IV Unifesp International Philosophy Graduate Conference

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AFFLUENT DIALOGUES: PHILOSOPHY THAT THINKS ITS TIME

“We are the river you invoked, Heraclitus. We are the time.”
(Jorge Luis Borges)

In the 5th century BC, Heraclitus intuited the endless transitoriness of matter from the river giving us a philosophical motto that is taken up now in multiple forms. Today, in the 21st century, several traditional peoples and communities in Brazil struggle and resist for the preservation and integrity of their respective territories, now weakened by a nefarious bill that establishes a time frame – quite questionable and arbitrary – to legitimize and delegitimize the effective possession of lands, increasingly threatening the material existence of these peoples and communities and their respective cultures and cosmogonies. And it is precisely the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, honorary doctorate from the Federal University of São Paulo, who denounces the death of the river waters – especially the rivers – caused by the dispersion of mercury and other toxic substances, as a result of illegal mining on Yanomami land.

By choosing the river as the propulsive image to build new dialogues, we invite the national and international philosophical community to reflect on the uses and problems, both literal and metaphorical, in what goes beyond the natural flow of the waters. It is about thinking both about the becoming that drags philosophy itself to regions beyond the contour of European thought, adding it with new voices and inalienable contemporary challenges, and about the transformation of subjects when conceiving life itself as a political, aesthetic, ethical, and existential act.

In Yoruba philosophy, it is the possibility of converging thoughts to a cosmophilic vision, whose elements of nature are properly subject. In classical Chinese philosophy, it is the co-action between subjects and the world that tend and interact. It is also the ancestral future, the conjugation of the we-river, as Ailton Krenak calls for. Thus, the waterways may point us to a form of submerging, immersing, and emerging toward the world in search of a circular belonging.

In this sense, the various philosophical contributions in intersection with literature, anthropology, geography, urban architecture, art history, etc. are welcome. We will accept papers for student communication in Portuguese, English and Spanish. The submission of abstracts will take place from July 24th to August 10th. On August 31st, we will release the list of approved abstracts; then, on September, the final program of the event along with the abstract booklet.

The IV Unifesp International Philosophy Graduate Conference is entitled AFFLUENT DIALOGUES: PHILOSOPHY THAT THINKS ITS TIME and will take place from November 6th to 9th, 2023, with online and in-person activities, at the Guarulhos campus of Unifesp. Both will be awarded with participation certificates, which will be valid for complementary hours. In this edition PhD's students Jonas Mur and Leandro Moura and master's students Amanda Romão, Gabriel Hamamoto, Kauana Niz, Monize Minarello, Paola Rezende and Vitor Paixão are responsible for the organization.

We are counting on your participation!

For any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us: [email protected].