CFP: Conference: Existence, Cognition, Action: Kant’s Legacy for the 21st Century

Submission deadline extended: New deadline is January 1st, 2023.

With the upcoming tricentennial of Kant’s birth in 2024, the time is right to look at the Kant’s legacy in and relevance for the 21st century philosophy. That Kant’s philosophy has maintained interest of scholars ever since its inception is sufficiently clear. However, the question of just how exactly and to what extent Kant is important in today’s philosophy bears repeated revisit and continuous exploration.

We are pleased to announce an online three-day conference, organized by the Institute of Philosophy (Belgrade University), aimed at pursuing the question of whether and how Kant can help us advance debates in a number of contemporary issues. Whereas numerous criticisms of Kant’s positions in early analytic philosophy (Moore’s, Russell’s and C.I. Lewis’s, to name several notable instances) had suggested, at least initially, his declining influence and perhaps even an outright obsolescence, there is a reason why we continue coming back to Kant. Namely, the rich thematic texture of Kant’s writings and his bold systematic innovations of staggering proportions merit our enduring interactions with all aspects of his thought.

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the ways in which Kant’s philosophy can contribute to contemporary debates in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. While the latter two areas have been continuously explored from Kantian perspective and are still of exceptional importance within discussions of normative ethics, meta-ethics or applied ethics, as well as in political philosophy in the form of debates about Republicanism, international relations and more, the possibilities for reintegrating Kant within contemporary discussions in metaphysics, epistemology or philosophy of science have only recently come into sharper focus.

For instance, in 2021, Synthese dedicated an entire volume (Synthese 198, supplement issue 13, ed. Gabriele Gava) to explore Kant’s relevance for metaphysics (e.g. Watkins’s paper on Kant and metaphysical grounding and Heidemann’s discussion of Kant’s distinction between types of realism), epistemology (e.g. Land’s defence of “faculty analysis”, Schafer’s work on Kantian virtue epistemology, or Rosefeldt’s paper on the importance of Kant’s view of imagination for current debates on modal knowledge) and philosophy of science (Massimi’s discussion on Kant and perspectival knowledge). In addition, there are ongoing discussions on Kant’s contribution to contemporary theories of emotions (Cohen), cognitive sciences (Brook) and contributions that explore how Kant’s views can help bridge gaps between human and natural sciences (de Bianchi and Kraus).

The possibilities for exploring Kant’s potential significance for today’s debates do not end there. On the contrary, the listed examples point to a far wider cluster of topics where Kant’s philosophy merits constructive or critical reconsideration. Some of the topics may be, but are in no way exhausted by the following list:

- The status of space and time

- Contemporary debates on modality

- Relation between the mental and the physical

- Whether metaphysical claims have truth-value

- Epistemic contextualism

- Knowledge-first approach/perception-first approach

- Evidentialism, meta-evidentialism and coherentism

- Recent theories of rationality

- Theories of action

- Rationality of perception

- Probabilistic knowledge

- Status of natural laws

- Scientific realism and anti-realism

- Science/pseudoscience

We invite submissions of 800-1000 words. Files should be sent in .doc, .docx or .pdf formats and prepared for double-blind review. Each talk should be about 25 minutes long, with additional 10 minutes being allotted for discussion.

Submissions and questions can be sent to: [email protected]

Submission Deadline: December 1st, 2022

We are considering a publication of an edited volume of conference papers. More information tba.