Phenomenology, in its Husserlian inspiration, is an attempt to constitute a scientifically valid methodology for the human sciences through a radical inquiry into the basis of the meaningfulness of human existence. Phenomenology discovers these roots in the world constituting subject. As such, phenomenology is historically the most sustained and most successful challenge to positivism, the naïve belief in the reality and knowability of an independently existing world. The world today, academia as well as in society at large, is garbed in various forms of positivism, from the logicism of analytic philosophy to the historicism of the social sciences and humanities to the naturalism of the hard sciences. The positivist search for "objective knowledge" has lost touch with its own origins in the human, and in so doing has become profoundly inhumane. In its emphasis on transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity, i.e. the human, as the starting point of all philosophical investigation, the Phenomenology Roundtable stands as an intervention in this positivist landscape.
Click here for more information about the 8th Annual Phenomenology Roundtable Meeting
June 4 - 7, 2008| Cité des Métiers, Le Raizet, Guadeloupe
5TH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE CARIBBEAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION
Under this heading, the Caribbean Philosophical Association will expand on its organizing theme, when it focused on the broad impact of the rise of Africana and other “third world” philosophies from geographical notions, metaphors, and assumptions that have long been associated with modern concepts of philosophical reason. For 2008, we will continue to look closely at the variety of intellectual movements that have shaped the development of ideas, especially in the Caribbean, that have contributed to, and continue to have an impact (positive or negative) on, the geography of reason. These movements include, but are not limited to, those that have grown out of the Africana Francophone world such as Negritude, Mestisaje, and Creolité, the varieties of Afro-Latin discourses on race and decolonization, and social and philosophical movements such as Pan-Africanism, Garveyism, Rastafari, Black Consciousness, Feminism, Historicism, Poeticism, historicism, Marxism, Afrocentrism/Africology, Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Existentialism, Pragmatism, Logical Analysis, Deconstruction, Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, Psychoanalysis, and more. In the spirit of reshaping the geography of reason, we invite the submission of papers on the philosophical aspects of these movements, nearly all of which are present in the texts and practices of Native Caribbean, Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean, Euro-Caribbean, African, Latin-American, African-American, Indian, and European thinkers, or papers that offer radically new formulations of issues born from these movements. Proposals may be submitted and papers may be presented in English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese since members of this organization are encouraged to work in these languages with and in indigenous and creolized New World languages as well.
Click here for more information about the 5th Annual Caribbean Philosophical Association Meeting
SPRING 2008
March 27, 2008| Temple University| English Department| Tuttleman Hall, Room 101| 5:30 PM
TRANSLATOR, TRAITOR; TRANSLATOR, MOURNER (OR, DREAMING OF INTERCULTURAL EQUIVALENCE)
Rey Chow, Brown University
Rey Chow is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where she teaches in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media. Her research interests include modern literature and film (with an emphasis on Asia), postcolonial studies, and critical/cultural theory. Professor Chow has authored seven books, most recently The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Columbia UP, 2002), The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Duke UP, 2006) and Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility, (Columbia UP, 2007). She has also published over seventy articles and her work has been widely translated and anthologized. Professor Chow’s work has been recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Pembroke Center at Brown University, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
April 4, 2008| Temple University| Philosophy Department| TU Center City Campus, Room 222 | 4 PM
WHAT SHOULD WE DO WITH MUSEUMS?
Beardsley Memorial Lecture in Aesthetics
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Princeton University
Click here for directions to the Temple University Center City Campus
