We are glad to announce that a call for papers has been opened for the 2016 CRMEP Graduate Conference (Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy), which will be dedicated to the following topic: Kanthropology: Kant’s Anthropology and its Legacy. The event is  organized by the Kingston University on May 19-20, 2016.

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The 2016 CRMEP Graduate Student Conference will focus on Immanuel Kant’s anthropological works and their legacy. The mainstream marginalization of Kant’s anthropological writings, in part due to their racist content, arguably makes philosophy ill-equipped to think some of today’s most pressing concerns, notably with regard to ableism, racism, classism and sexism in philosophical discourse. As Robert Bernasconi has observed, ignoring the Kant of the Anthropology is ‘to diminish philosophy as an activity more generally.’

While it is clear how Kant’s canonical works in philosophy inform his anthropological work, it is not clear how his anthropology informs his philosophy and to what extent his anthropology is integral to the rest of his thought. The 2016 CRMEP Graduate Conference aims at reconsidering these questions and opening a critical discussion on the anthropological legacy of Kant in contemporary thought.

We invite papers from philosophy and other disciplines reacting to the following topics:

• Critical ‘race’ theory and the Critical Philosophy of ‘race’.

• The place of anthropology in Kant’s critical project.

• Anthropology, psychology and Foucault.

• The troubled legacy of Enlightenment philosophy with respect to its racial, colonial and gendered biases.

• Kant and Human Rights Discourse.

• Ontology contra anthropology.

• The empirical subject vs. the transcendental subject.

• Ideology and History in Kant.

• The idea of the ‘canon’ in Modern European Philosophy.

• Anti-humanism and/or Post-humanism.

• Existential anthropology and/or relational humanism.

• The philosophical elucidation of the struggle against everyday; ableism, racism, classism and sexism.

• A discussion of Kant’s allusion to what we would now call a ‘performative subject’ in his statement from the anthropology ‘the more civilized human beings are, the more they are actors’.

Keynote speakers will be:

Lewis Gordon (Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, University of Connecticut)

Stella Standford (Professor of Modern European Philosophy, CRMEP, Kingston University)

If you are interested in giving a presentation, please send 300-word abstracts to crmepagc@gmail.com by 1st February 2016. Selections shall be made anonymously and shall be responded to by the 1st March.

The deadline for submissions is the 1 of February 2016.

Please direct your queries to crmepagc@gmail.com.

For further Information, please see here.