Conference dates: April 14–15, 2016

Venue: Kingston University London

 

Abstracts’ submission deadline: 29 November 2015

 

ORGANISERS

HegeLab (Laboratorio di Studi Hegeliani, University of Eastern Piedmont)

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP, Kingston University)

London Graduate School (Kingston University)

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

Objektiver Geist occupies an intermediary position in the general context of Hegel’s system. It was, however, a late “discovery” encountered in a double exteriority, both outside the subjective and separate from absolute spirit. Hegel’s passion for the objective led to numerous returns to the system’s middle term to rework and update its content. When this effort was interrupted by the philosopher’s death, the first Hegelians took up the challenge to furnish the system’s middle grounds with the philosophy of history and other posthumous fragments of teaching or early writings.

 

If the Hegelian concept of objective spirit was developed on the grounds of history, rather than political economy, is the concept itself subject-specific? What does it cover, designate, constrain, impose, or conceptualize? Is objective spirit still to be thought there, where it imposed itself on Hegel, on the first Hegelians, and on later ones (Left, Right and Center)?

 

KEY TEXTS

This conference seeks to address questions arising from the concept of world history in relation to the form, function, and content of objective spirit as presented in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and Elements of the Philosophy of Right.

 

TOPICS

We welcome paper proposals and panel suggestions in the following broad questions:

1-    Normativity and realism: practical philosophy, positive content, collective action, authority, right.

 

2-    Actualisations: social and political institutions – historicity of institutions, institutions as objective reason and their manifestations in the becoming of history.

 

3-    Objective spirit and its interpretations: how it has been tempered or distorted by critical interventions – positivism, sociologism, philosophies of language, social and political sciences, political economy, historicism, hermeneutics. Uses and misuses of dialectical totality and collective consciousness.

 

4-    Objective spirit as world-history: rationality of the real (speculative v. descriptive), effectual reality and becoming reality; effective reality and the future of history; relations to modernity.

 

5-    Religion, politics, and history: religion, modernity, secularization; state and religion; the art; the age of globalization; world history and the history of religions.

 

CONTACT

Please email paper abstracts and panel proposals for blind review by 29 November 2015

To

 

Further details on confirmed keynotes, conference programme, and accommodation arrangements will be posted in due course.

 

General queries can be directed to: