The philosophy of art, as practiced in the western world, has tended to have two divided homes: in analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. Within the analytic tradition, the philosophy of art has recently undergone a revival with the emphasis on perception. This has more closely aligned art theory to science and questions of biology as well as to issues within psychology. The continental tradition has traditionally drawn upon phenomenology’s first-person experience with its ties to embodied perception as well as the social and historical concerns of the social aspect of art. In the realm itself of visual art, the state of (so-called) post-post modernism has resulted in both the dissolution of belief in progress and even, according to some art critics, a lamentable stagnation. But many philosophers of the last century, beginning with Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Nelson Goodman, etc., have suggested that art needs to be thought of within its social, pragmatic, or epistemological functions, suggesting perhaps a need to think of art outside the confines of modernism’s stylistic revolutions and formalist issues. Relatedly, the pluralism within science could be accessed as model for this enterprise. Multiple views on a phenomenon are required due to the complexity of the enterprise, and the practice of both making art and of perceiving it might be in that category. This conference seeks to bring these strands, the analytical and the continental ones, together and evaluate how to move forward with art theory in an age of globalization.
We welcome submissions on these possible questions:
1. Should we value a diversity of perspectives in art theory? If so, what is the value? If not, why not?
2. Are there aspects of art that we presume to be universal that are, in fact, culturally situated?
3. How should different ways of experiencing art be characterized?
4. What is the epistemological function of art?
5. How does the monetary role in art affect both the artist and the perceiver of art?
6. How do the mechanics of seeing (e.g., gist perception, peripheral vision, etc.) affect how we experience art?
7. How does the practice of making art relate to the first-person experience?
8. What role does Husserl’s “bracketing” have in the viewing or making of art?
9. Are there specific non-western traditions that provide a better explanatory solution for the role of art than have the competing paradigms of continental and analytic?
We welcome your participation and look forward to your contributions. Papers should not extend over 45 minutes. Q & A are 15 minutes.
To submit anonymized abstract BY JULY 15, 2024: papers: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe5c9bmoBYb3hCAb0YWWfzV0BLWbhig2PD5VeKU358VA3RKGw/viewform?usp=sf_link
Contact the Center for Ethics Education if interested in attending
I use the conceptual umbrella – A Caribbean Poetics of Forgetting – to think through the temporal and spatial aspects of world-making as it arises out of the Caribbean diaspora. The ‘forgetting’ in this ethics of forgetting is not a disavowal of multiple axes of violence that found this diaspora. Rather, I attempt to use an ethics of forgetting to name Caribbean practices of clearing that condition something like a Kierkegaardian leap of faith – into a future; toward the miracle work of making roots in blood-soil; and for the work of making a way out of fragmented history/ruptured time. In the main, this exploration is grounded in Dionne Brand’s poetic cartography (in Map to the Door of No Return), and Edouard Glissant’s twinned account of the oral and the opaque (in Poetics of Relation and Caribbean Discourse).
Bio: Kris F Sealey is Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University. She graduated from Spelman College in 2001 with a B.Sc. in Mathematics, and received both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from The University of Memphis. Dr. Sealey served as the book review editor of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy from 2011 – 2022. From 2018 – 2021, she also directed PIKSI-Rock (Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute), a summer immersion experience at Penn State for under-represented undergraduate students with an interest in pursuing a doctorate in philosophy. Dr. Sealey’s areas of research include Continental Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, Caribbean Philosophy, and decolonial theory. Her first book, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre and the Question of Transcendence, was published in December 2013 with SUNY Press. Her second book, Creolizing the Nation, published in September 2020 with Northwestern University Press, was awarded the Guillén Batista book award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2022.
We are pleased to announce that the 2024 meeting of the Northeast Conference on Chinese Thought (NECCT) will be held on November 2-3 at Baruch College, City University of New York. This annual meeting is an opportunity for scholars of Chinese thought (broadly construed) from across the northeast US (also somewhat broadly construed) to gather and share their research. As we are interested in generating interdisciplinary discussions, we welcome work of any disciplinary/methodological orientation that bears on Chinese thought.
- When: Saturday, November 2-Sunday, November 3, 2024
- Where: Baruch College, CUNY, New York, NY
- Format: Approximately fifteen thirty-minute slots. We ask that presenters plan for a twenty-minute presentation and allow for a ten-minute Q&A.
- Meals, Travel, and Accommodations: Presenters will be provided with lunch and dinner at the conference. Presenters are expected to pay for their own travel and accommodations.
- Submissions: Please email your paper proposals by July 31st to nell.evans@baruch.cuny.edu with the subject line “NECCT 2024 Submission”. The paper proposal should be a one-page document with a title and abstract. It should be anonymized for review. We expect to have the schedule finalized by August 15th.
We are grateful for the generous financial support of CUNY Graduate Center and the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College.
Please direct any questions about the conference to Hagop Sarkissian (hagop.sarkissian@baruch.cuny.edu) or Wenqing Zhao (zhaowenqing711@gmail.com).
We look forward to hearing from you!
NECCT Organizing Committee:
Stephen Angle (Wesleyan University)
Mick Hunter (Yale University)
Andrew Lambert (CUNY College of Staten Island)
Ellen Neskar (Sarah Lawrence College)
Thomas Radice (Southern Connecticut State University)
Hagop Sarkissian (CUNY Graduate Center/Baruch College CUNY)
Christopher Yang (Brown University)
Wenqing Zhao (Baruch College, CUNY)