2027 Boston College Grad Conference: "Philosophy of Reading; Reading Philosophy"

Philosophy of Reading; Reading Philosophy

This in-person conference will take place at Boston College’s Chestnut Hill campus March 18 - 20, 2027.  All Applicants must be enrolled as graduate students at the time of the conference. Please see below for a description of the theme:

As early as the Phaedrus, philosophy’s self-examination demanded critical attention to practices of reading and writing. This concern has remained throughout the discipline’s history, as philosophers engage in commentaries upon each other’s work and practices. Questions of readership and literary style have been approached from all angles: by black radicals, critical theorists, existentialists, feminists, phenomenologists, theologians, hermeneuticists, and others. Methods of reading remain debated across analytic and continental circles, as scholars argue the necessity of original language reading (as opposed to translation), principles of charity, close versus surface reading, and esoteric versus exoteric interpretation. And in almost all schools of thought, philosophers are reckoning with the question of whom to read, as long-overdue canon expansion finally takes place.

This conference seeks to explore how we read philosophy deliberately, and what a philosophy of reading entails. This is one concern which unites philosophers across schools and traditions, but often goes unaddressed and undertreated in the discourse of the profession. By bringing philosophers from multiple traditions together to discuss reading and its philosophical implications, consequences, and limitations, we seek to not only address “reading” as such but reading as formative of philosophy and its boundaries. We are open to papers on (but not limited to) the following topics:

● Hermeneutics (philosophical, scriptural, critical, historical)

● Phenomenologies of reading 

● Citational practices, canon formalization, and the construction of “history of philosophy”

● Histories of reading philosophy: commentary traditions, cross-cultural comparisons, and

reception studies

● The boundaries between philosophy, criticism, literature, and theology

Keynotes will include John Lysaker (Emory University) and Kevin Newmark (Boston College). More information will be forthcoming!