2021 Boston College Philosophy Graduate Student Conference

The Boston College Philosophy Department will be hosting its annual graduate student conference on March 26th-27th, 2021. The conference will be virtual. The theme is “intersubjectivity”, broadly construed. The coronavirus pandemic has given us an interesting moment to examine our relations to others. With mask mandates, social distancing requirements, and reduced physical face to face interactions, one can ask many philosophical questions about the nature of our relation with others, the process of understanding others, and even our ethical duties to others. It has become apparent that our relations with others contribute significantly to the meaning of our lives. Even before the pandemic, studies in intersubjectivity flourished because humans play many roles in life, such as being a friend, lover, mother, daughter, son, student, and so on, and many, if not all, of these roles include a relation with another person. Philosophy can not only help us understand these social relations, but can also help us improve our social relations in hopes of living a better life. This conference will explore these social relations and will answer questions such as, but not limited to: How do we understand other subjects? What is empathy? What is the relation between my identity and the identity of the other? What does it mean to be a friend? a lover? What is a community? What is compassion? What is hate for another person? What is my moral duty to other people?  Studies of inter-subjectivity can open up avenues for research in many areas such as, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of religion, political philosophy, metaphysics, and interdisciplinary studies. In addition, studies of inter-subjectivity allow for fruitful dialogue between the history of philosophy, continental philosophy, and analytic philosophy. Therefore, this conference will accept proposals from any philosophical discipline, as long as it relates to the larger theme of the conference. 

Our keynote speakers will be:

Amy Allen (Penn State)

Matthew Ratcliffe (University of York)

Dan Zahavi (Universities of Copenhagen and Oxford)

Contact info: Abbey Murphy at [email protected] or Martín Sotomayor at [email protected]

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