CFP: The Redemption of Feeling: The Religious Existentialists

The Redemption of Feeling: The Religious Existentialists

Traditional philosophizing has generally depended upon logic or reason as its primary or sole access to truth. Subjective experiences such as feelings or emotions have typically been viewed as secondary, at best, accompanying reason, or, at worse, clouding or misleading reason. This conference attempts to revisit how the movement of existentialism—and more specifically, the religious existentialists—have contributed to a rethinking of the role of subjective experience for the philosophical enterprise in contrast to the rationalist and idealist traditions. This rethinking of our subjective experience is what we are characterizing as the redemption of feeling. As such, this includes anything and everything that can be thought of as outside of a rationalistic approach such as feelings, emotions, moods, intuitions, etc.

The redemption of feeling, then, can be thought of as a rethinking of subjective experience as a whole, and its role in our philosophical enterprise, which may include a re-evaluation of the non-rational approaches to reality introduced above (emotions, moods, intuition, etc.) Expanding our understanding of philosophical thought to include these subjective experiences opens the door for the possibility of a mode of philosophizing that does not reject human experience as philosophically significant, thus reframing the significance of feelings in general for philosophical inquiry. We are interested in papers that creatively explore the importance of feeling within philosophy, but in particular, how the religious existentialists have contributed to such a re-valuation of feeling.

Preference will be given to papers generally related to the following topics:

·       Kierkegaard’s, Marcel’s, Levinas’ (or any other religious existentialist) contribution to our understanding of feeling

·      What role can feeling/emotions have in relation to our faith or relation to God? (note: by feelings we do not mean just the emotions)

·      What cognitive importance do feelings have for any particular existentialist?

·      What role do feelings have in moral/ethical questions or behaviors?

·      What might be the role of feelings/emotions, if any, with respect to our knowledge of God?

·      A discussion on the range of human experience, or feelings

·      How do any two religious existentialist relate to one another on this issue?

·      A discussion on lesser known religious existentialists, such as Ebner, Berdyaev, etc.

We are especially interested in papers on the following thinkers:

Soren Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Ferdinand Ebner, Nikolai Berdyaev, Miguel de Unamuno, Lev Shestov, Luce Irigaray, and Simone Weil

Submission Guidelines:

Ppaper abstracts and panel proposals of up to 300 words should be submitted by October 5th, 2015 to the planning committee at [email protected].  Paper length should not exceed 10 pages, double-spaced, or 3000 words.

Notice of acceptance will be sent by Oct. 10th, 2015.

Conference website: http://www.redemptionoffeeling.wordpress.com