PHENOMENOLOGY PRIZE

The Phenomenology Roundtable and the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought will honor Dr. Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy at the New School University, as this year’s recipient of the award for outstanding contributions to phenomenology.  The event will take place on Friday, May 9th, in the afternoon session of this year’s Roundtable meetings, which will take place at John Jay College of the City University of New York, North Hall, Room 2200.

Past recipients of this award are:

Jitendra Mohanty, Temple University

Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Lewis University

Paget Henry, Brown University

LOCATION

John Jay College of Criminal Justice
North Hall, Room 2200
445 West 59th St.
New York, NY 10019

Click here for a map of this location

Click here for directions to JJC North Hall (scroll down for North Hall Building directions)

PAPERS

1) Niel Rosen (Georgetown University):

"The Healing Relationship as a Moral Community"

Related essay:

Pellegrino, Edmund. "Toward a Reconstruction of Medical Morality." American Journal of Bioethics, 6(2): 65-71, 2006.

2) Karli Cerankowski (Stanford University):

"Seeing the Invisible: The Performative Power of Coming Out as Asexual"

3) Avram Gurland-Blaker (Temple University):

"Some Phenomenological Thoughts on Humor"

4) Marilyn Nissim-Sabat (Lewis University):

"Genetic Phenomenology and the Ready-to-Hand"

5) Dilan Mahendran (University of California, Berkeley):

"Intersubjectivity and Racial Intercorporeality: A Preliminary Sketch of the Interior and Exterior Horizon of Racial Perception"

6) Mike Watson (Temple University):

"On the Self-questioning and Replanning of a Responsible “Mature Double-Consciousness”: A Useful Example of WEB Du Bois’ Pedagogical Failure to Recognize the True Worth of a “Young Double Consciousness”"

7) Carolyn Cusick (Vanderbilt University):

"Epistemic Openness and the Character of Good Listeners"

8) Rick Anthony Furtak (Colorado College):

"On the Intentionality of Love and Other Emotions: Thinking with Kierkegaard, Scheler, & Marion [among Others, Especially Harry Frankfurt] about the Grounds of Affective Experience; or, 'Love as the Ultimate Ground of Practical Reason'"

9) Michael Monahan (Marquette University):

"Racial Justice and the Politics of Purity" [updated 5/2/08]

10) James B. Haile (University of Memphis):

"'Happily, the View from Inside the Skin Is Not So Dark': Black Existential Perspectives on Black Existence"

11) Katharine Loevy (Vanderbilt University):

"Living Things versus Hegel's Death Machine: An Interpretation of Hegel's Account of Life" [updated 5/2/08]

ACCOMMODATIONS

International House (located near Teachers College and Union Theological Seminary)

Holiday Inn (located next to John Jay College)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Notification of intent to present: Friday, March 7

Papers due: Friday, April 18 (but as early as possible)

The Phenomenology Roundtable announces its eighth annual meeting, to take place at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, NY.

Our mission statement reads, "We recognize Husserlian phenomenology as our ground and as the proper method of philosophical analysis, and work from this perspective in dialogue with other phenomenological perspectives." In this spirit, we invite papers that deal with issues, theoretical and praxiological, from a phenomenological perspective. Also, as the Roundtable is a "working group," we ask that the papers be "works-in-progress."

As usual, depending on how many participants we have, we plan to dedicate between 45 minutes and 1 hour for each presenter. Since we distribute our papers beforehand, we ask that participants plan not to read their papers during their time-slots. Instead, we ask that participants spend no more than 15 minutes outlining their projects and directing the Roundtable to the points that they would like to consider. This will leave most of our time open for critical, meaningful discussion.

Our invited guest for this year's Roundtable is Simon Critchley (New School for Social Research).

Please send your notification of intent to present by Friday, March 7 and your paper by Friday, April 18 to: phenomenology_roundtable@yahoo.com.

The fees for this year's Roundtable are: $30 for students and $50 for faculty.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Douglas Ficek and Rosario Torres-Guevara
Co-Organizers


MISSION STATEMENT

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.

The Phenomenology Roundtable was founded at a meeting of the Radical Philosophy Assocation in November 2000, at Loyola University, Chicago.  There, over coffee, several of us* gathered and discussed the lack of a space for doing phenomenology.  We experienced the antagonistic and confrontational attitude of the dominant philosophical organizations; we bemoaned the lack of collegiality and constructivity in their meetings; and, most significantly, we noted the lack of a Husserlian starting point in most of the work of these groups.  We decided we would form our own group aimed at a creative and supportive atmosphere in which we and other phenomenologists could discuss our work and interact with one another.  In our meetings, we combine the most radical critique with the respect and support indicative of a true intersubjective community -- two ideals that, we believe, entail one another; we remain committed to collaborative and highly engaged discussion; and we welcome and encourage participation by all those doing phenomenology, students and professors, academics and activists alike.  In all of this, we recognize the importance of our work as part of the shared goal of human knowledge and liberation, which is, after all, the goal of phenomenology itself.  We hope in this way to make a contribution to the continuing role of philosophy as essential to the future of human life.  

*Carolyn Cusick, David Fryer, Erik Garrett, Lewis Gordon**, Michael Michau, Michael Monahan, and Marilyn Nissim-Sabat.  

**The Phenomenology Roundtable would like to give recognition to the work of Lewis R. Gordon as one of its most important sources of inspiration.  In his work, Gordon, a founding member and enthusiastic supporter of the Roundtable, has constituted, for the first time, a phenomenological critical race theory, which stands as a model for the kind of committed phenomenological liberatory theory that the Roundtable seeks to create.

Click here for the published mission statement.