The 2016 CRMEP graduate conference (19-20 May) and reading group on Immanuel Kant's anthropological writings and their legacy.
View the conference programme and register.
"The mainstream marginalization of Kant’s anthropological writings, in part due to their racist content, arguably makes philosophy ill-equipped to think some of today's most pressing concerns, notably with regard to ableism, racism, classism and sexism in philosophical discourse." - Call For Abstracts.
The 2016 Graduate Student Conference of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP; Kingston University) will focus on Kant’s anthropological works and their legacy. An associated reading group shall precede it.
January - May 2016: Reading group
15 February 2016: Deadline for conference abstracts (extended from 1 Feb)
19-20th May 2016: Graduate conference
Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies,
University of Connecticut
Caribbean Philosophical Association
Professor Of Modern European Philosophy,
Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP),
Kingston University
Image: detail from 'The Rich Soil Down There' by Kara Walker
Reserve your place by emailing crmepagc@gmail.com
£5 for the whole conference, to subsidise refreshments, lunches and other conference fees. If this is unaffordable but you wish to attend, please email us.
9:30 - 10:00: Registration
10:00 - 10:20: Welcome and Introduction
10:20 - 11:40: Incidental Categories? Race, Gender and Human Being
* Alva Gotby: “Rational Being: Philosophy’s Master Subject”
* William Reckner: “Kant's Negative Equality”
* Luis Fellipe García: "Anthropology and Critique – when the I is an Other"
11:40 - 12:00: Coffee Break
12:00 - 13:20: Enlightenment and the Limits of Liberalism
* Koshka Duff: "Locke's Tyranipocrisy Discovered"
* Jaakko Karhunen: “Félix Guattari’s aesthetic anthropology of ‘archaic society’”
* Tihana Pupovac: "Equality and (anti)Humanism: Kant with Rousseau"
13:20 - 14:30: Lunch
14:30 - 15:50: Subjects, Science and Social Ontology
* Till Hahn: “The social a priori - Kant with Durkheim”
* Rob Brooks: “The Sublime Science: the Place of Pragmatic rule in Foucault’s Reading of Kant.
* Jens de Vleminck: "Kant’s Anthropology, a Fremdkörper? On Foucault’s ‘Kanthropologisation"
15:50 - 16:00: Coffee Break
16:00 - 17:30: Keynote Lecture 1: Professor Stella Sandford:
"Reception is Everything: Kant, Race and Disciplinary Bad Faith"
17:30 - : Reception
10:00 - 12:00: Autonomy and Philosophical Anthropologies
* Tijana Okic: "Kant against Kant: Anthropology versus Autonomy"
* Sebastian Kock: “Kant's Anthropology as Negative Anthropology – Perspectives & Genealogies”
* Jeremy Hovda: "Kantian Self-Perfection from a Moral and an Anthropological Point of View"
* Maxime Lallement: “The Role of Foucault’s Reading of Kant’s Anthropology Towards his Critique of the Concept of Truth”
12:00 - 13:00: Lunch
13:00 - 14:45: Kant’s Dispositions Reconsidered: Imagining, Feeling and Perceiving
* Oisín Keohane: "Kant on Babel: The Spirit of the French language and the German Language"
* Anna Enström: "Beyond the Parallelism between the Transcendental and the Empirical Subject: Kant’s Concept of Gemüt and the Aesthetic Judgement of Jokes."
* Amanda Holmes: "Eavesdropping on Oneself: Imagination, Identity, and the Problem of Reflection"
* Darla Migan, “Adrian Piper’s Thwarted Projects, Dashed Hopes, A Moment of Embarrassment (2012): Anti-Black Racism as Mistakes in Kantian Aesthetic Reflective Judgement"
14:45 - 15:00: Coffee Break
15:00 - 16:30: Workshop: Critical Theory of Race
In this workshop we will collectively read 'The color of reason: The idea of ‘race’ in Kant’s Anthropology' by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze. This text will enable us to reflect on Kanthropology in the 18th century as well as our conference in the 21st.
16:30 - 16:45: Coffee break
16:15 - 17:45: Keynote Lecture 2: Professor Lewis Gordon:
'O, Kanthropology: Moving on, Fanthropologically, in Africana Philosophy'
Reserve your place by emailing crmepagc@gmail.com £5 for the whole conference, to subsidise refreshments, lunches and other conference fees. If this is unaffordable but you wish to attend, please email us.
The 2016 CRMEP Graduate Student Conference will focus on Kant’s anthropological works and their legacy. The mainstream marginalization of Kant’s anthropological writings, in part due to their racist content, arguably makes philosophy ill-equipped to think some of today's most pressing concerns, notably with regard to ableism, racism, classism and sexism in philosophical discourse. As Robert Bernasconi has observed, ignoring the Kant of the Anthropology is ‘to diminish philosophy as an activity more generally.’
Foucault demonstrates, in his use of Anthropology From a Pragmatic point of View as a starting point for his foundational work The Order of Things, how Kant’s anthropological works have a central role in the history of knowledge production and ‘truth discourse.’ Furthermore, there are philosophical convictions embedded in the anthropology that are not developed elsewhere in Kant's work, such as an oscillation between the priority of the empirical and transcendental subject (beginning in his writings on the sublime Kant’s anthropological work suggests that the transcendental subject relies on an empirical one).
While it is clear how Kant’s canonical works in philosophy inform his anthropological work, it is not clear how his anthropology informs his philosophy and to what extent his anthropology is integral to the rest of his thought. The 2016 CRMEP Graduate Conference aims at reconsidering these questions and opening a critical discussion on the anthropological legacy of Kant in contemporary thought.
We invite papers from philosophy and other disciplines reacting to the following topics:
Please submit 300-word abstracts via our abstract submission form by the 15th February 2016 (extended from 1st Feb). Selections shall be made anonymously and shall be responded to by the 1st March.
A reading group focusing on Kant's anthropological writings and literature related thereof shall take place in London from January 2016 to May 2016. The group is free and open to all. To participate email crmepagc@gmail.com
Kanthropology, the 2016 CRMEP graduate student conference and associated events, is being organised by Rebecca Carson, Isabell Dahms, Mijael Jiménez, Christopher Jones, Noa Levin, Daniel Nemenyi, Borna Radnik and Bernadette Schulz.