Keynote addresses:
\nWe open our discussion with a provocation: To what extent\, if at all\, are we even permitted to call \;German Idealism an idealism? In contemporary parlance\, &ldquo\;idealism&rdquo\; is often associated with the \;insurmountable necessity of investigating the very possibility of thinking's access conditions to \;being\, a task that not only leads to their irremovable correlation but also in the process renders \;meaning dependent upon language or a subject's constituting or inferential powers\, in stark contrast \;to traditional metaphysics. However\, throughout what has come to be known\, perhaps somewhat \;unfortunately\, as German Idealism we encounter a series of meditations on the relationship between \;being and thinking that does not merely problematize such a one-sided conception&mdash\;but\, more \;profoundly\, requires us to reconsider whether we are justified in any useful manner to denote this \;tradition as idealistic rather than realistic.
Responding to Kant's Copernican revolution\, both Schelling and Hegel\, in theirown way\, attempt to \;overcome the transcendental turn from within. Never rejecting the primacy and role of thinking\, they \;nevertheless refuse to claim that we only have knowledge of phenomenal appearances or that being \;is dependent upon a subject. Not only must thinking be able to grasp the real in itself\, but thinking \;must simultaneously be able to give an account of its own pre-history out of nature\, thereby \;reconciling itself to the latter\, and even mythology. But neither are they solitary thinkers that emerge \;ex nihilo in the philosophical throes of the Kantian legacy: their own projects are anticipated\, \;foreshadowed\, and even in hindsight challenged by Hö\;lderlin\, Novalis\, and Schlegel\, whose \;theoretical contributions sadly have a tendency to be neglected. Our wager is that these thinkers' \;meditations upon the relationship between being and thinking\, and their place in an overarching \;metaphysical system that articulates itself through both moments\, represent some of the most \;original\, and daring\, attempts to come to terms with the nature of human knowledge\, our place in \;the world\, and the status of the absolute\, in Western thinking\, with wide-reaching implications that \;have yet to be truly exhausted.
Contact: Joseph Carew \;(jstephencarew[at]gmail.com) and Wesley Furlotte (wesleejoseph[at]gmail.com).