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Call for Papers

 

Continental Empiricism

A One Day Graduate Conference

Friday, March 10th 2006

 

 

Keynote Speaker: David Lapoujade

(Sorbonne, Paris)

 

 

‘It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion (we have so many reasons not to believe in the human world; we have lost the world, worse than a fiancée or a god). The problem has indeed changed.’ G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, What is Philosophy?

 

‘If we had a choice between empiricism and the all-oppressing necessity of thought of a rationalism which had been driven to the highest point, no free spirit would be able to object to deciding in favour of empiricism.’ F.W.J. von Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy

 

 

The aim of this one-day graduate conference is to explore the possibilities of empiricism today with reference to ‘continental’ trajectories of thought. Empiricism has been variously understood as a theory of experience, of knowledge, of events, of the formation of a human nature, and of relations. In one or more of these forms it is a conception of mind and world that post-Kantian European or continental philosophy has had a critical relation to since Kant and Hegel: does empiricism need sublating or should it be refined in new and novel ways? We welcome papers from postgraduates currently working on the nature and possibilities of empiricism. Topics might include:

 

  • The nature and scope of transcendental empiricism
  • Deconstruction and empiricism
  • Empiricism and pragmatism
  • Phenomenology and empiricism
  • Deleuze and a logic of multiplicities
  • Schelling and ‘superior’ empiricism
  • Kant and his empiricist critics
  • Hegel and the search for a concrete metaphysics
  • The relation between metaphysics and empiricism (e.g. the work of Bergson)
  • Nietzsche and noble thought
  • James’s radical empiricism
  • Empiricism and ethics; empiricism and politics

 

 

Abstracts of not more than 500 words should be sent to Siobhan McKeown at the address below by November 1st 2005. A selection of the papers of the conference will be published in a future issue of Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy.

 

philgradconf@warwick.ac.uk

 

Department of Philosophy

University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom