CFP: DePaul Philosophy Graduate Student Conference 2027

From East to West and Back: Kyoto School in Dialogue with Western Philosophy

The Philosophy Department at DePaul University is pleased to announce the DePaul Philosophy Graduate Student Conference 2027, to be held in person on February 6–7, 2027, at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois.

This year’s conference, “From East to West and Back: Kyoto School in Dialogue with Western Philosophy,” explores the rich and complex philosophical exchanges between the Kyoto School and Western philosophy. We are pleased to welcome Prof. Gregory S. Moss, Associate Professor of Philosophy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, as our keynote speaker.

Prof. Moss is the author of Hegel’s Foundation-Free Metaphysics: The Logic of Singularity (2020), which received the HegelPD Prize in 2022, and Absolute Dialetheism: Hegel, Schelling, and the End of Alterity (2026), recently published by Edinburgh University Press. His keynote address will draw from his new manuscript, Hegel and Nishida.

Call for Papers

The Kyoto School represents one of the most significant encounters between Japanese philosophy and Western philosophical thought. Its philosophers engaged deeply with figures such as Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Husserl, Heidegger, and others, while simultaneously developing philosophical approaches grounded in their own intellectual and cultural contexts. The resulting dialogue was neither simply an adoption of Western philosophy nor a rejection of it, but a complex process of inheritance, transformation, criticism, and philosophical creation.

This conference invites graduate student papers that investigate the ways in which philosophers of the Kyoto School understand, inherit, develop, transform, or criticize the thought of familiar Western philosophers and philosophical traditions. At the same time, we welcome contributions that bring Western philosophical traditions, as well as philosophical traditions from other cultural and intellectual contexts, into dialogue with the Kyoto School, whether by engaging, evaluating, challenging, or developing its philosophical practices.

We particularly welcome papers that explore, but are not limited to:

- Kyoto School engagements with Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Husserl, Heidegger, and other Western philosophers;

- Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji, and other Kyoto School philosophers;

- Comparative approaches to Japanese, Western, Chinese, Indian, Buddhist, Daoist, or other philosophical traditions;

- The concepts of absolute nothingness, basho, pure experience, self-awareness, dialectic, contradiction, mediation, and alterity;

- Kyoto School approaches to metaphysics, epistemology, phenomenology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion;

- The relationship between philosophical traditions and their cultural or historical contexts;

- Questions concerning translation, interpretation, appropriation, and philosophical inheritance;

- Contemporary philosophical engagements with the Kyoto School; and

- New possibilities for philosophical dialogue between East Asian and Western traditions.

We also encourage submissions that move beyond conventional comparative philosophy and consider whether engagement between different philosophical traditions can generate new philosophical problems, methods, or conceptual possibilities.

Submission Guidelines

We invite submissions from current graduate students (MA and PhD) in philosophy and related disciplines.

Submissions should:

(1) Consist of a full paper suitable for a 30-minute presentation, approximately 3,000–4,000 words;

(2) Be prepared for blind review; and

(3) Be accompanied by a separate cover page containing the paper title, author's name, institutional affiliation, graduate student status (MA or PhD), and contact information.

Please email submissions as a PDF or Word document to: [email protected]

The submission deadline is November 20, 2026.

Decisions regarding submissions will be announced approximately two weeks after the submission deadline.