CFP: Theory and Practice

Submission deadline: March 14, 2015

Conference date(s):
May 8, 2015 - May 9, 2015

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Conference Venue:

Society of Fellows, University of Chicago
Chicago, United States

Topic areas

Details

The University of Chicago Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts will host a two-day conference addressing the theme of Theory and Practice. The conference seeks to explore the tenuous relationship between theory and practice in the human and social sciences, and the practical dimensions of theoretical interventions in struggles for political emancipation, institutional structures, and artistic, historical, and scientific movements.

Our keynote speaker will be Danielle S. Allen (UPS Foundation Professor, School of Social Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study), whose talk will be entitled “Politics and Prophetic Speech.”

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The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Marx’s celebrated admonishment articulates the tension between theoria and praxis central to the Western tradition. Plato and Aristotle grappled with the question of the best way of life for a human being—the theoretical contemplation of the philosopher, or the practical political engagement of the statesman. In the modern period, Kant and Hume focused on the fallibility of human judgment in attempting to act on the basis of moral principles or theoretical precepts. If the tension between theory and practice is a ‘problem’, then, it is a productive one, for precisely this tension itself continues to generate innovative forms of both thinking and acting.

Much humanistic inquiry directs its theoretical gaze toward the practical work of artists of various stripes, but this gaze is hardly detached. The praxis of creative artists often takes its orientation from the theoretical categories of scholars and, from Dante and Goethe to contemporary conceptual art, many artists see their work as contributing productively to theoretical inquiry. There is increasing pressure on universities to produce research with demonstrable practical import, and the very question of how the theoretical work of scholars relates to the ‘outside world’ is central to current debates about the very meaning or worthwhileness of a university in contemporary society.Presentations will investigate how the relationship between theory and practice is lived, conceptualized, and contested across socio-political, historical, philosophical, aesthetic, ethnographic, literary, and theological experience.

The conference will take place on May 8th-9th, 2015. Please send 300-400 word proposals for 20-minute papers or 200 word proposals for panels (which may or may not include suggestions for specific papers) to the conference organizers, David Egan and Jared Holley, at [email protected] by March 14th. Submissions should also include a separate document with the author’s name, contact details, and institutional affiliation. Participants will be notified by March 31.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

•       The character of theory and/or practice (and places where they intersect)

•       The role of the university in contemporary society

•       Intersections of “practical” and “theoretical” philosophy (applied ethics, rationality theory, etc.)

•       Problems of moral and political judgment (realism v. moralism; ‘dirty hands’, etc.)

•       Avant-gardes: theoretical practices/practical theories

•       Ideal and non-ideal approaches to political problems

•       The political role and responsibilities of the scholar

•       Posthumanist reconfigurations of theoretical practices

•       The reciprocal influence of theory and empirical research in the social sciences

•       Methodology and the practice of scholarship

•       Theoretical interventions in the pysences (psychoanalysis; psychology; neuroscience)

•       Philosophy as a ‘way of life’ (Hellenistic ethics; engaged Buddhism, etc.)

•       The uses and abuses of history as a guide to judgment

•       Performance studies and/or the performative

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