Figuring Existence: A Postgraduate Conference in Existential Analysis
FIGURING EXISTENCE
A Postgraduate Conference in Existential Analysis
Friday 1st March 2019
University of Oxford
United Kingdom
Keynote Speaker: Kate Kirkpatrick (King’s College London)
Organisers: Elizabeth Xiao-an Li and Nikolaas Deketelaere
Centre for Theology and Modern European Thought
The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno summarised the guiding motive of those intellectual approaches we might nowadays call existentialist by saying that “philosophy is a product of the humanity of each philosopher, and each philosopher is a man of flesh and bone who addresses himself to other men of flesh and bone like himself. And, let him do what he will, he philosophizes not with reason only, but with the will, with the feelings, with the flesh and with the bones, with the whole soul and the whole body. It is the man that philosophizes.” Yet, it is perhaps also because of definitions as broad as this one that Jean-Paul Sartre felt that “the word is now so loosely applied to so many things that it no longer means anything at all.” This conference aims to provide a sketch of the style of thinking that can broadly be conceived of as existential analysis.
In connection with the conference, we are also inviting submissions to a special edition of Open Theology on the topic “Existential Conceptions of the Relationship between Theology and Philosophy”. The CFP is attached below and submissions are due in May.
For more information contact: Nikolaas (nikolaas.deketelaere@balliol.ox.ac.uk) or Elizabeth (elizabeth.li@mansfield.ox.ac.uk).
Programme:
Venue: Von Trott and Wolfson Rooms, Jowett Walk Building (OX1 3TL)
8.30: Registration and welcome
8.45: Opening words
9.00-10.30: Parallel panels
Session 1: The Long 19th Century
Chair: Stevan Veljkovic
Josh Roe: “The Rise of Enthusiasm: From Shaftesbury to Hamann”
Shari Dedier: “Diester Thorweg ‘Augenblick’: The Exalted Moment and Eternity in Nietzsche and Jaspers”
Levy Coudyser: “The Will to Power and Suicide”
Session 2: Freedom
Chair: Travis La Couter
Dritero Demjaha: “Existentialism and metanarrative or the atheist existentialist dilemma: Hegelian end of history or Christian end of philosophy?”
Piergiacomo Severini: “Jeanne Hersch’s Realist Existentialism: Reasoning on Human between Body and Freedom”
David Mark Dunning: “A Decisively Free Existence: Negative Certainty in Jean-Luc Marion”
10.30 Coffee break
10.45-12.15: Parallel panels
Session 3: The Place of Existentialism
Chair: Dr. Kate Kirkpatrick
Samuel Filby: “Can there be an Existential Analytic Philosophy?”
Mimi Howard: “Heidegger’s Early Christianity and Place of Politics”
John Rayburn: “For the Sake of Soul: Existential Meaning in James Hillman’s “Soul-Making”
Session 4: Kierkegaard
Chair: Elizabeth Li
Lea Cantor: “Hegel’s Concept of Freedom in the Light of Kierkegaard’s Critique”
Frederic Dubois: “Existentialism as a Development of Dialectical Metaphysics: The Case of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety”
Barney Riggs: “Kierkegaard’s Concept of Busyness: A Preliminary Account”
12.30-13.30: Lunch
14.00-16.00 Parallel panels
Session 5: Phenomenology
Chair: James Lorenz
Kevin Mager: “Merleau-Ponty and the Existential Analysis of Discovery: Expression in Art and Science”
Maria-Nefeli Panetsos: “Dance and Existential Phenomenology”
Renxiang Liu: “Sartre’s Dualist Monism and Its Temporal Dimensions”
Ed Willems: “Husserl’s Transcendental Ego and the Transition to Existentialism”
Session 6: Existential Experience
Chair: Naomi Irit Richman
Maja Vejic: “Anxiety in Philosophy, Literature and Life”
Maja Berseneva: “Existential Vulnerability”
Michal Pawlowski: “Kitsch as an Existential Experience”
16.00-17.00: Coffee break
17.00-18.30 Keynote Lecture — Dr. Kate Kirkpatrick: “Existentialism and Exemplars”
18.30-19.30: Dinner
