Time and Language: An Encounter Between Philosophy and Philology

Outside of analytic philosophy, there is a strain of contemporary research in fields such as Comparative Literature, German, French, and Religious Studies that approaches the study of language through the lens of philology. Much of the recent popularity of philology is due to the late Werner Hamacher, whose works, including “95 Theses on Philology” and “For—Philology” are inexhaustible wells of philological insight. Presently, philosophers remain largely ignorant of such philological research, just as philological researchers may be unaware of the contemporary philosophical interest in philologically relevant topics like metasemantics, the evolutionary origins of language, semantic drift, and conceptual engineering/amelioration. This event is a first-of-its-kind opportunity for philosophers and philological researchers to come together and share their research on topics like these and much, much more.