Symposium 2016 on the topic: Philosophy and its History – A Current Debate

Organizers:

The Geneva Group of the Swiss Romandy Society of Philosophy

Scientific Committee:

Marcel van Ackeren (Münster)
Laurent Cesalli (Geneva)
Janette Friedrich (Geneva)
Anton Hügli (Basel)
Stefan Imhoof (Geneva)
Hamid Taieb (Geneva, Lausanne)
Giovanni Ventimiglia (Lugano)
Markus Wild (Basel)

Keynote Speakers:
Prof. em. Jacques Bouveresse (Collège de France)
Prof. Carlo Ginzburg (UCLA, Los Angeles)
Prof. Catherine König-Pralong (Université de Fribourg-en-Breisgau)
Prof. Martin Kusch (Université de Vienne)
Prof. Kevin Mulligan (Université de Genève)
Prof. Irène Rosier-Catach (EPHE, Paris)
Prof. Martin Rueff (Université de Genève)
Prof. Katia Saporiti (Université de Zurich)
Prof. Denis Thouard (Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin)

Argument:

Since the end of the 1980s, the question of the relationship between philosophy and its own history has occupied a central place in discussions about the nature and method of philosophy. What can philosophy do with its history? asks, for example, Gianni Vattimo in his book of the same title, published in 1989.

Influenced by representatives of continental philosophy such as Foucault and Collingwood, a relativist position (Alain de Libera, Kurt Flasch) has emerged, opposed by a more continuist position (Claude Panaccio, Pascal Engel), which draws on prominent figures of analytic philosophy such as Peter Strawson, Donald Davidson, and Michael Dummett. These debates have renewed the philosophical community’s interest in metaphilosophical and methodological questions.

The 2016 Symposium of the Swiss Philosophical Society is dedicated to this return of the history of philosophy to current debates. Participants are invited to discuss the relationship between philosophy and its history from one of the following three perspectives:

1. in contemporary philosophy (20th and 21st centuries), both within the continental and the analytic traditions;
2. in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy;
3. from a metaphilosophical perspective, through a contribution to the philosophy of the history of philosophy, as one might call it following Brentano.

Questions of the following kind will be addressed: Can philosophy be practised without simultaneously engaging in the history of philosophy? Which methodological approaches are used in the field of the history of philosophy? What tendencies, developments, and ruptures can be observed in the ways in which the history of philosophy is practised? What effects do different conceptions of the history of philosophy have on the very concept of philosophy itself?