After Kant: Beyond Transcendental Idealism

The aim of the conference is to examine the philosophical systems developed by German philosophers in the 1860-1951 period, and discuss their relevance to contemporary analytical and continental philosophy. The focus is on thinkers such as Max Scheler, Franz Brentano, Adolf Trendelenburg, Martin Heidegger, Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt. Their systems emerged out of dissatisfaction with Kant’s transcendental idealism, and with German idealism, and offered a wealth of original ideas in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and language, moral and political philosophy, anthropology, and philosophy of culture and history.

Speakers:

Daniel Came (Oxford) on Max Scheler
Michael Franz (Tuebingen) on Helmuth Plessner
Sebastian Gardner (UCL) on Kant
Ken Gemes (Birkbeck) on Friedrich Nietzsche
Edward Kanterian (Kent) on Adolf Trendelenburg
Christine Lopes (London) on Franz Brentano
Michael Inwood (Oxford) on Ernst Cassirer
Eric Nelson (Massachusetts) on Wilhelm Dilthey
Vasilis Politis (Dublin) on Paul Natorp
Joseph Schear (Oxford)  on Martin Heidegger
Gudrun von Tevenar (Birkbeck) on Hannah Arendt

While the conference is analytical in motivation and objective, it has also an unique historical focus. We aim to establish with this conference a new forum for philosophical studies to be known as Later German Philosophy (http://latergermanphilosophy.com), and which looks into the contemporary relevance of philosophical works produced during the 1860-1951 period, i.e. a period marked by the deaths of two philosophers whose methods of inquiry and argumentation marked respectively the end and the beginning of significant philosophical traditions: Schopenhauer (1860) and Wittgenstein (1951). The philosophers whose ideas and arguments the conference speakers will consider are all Later German philosophers in this sense.

Research questions

• What alternative philosophical systems were developed in response to Kant and the German idealists?
• How did the rise of the natural and historical sciences affect philosophy?
• How did the analytic-continental divide emerge? Can it be overcome? Does the 1860-1951 period offer us new approaches to this questions?
• In which areas and what respect can contemporary philosophy benefit from the ideas of the 1860-1951 thinkers?

Conference fee is £12 for non-students and £4.50 for students. Buffet lunch, coffee and cookies are included.

This conference is a non-profit event. To register, please email us first to ensure that spaces are still available, and, if so, please send a cheque for £12 or £4.50 to the following address:

Clare Valentine
SECL Finance and HR Coordinator
Cornwallis NW
University of Kent
Canterbury, Kent
CT2 7NF

Please send all queries to [email protected] or [email protected].