NOV 30 Deadline: CFA SWIP UK Conference

Don’t forget….

Call for Abstracts

We welcome abstracts (of up to 500 words) for 30-minute presentations on the theme of feminism in/and philosophy. Please email your abstracts to oxfordswip2014 AT gmail.com by 30 November, 2013. Travel within the UK and accommodation will be covered for speakers.

Conference Announcement

“[W]hen you are a woman and a philosopher,” writes Michèle Le Doeuff in Hipparchia’s choice, “it is useful to be a feminist in order to understand what is happening to you”. Like many productive relationships, the relationship between feminism and philosophy has never been easy. Feminists and philosophers alike have claimed that between the two there can be no real dialogue. Radical feminists argue that the history of philosophy is the history of a patriarchal institution, the values of truth and reason no more than tools of subordination. Many philosophers meanwhile dismiss the very idea of ‘feminist philosophy’ as a category error: a conflation of a political project with an epistemic one.

And yet, we now have a rich tradition of feminist philosophy: a tradition that embraces orthodox philosophical values while drawing on the concerns and interests and methods of feminism. But just what is feminist philosophy, and how is it possible? What is it to be a feminist philosopher, beyond being both a philosopher and a feminist? What is it do philosophy as a feminist? And what is to practice feminism through philosophy? How are we to reconcile the demands of theory and practice, the goals of truth and emancipation, the perspectives of the universal and the particular?

This set of questions will be the starting point for the Feminism in/and Philosophy conference, at All Souls College, Oxford, 27-29 March 2014. Invited speakers are Michèle Le Doeuff, Rae Langton and Jennifer Saul.

For more information, go here.

Men Talk About Suffering

Conference announcement for a gendered conference on suffering:

 

Registration is now open for a one day workshop on Suffering and Normativity.

The workshop will be held on 18 January, 2014, and is hosted by Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

What is suffering’s place in our rational lives? Suffering is traditionally taken to be an impediment to reason, but what roles might suffering play in supporting and assisting rational activity? Suffering arguably provides reasons for actions and beliefs, but might suffering also respond to reason? If so, might we sometimes be rationally criticizable for suffering or for failing to suffer?

Our aim at this workshop is to explore what and how suffering rationalizes and whether and how suffering itself is rational or irrational.

The day will be organized around the research of the following presenters:

Bastian Brock (Psychology, University of Queensland)

Jonathan Cohen (Philosophy and Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego)

Matthew Fulkerson (Philosophy and Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego)

Tom Johnstone (Psychology and Affective Neuroscience, University of Reading)

Manolo Martinez (Philosophy, Universitat de Barcelona)

The workshop is funded by the John Templeton Foundation and is part of the larger project: The Value of Suffering: An Interdisciplinary Investigation of the Nature, Meaning, and Role of Affective Experiences. The Value of Suffering Project is an international, interdisciplinary research project whose aim is to foster multidisciplinary exploration of the roles that affective experiences—suffering in particular—play in our lives.

Though our website is currently under construction, more information about the Value of Suffering Project and our research team can currently be found at: http://www.davidbain.org/value-of-suffering-project