaced by the exponentially conceived pursuit of pleasure, pain and depravity.
While there are certainly innumerable recent instances that wouldseem to indicate that this may indeed be the case inthe institutional and political arena, (as, forexample, the distinctly Sadean tableau of the human pyramids of Abu Ghraib), in the private and cultural arenas, the configurations of power and desire that make up human identity are more complex and ambivalent in their response to the violence of rationality. This is an ambivalence that characterizes the Sadean and Masochean spectrum, from individual proclivities and the subcultures of BDSM that have formed around them,on the one hand, to its broader expression and interrogation in art, film and fiction, on the other; an ambivalence whose consequences are further accentuated when viewed through and against the capacity of digital media systems and networks to infinitely duplicate and transform images and identities through repetition.From this observation, and following Gilles Deleuze’s distinction in Coldness and Cruelty between the Sadean obsession with cruelty as institutionalized possession and the Masochean deployment of cruelty as a contracted alliance, it becomes possible to revisitand reassess both the politics and the cultural obsession with violence, cruelty and sexuality inrecent and contemporary philosophy, literary fictions, art and film, as a spectrum of possibilities rather than as a logic of imposition.
Abstracts are, therefore, invited that will explore these themes in philosophy, politics, literature, art and film. Although some papers will inevitably traverse these thematic domains, the editorial design will delineate three main sections, dealing respectively, though in no way exclusively, with“Humiliating Reason: Philosophy & Perversity”, “TheCorrupted Text”, and “The Depraved Image”. We areparticularly interested in submissions that consider the implications of the discourses of Sadism/Masochismfor the contemporary theory and practice of self.
Abstracts should be submitted in electronic format byFebruary 29, 2008, to the editors:Frida Beckman and Charlie Blake. The editors will respond to abstracts within a month.
If accepted, completed papers should be with the issueeditors no later than September 7, 2008. Length:5000–10,000 words. Papers will then be circulated to external referees and depending on their feedback, papers will be amended or accepted by the deadline of December 1, 2008. Queries on this special issue may be addressed to the issue editors. Work accepted for development in this special issue must conform to theModern Language Association Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (www.mla.org). Manuscripts should be original in content and not published, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Manuscripts are not returned.
Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanitieshttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge/0969725x.html
