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Call for Papers
Theme: Judgment, Pluralism, and Democracy
Subtitle: On the Desirability of Speaking with Others
Type: Interdisciplinary Conference
Institution: Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities,
Bard College
Location: Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (USA)
Date: 2.–3.3.2023
Deadline: 15.10.2022
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Description
One of the latest features of the crisis of democratic culture is the
problematization of free speech. The dysfunction of public discourse
in democratic societies has sparked skepticism about the validity of
the principle itself and concerns about its evident impracticability.
This line of interrogation has targeted the grounds and scope of this
putatively desirable freedom. For example, does Louis Brandeis’s idea
that with “more speech… the truth will out” have any actual empirical
validity? Or does the weaponizability of free speech in the age of
the internet not call for modifying or restricting its legal
protection? This conference aims to expand the parameters of the
current conversation by taking a step back from the desirability of
unrestricted ‘freedom’ of expression and shifting critical attention
to the desirability of ‘talking to others.’ For any case to be made
in support or against free speech is, more fundamentally, a statement
about whether the good of talking to others demands the protections
that make it possible, be that demand conceived in moral,
instrumental, or prudential terms.
We propose to launch the conversation by foregrounding the
contributions of two figures who have explicitly and substantively
defended the necessity of speaking to others who differ from and with
us: Immanuel Kant, who first elaborated philosophical grounds for the
idea, and Hannah Arendt, who critically revived the Kantian framework
in the middle of the 20th century — at a historical juncture where
she considered the defense of pluralism to be at risk. In his
Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant famously puts forward the maxim to
“think in the position of everybody else,” and characterizes
judgments of taste as requiring that one “reflect on [their] own
judgment from a universal standpoint” which entails “putting
[one]self into the standpoint of others.” In fact, Kant further warns
in his Anthropology (1798) of the dangers of “isolating ourselves
with our own understanding and judging publicly with our private
representations.” In her well-known Kant Lectures (Fall 1970), Arendt
draws out the implications of Kant’s claim that to “restrain our
understanding by the understanding of others” is, in fact, a
“subjectively necessary touchstone of the correctness of our
judgments generally.” Building on this, Arendt puts forward the
related notions of ‘representative thinking’ and ‘enlarged
mentality,’ which involve not only the idea that it is good to think
from the standpoint of others and take their thoughts into account,
but that “thinking...depends on others to be possible at all.”
Whatever her differences with Kant, Arendt is to be credited for
highlighting the radical force of Kant’s “belie[f] that the very
faculty of thinking depends on its public use” because it was “not
made ‘to isolate itself but to get into community with others’.”
The aim of this conference is to curate an interdisciplinary
conversation between scholars in the humanities and humanistic social
sciences who are interested in critically exploring historical or
theoretical accounts of the practice of talking to others in
philosophy, political science, cultural studies, history,
linguistics, or any related humanistic discipline. We welcome
contributions that may be informed by notions of alterity and ‘the
Other’ (which commonly appear as technical terms in 20th century
European philosophy) — however, our interest lies in contexts where
‘the other’ is related to as an interlocutory partner of some kind,
where engaging ‘another’ or ‘others’ is ascribed a function or value
in some domain of thought, and especially, where modes of talking to
others are deemed consequential not merely for our thoughts and
opinions, but for our capacity for thinking and making judgments.
Papers may be archival, theoretical, historical, conceptual,
descriptive, normative, or any combination thereof.
We offer a cluster of key terms and topics, though the following list
is by no means exhaustive:
- Thinking Alone vs. Thinking with Others
- Publicity; Community
- Pluralism/Plurality; Relationality; Autonomy
- Identity and Difference
- Affects, Feelings, & Emotions; the Imagination
- The role or function of others in:
* ethics and moral psychology (e.g., love, friendship, forgiveness)
* politics (e.g., human rights, polarization, disagreement,
persuasion)
* aesthetics (e.g., the sociality of taste; narrativity; the
fictional other)
- Limits of philosophical concepts of ‘the Other’ and/or possible
tensions with practical or political accounts that emphasize actual
others
- Different ways of conceiving of others (abstractly vs. concretely),
including historical accounts
- the Virtual Other, i.e., others in digital/technological spaces
- ‘Othering’ (e.g., in the Refugee Crisis and other geo-political
issues)
We conjecture that societies that avow pluralism, in the liberal or
cultural sense, must periodically renew the conversation about the
‘reasons’ to converse across difference.
Submission guidelines
We invite submissions of paper proposals in the form of an extended
abstract (500-1,000 words). Papers should be suitable for a 20 to 25
minute presentation, to be followed by a 15 minute Q&A.
Please send anonymized submissions by 15th October 2022; personal
information (author name and affiliation) should be included in the
body of the email:
others2...@gmail.com
Decisions will be communicated by mid-November. There may be limited
travel support for graduate student presenters; please indicate in
your submission if you are a graduate student.
Registration and Format
The event will take place in-person and will be free and open to the
public.
We anticipate that this event will eventually lead to an edited
volume on the conference theme. Speakers will have the opportunity to
submit their full papers for consideration.
Keynote Speaker:
Linda Zerilli (University of Chicago)
Organisers:
Nicholas Dunn (Bard College)
Nirvana Tanoukhi (Dartmouth College)
Please direct any questions to Nicholas Dunn:
nd...@bard.edu
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