Kant and the Founding of Phenomenology

From the beginning, phenomenology has sought to formulate its methodology and its findings in ways that at once draw upon and challenge influential currents and figures in the history of philosophy.  While this ongoing engagement with the history of philosophy has been a constant source of vitality for phenomenology, it has also led to the productive re-investigation of the history of philosophy itself, allowing familiar concepts, individual texts, thinkers, and even  movements as a whole to be seen in new ways.  The Seminar in Phenomenology and the History of Philosophy (SIPHOP) aims to provide a venue for rigorous and scholarly work that is focused on phenomenology’s engagement with the history of philosophy, with the goals of, on the one hand, fostering discussion of continuing philosophical issues from a phenomenological perspective by tracing out the historical threads woven into the phenomenological tradition, and, on the other, putting the phenomenological interpretations of works in the history of philosophy into dialogue with the broader tradition of interpretation of historical texts.  SIPHOP meetings will follow the format of the successful Seminars in Early Modern Philosophy held annually in different regions of the country, in which 8-10 junior and senior scholars present works in progress in longer sessions than are typical at larger philosophical meetings.

For the inaugural meeting of SIPHOP, we invite papers that explore the attempts by Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others involved in the development of phenomenology (up to roughly 1945) to engage with Kant and neo-Kantian thought.  Papers that are more topical but that draw directly on this period of phenomenology and its engagement with Kant/Kantianism will also be considered. See the associated CFA for more information.