Phenomenology: Nature, Science and Technics
The theme for the 2010 meeting of the International Symposium on Phenomenology is “Phenomenology: Nature, Science and Technics.” The dates of the meeting are 12-17 July 2010 in Perugia Italy.
Today it is an opportune moment to re-investigate the ties that unite us with technics, to ask where modern science and technology are taking us. Inspired by Husserl’s and Heidegger’s critiques of modern science and technology, as well as Merleau-Ponty’s critical interrogations of the sciences of nature, the ambition is to create a dialogue between phenomenology broadly construed, the sciences, and technology. If contemporary science has changed the way we think of nature and of ourselves as an organism, species, or being, and if technology has changed the temporality of existence and the relation to space, then how does phenomenology respond to, and what does it become in light of, these developments? The phenomenological, the post-phenomenological, and even the non-phenomenological approaches to this network of questions are all invited to participate in this dialogue.
Among the questions we wish to address are the following:
– In a time characterized by an important, perhaps unprecedented, scientific and technological innovation, how does one reflect, beyond any technophobia or technophilia, on the relation of phenomenology to technics/technology in its plurality of expressions?
– What can phenomenology gain from a careful and critical attention to investigations conducted in the sciences? Conversely, what does phenomenology offer to the sciences?
– What are the philosophical and ontological implications of research in the sciences and developments in technology for the meaning of human being? Is human being alienated and de-humanized, or is it rather the case that technology open new possibilities to enrich our experience, give access to new dimensions of reality, and reconfigure the relations of the human to Being?
With these questions, then, we invite you to consider this Call For Papers. Anyone who would like to be considered for a presentation should send a short, paragraph-long description of current research on the theme to Bob Vallier at rvallier@depaul.edu no later than 1 March 2010. Those who might like to attend the Symposium may also send enquiries to Bob Vallier. A website is forthcoming. call for papers from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek
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- is this rather the ambiguous harmony of a new subjectivity?
- Is it possible anymore to talk of humanism, when human consciousness is physically and metaphysically thought of and described in terms of platforms for running machine-codes of Darwinian algorithms; or when a tangle of human destinies contest the future and in the thick of this contest, human agency is forcibly hybridized in incalculable ways?
- Who and how many are the seen and unseen contestants slouching towards Bethlehem to be born?
- Our technologies are increasingly the ubiquitous environments of our Lifeworld. Will humanity disappear in technology or will technology disappear in the human?
In this the age of comparative-culture-gone-crazy in which the digital commodity forms of hyper-modernism assault consciousness mercilessly at almost every waking moment, are there a set of inexorable options or alternate modernities that can grow rhizomatically from our present orientation to promise a future free from the terror of code, the horrors of consumerism, and the death wish of fundamentalism?
Could anyone point me in the direction of the website, or the university that the Phenomenology; Nature, Science and Technics conference will be held? Details seem difficult to find.
ReplyDeleteCheers, Ruth