A whole mess of events and CFPs to announce:
Warwick Symposium on the Non-Philosophy of Francois Laruelle
The Warwick University Philosophy Society, in association with Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, is pleased to announce a short symposium on the non-philosophy of Francois Laruelle on Wednesday the 3rd of March. This will take place in H0.52, in the humanities building, on Warwick main campus, from 3.30pm to 7.00pm.
Programme
3.30 – “Non-Philosophy in English” – Nick Srnicek (LSE), Anthony Paul Smith (Nottingham), Reid Kotlas (Dundee) – Three presentations introducing the central features of non-philosophy followed by a joint question and answer session.
5.00 – Break
5.30 – “From the First to the Second Non-Philosophy” – Francois Laruelle – Paper in French, with English translation provided by Anthony Paul Smith, followed by a question and answer session interpreted by Marjorie Gracieuse (Warwick).
Free to all, no registration required. For further enquiries contact t.k.osborne@gmail.com
See below the fold for more…
Real Objects or Material Subjects
Department of Philosophy, University of Dundee
March 27-28, 2010
Find the newly posted schedule here.
CFP: Contingency – PLI (Warwick Journal of Philosophy, vol. 22)
Pli invites submissions for the next volume (22) on the topic of Contingency. Recently, contingency has been reassessed (Meillassoux, After Finitude) in ways which bring that notion back into the centre of the contemporary philosophical debate. For the next volume of Pli we welcome papers that aim to understand or shed new light on this important notion.
“The root of freedom in God is the possibility or contingency of things, by which it happens that innumerable things are found which are neither necessary nor impossible, from which God chooses those which do most to testify to his own glory.” Leibniz, Contingency and Necessity.
“In this externality, the determinations of the Notion have the show of an indifferent subsistence and isolation [Vereinzelung] in regard to each other, and the Notion, therefore, is present only as something inward. Consequently, Nature exhibits no freedom in its existence, but only necessity and contingency.” Hegel, §248, Encyclopedia.
“The Logos breaks up into hieroglyphics, each one of which speaks the transcendent language of a faculty. Even the point of departure—namely, sensibility in the encounter with that which forces sensation—presupposes neither affinity nor predestination. On the contrary, it is the fortuitousness or the contingency of the encounter which guarantees the necessity of that which it forces to be thought.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
Possible topics include:
– Contingency, necessity and probability.
– The necessity of contingency in Quentin Meillassoux.
– Early modern understanding of contingency in Leibniz and/or Spinoza.
– Contingency after Kant.
– The Hegelian rehabilitation of the principle of sufficient reason.
– Nietzschean becoming.
– Contingency and Heideggerian ‘facticity’.
– Contingency and the Event
Submissions should be articles no longer than 8,000 words, accompanied by an abstract, and sent by email to: plijournal@googlemail.com . Alternatively submissions can be sent in the form of a single hard copy plus a copy on disk as a Word, ODT or RTF file. Include an e-mail address for future correspondence. The deadline for submissions is the 30th of June 2010. Please refer to the ‘Notes for Contributors’ on the journal’s website.
Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy,
Department of Philosophy
University of Warwick
Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK
Visit http://www.warwick.ac.uk/philosophy/pli_journal/
Form and Genesis
The Theory Reading Group at Cornell University invites submissions for its sixth annual interdisciplinary spring conference.
Featuring keynote speakers Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico) and Robert Kaufman (University of California, Berkeley)
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
April 22-24, 2010
Increasingly it seems that contemporary thought is confronted with two ways of explaining its objects. On the one hand, a formal approach seeks to analyze the necessary structures or defining qualities that make something what it is. On the other hand, a genetic or historical method aims to uncover the forces that give rise to form or structure in the first place. Do these modes of explanation disqualify one another, or are there compelling prospects for their integration? For example, is it possible to understand how thought or rationality can grasp its own determining processes? Or, on the contrary, is thought structurally unable to access a domain that is by nature exterior to reason, sense, or order?
Broadly understood, the formal approach tends to seek logical explanations, while the genetic approach looks to materialist or genealogical accounts. The relation between these two orders of explanation has wide implications. What is the connection between logical or normative form and its temporal, material, or historical genesis? Conversely, what might an analysis of the structure of genealogy or critique tell us about the latter? Does the political critique of form as an arbitrary convention mitigate its powers of normativity? What is the relationship between form and history, or form and materiality in literary and aesthetic theory? What is the status of formalism, whether literary or logical-mathematical, in contemporary theory?
Suggested topics:
Speculation and critique
Formalisms and historicisms
The transcendental and the empirical
Limits of philosophy/limits of science
Form of the political
Originality
Events of reason
Condition and cause
Sense and nonsense
Form and genre
History and form in aesthetics
Breaking form: the sublime, the unrepresentable, the iconoclastic
Formation and deformation
The finite and the infinite
Forms of the event
Structure and drive (Freud, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari)
Form and interpretation (New Critics, Deconstruction)
History, genealogy, critique (Nietzsche, Foucault)
Marxism and form (Benjamin, Adorno, Jameson)
Forms of life (Wittgenstein, Arendt, Agamben)
Please limit the length of abstracts to no more than 250 words. The deadline for submission of 250-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations is March 1, 2010. Please include your name, e-mail address, and phone number. Abstracts should be e-mailed to theory@cornell.edu. Notices of acceptance will be sent no later than March 6, 2009. For more information about the Cornell Theory Reading Group, visit http://www.arts.cornell.edu/trg .
Speculative Heresy 