Forms of Knowledge: Literature and Philosophy Conference

Dates of conference : November 7-8, 2017

Deadline for submissions : September 17, 2017

Name of organization: University of Edinburgh (precise location to be announced)

Contact email: overlapedinburgh@gmail.com

Keynote Speaker: Sandra Laugier, Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris 1

Pantheon-Sorbonne and Scientific Deputy Director at the Institute for Humanities and Social

Sciences (INSHS) at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that “Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth,

but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being”. Although often divided along institutional

disciplinary lines, literature and philosophy have long shared an interest in questions of truth

and knowledge raised by such statements. How do intellectual, phenomenological,

theological, and affective forms of knowledge figure in literary and philosophical texts? How

can works of literature perform and/or clarify philosophical concerns, especially questions of

epistemology? How can philosophical texts and methodologies illuminate and/or reframe

works of literature? How are forms of knowledge racialized, gendered, queered, or otherwise

embodied and encoded?

Hosted by the University of Edinburgh’s research group Overlap, in partnership with the

French Institute, the Department of English Literature, and the Department of European

Languages and Cultures, this interdisciplinary conference invites delegates to explore

questions such as these, bringing together viewpoints from the intersecting fields of

philosophy and literature to interrogate various forms of knowledge creation.

Possible lines of inquiry include (but are not restricted to):

- how the work of certain philosophers have assumed “literary” forms in order to

express philosophical ideas.

- how literature represents the relation of affect to ethics and politics, as discussed,

for example, by Martha Nussbaum.

- how epistemologies are theorized within feminist, queer, and/or postcolonial

paradigms, as, for example, in the work of Sarah Ahmed.

- Stanley Cavell’s work on literature and cinema, and his role in bridging the divide

between analytic and continental philosophy.

- writers of philosophical fiction, drama, or poetry, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Iris

Murdoch, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

- environmental philosophy, for example how Western culture’s human/nature dualism

is figured in literature.

- proposals for other papers dealing with the relation of philosophy or literature to

aesthetics, affect, beauty, drama, epistemology, ethics, existentialism, feminism,

fiction, gender, history of knowledge, memory, ontology, performativity,

phenomenology, poetry, postcolonialism, power, politics, religion, rhetoric,

semiotics, sexuality, trauma, and truth will be welcomed.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words for a 15-20 minute paper, plus a 100-word biography

should be submitted to overlapedinburgh@gmail.com by Sunday 17 September 2017 .

Further details can be found on the Overlap website: http://www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk/overlap