Calendar | Conference

From the Paris Lectures to the Cartesian Meditations. The Legacy of Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology

Prague, 17 - 19 October 2019

Ninety years ago, notably, on February 23rd and 25th, 1929, Husserl held his two quite famous Paris lectures Einleitung in die transzendentale Phänomenologie that, after a very long and laborious re-elaboration, would later come to be known as Méditations Cartésiennes (1931) and then—after the publication of the first volume of the Husserliana series—as Cartesianische Meditationen (1950). Over the course of the five Meditations all the most important and crucial elements of his ambitious project are either explicitly tackled and systematically worked out or touched upon: the Cartesian “motive” animating the phenomenological enterprise; the foundational role of philosophy, understood as first philosophy, vis-à-vis the totality of positive sciences; the structure of intentionality and the concept of synthesis; the notion of evidence and the contingency of the world-experience; the concrete subject and the method of variation; the relation between transcendental reduction and the epochè; the constitution of the alter ego and the metaphysical outcomes of the explication of the experience of the other; the thorny issue of the relation(s) between phenomenology and metaphysics, and the structural concept of reason; the assessment of modalities; the relation between phenomenology and psychology and the explicit endorsement of a monadological idealism.

The combination of all these themes, motives and concepts contributes to providing the reader of the Cartesian Meditations with one of the most articulated and complex presentation of what might be labeled Husserl’s “system of philosophy,” of all its ambitions, aspirations as well as difficulties.

The goal of the conference is to explore the legacy of the Cartesian Meditations according to three different, yet intertwined perspectives:

(a) That of a straightforward confrontation with the text itself of both the Paris Lectures and the five Cartesian Meditations by tackling specific notions, problems and themes that Husserl develops therein by also relating them to other texts and contexts;

(b) That of the assessment of the overall project of a new System of Phenomenological Philosophy on which Husserl tirelessly worked during the last decade of his activity;

(c) That of the Wirkungsgeschichte of the text and the long-standing influence and fascination that it exerted on philosophers and scholars; the history of its reception and interpretations.

Submissions are welcomed by scholars on any aspect of the text of the Cartesian Meditations and their position within Husserl’s philosophy and, more in general, 20th phenomenology. They include, but are not limited to:

• The concept of intentionality and its structure

• Husserl’s Cartesianism and his interpretation of Descartes’ role in the history of philosophy

• Transcendental phenomenology and pure psychology

• The (many) phenomenological reduction(s)

• The concept of monad or concrete subjectivity and the confrontation with Leibniz

• Phenomenology, first philosophy, metaphysics

• The reception and interpretation of the Cartesian Meditations in post-Husserlian phenomenology (e.g., E. Fink, J. Gaos, R. Ingarden, L. Landgrebe, E. Levinas, E. Stein, etc.)

• Subjectivity, Inter-Subjectivity, Alterity

• The concept of evidence in Husserl’s theory of knowledge

• Active and passive syntheses; static and genetic descriptions

* * *

Please, send a 500 word abstract to the following address: daniele.desantis@ff.cuni.cz

Deadline for submissions: June 1, 2019

Notification of Acceptance: July 1, 2019

 

The organization of the conference is supported by The European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).

CFP is closed
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