Foucault News

Prospects for an Ethics of Self-Cultivation

Conference 1: ‘Hellenistic Ethics in Nietzsche and Foucault’

Date: 25-27 September, 2014

Location: The University of Warwick, UK

PDF of call for papers

1st Call for Abstracts:

Philosophical interest in the ethical ideal of self-cultivation has increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as philosophers have sought alternatives to deontological and utilitarian theories. This interest has been most evident in the widespread revival of virtue ethics, although contemporary virtue ethicists tend to focus on Aristotle’s account of character formation. Philosophers in the modern European tradition, however, have been influenced by other views on self-cultivation from the Hellenistic period. Nietzsche’s account of self-cultivation, for instance, is closer to Epicurus’s than Aristotle’s, while Foucault draws extensively on Stoicism and Cynicism for his account. The insights of these thinkers suggest that we may deepen and expand our understanding of self-cultivation by reassessing the merits of the Hellenistic tradition.

Confirmed Speakers

Prof. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Warwick)
Prof. Daniel Conway (Texas A&M)
Dr Edward Harcourt (Oxford)
Prof. Beatrice Han-Pile (Essex)
Dr John Sellars (Birkbeck)
Dr David Webb (Staffordshire)

We welcome papers suitable for 30 minute presentation on self-cultivation in Hellenistic ethics and modern European philosophy. Abstracts of around 500 words suitable for blind review should be sent to selfcultivation@warwick.ac.uk by June 30th 2014. Submissions from graduate students and early-career researchers are especially welcome.

This event will be followed by a second conference hosted by Monash University in 2015 with a separate registration and CFA. To find out more about the research project please visit our webpage: www2.warwick.ac.uk/selfcultivation, and to keep up with future news join our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/selfcultivation2014.

Call for Papers

A day-long workshop on the topic (with a view to an edited volume)

“Crisis and Reconfigurations: 100 years of European Thought Since 1914”

November 7 2014, Deakin Melbourne City Campus, Australia

An event hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Centre http://www.deakin.edu.au/arts-ed/centre-for-citizenship-and-globalisation/research/thematic-research-groups/ephi and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Keynote speaker:

William Altman, author of The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism, Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration, Nietzsche: Philosopher of the Second Reich, and Plato the Teacher, the Crisis of the Republic

Overview

August 2014 marks 100 years since the outbreak of the first global war, and the beginning of what some historians have called a second ‘30 years’ war.’  The 1914 war itself, then the Russian revolutions of 1917, a contested peace after 1918, accelerating economic crises, the rise of fascism in Spain, Italy, then Germany, the systematic atrocities committed under these regimes, and the division of the world into the two blocs of the cold war following 1945 profoundly shocked European consciousness and culture.  Many philosophers and thinkers, like Hannah Arendt, argued that there had been an irreversible breach in the continuing traditions of the West.  Many others took these crises as proof positive of the redundancy, or culpability, of the ideals of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, centring around notions of progress, the beneficence of scientific advance, and the overcoming or taming of natural necessity.  In academic philosophy, this period saw the opening up of the gulf between angloamerican, analytic and ‘continental’ modes of philosophising, a distinction which still has real currency today.  Within European thought, while German post-war thinking largely saw a profound shift away from the figures of Nietzsche, Schmitt and Heidegger, held to have been implicated in their national disaster; in French thought, following 1960, Nietzschean and Heideggerian thought had a huge say in shaping the post-structuralist generation of thinkers whose wider influence around the world, and across disciplinary boundaries, is still felt today.  Differently, the need to avoid any perceived proximities to the oppressive statism of the National Socialist and Stalinist regimes has had a huge role to play, via Hayek, Friedman and others in the economic thought that has widely reshaped the international economic and political landscape since 1979.  This CFP calls for contributions to this workshop (with a view to an edited volume) on and around the hypothesis that European thought since 1914 has been decisively shaped, in both its strengths and weaknesses, by the political, cultural, economic and human crises inaugurated 100 years ago this year.  Possible areas of special interest may be:

– the political and historical context of the analytic-continental divide in philosophy

– the possible shaping force of the European catastrophe in philosophical thinking, rhetoric, modes of argumentation and self-perception

– the role of debates concerning Soviet and Maoist forms of Marxism in wider philosophical and political thought

– the role of reactionary thought in European ideas since 1914, and the centrality of the “crisis” motif

– the motif of a ‘return to the Greeks/Romans/theologians’ in post-1914 European thought

– the influence of theological, and contrastingly, classical motifs inpost-1914 European thinkers’ works

– the oeuvres of particular leading European thinkers, as inflected by the political and cultural crises of the first half of the 20^th century.

– what are the future directions for philosophical thought, beyond the attempts to mourn and comprehend the crises set in chain by 1914?

People interested in contributing a paper to this event should send a 300-800 word abstract to msharpe@deakin.edu.au or jack.reynolds@deakin.edu.au.   Deadline: 30 May 2014.