Conference (London) Defensible in Theory and Workable in Practice

Is there are conception of autonomy that is:

Defensible in Theory and Workable in Practice

15-16 March 2013

Institute of Philosophy, London

Are any conceptions of autonomy defensible in theory and workable in practice? At the Essex Autonomy Project, this has been a key question animating our work. In this international conference — the culmination of our major programme of events — we intend to address it head on with contributions from philosophers, lawyers, psychiatrists and other practitioners. Among the issues to be discussed will be philosophical disputes about theories of autonomy, developments in mental health and capacity law, and autonomy in the context of eating disorders. A debate between Gordon Ashton (District Judge and Court of Protection) and Genevra Richardson (Professor of Law, Kings College London) will also be held, exploring the contested implications of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for reform of regimes of legal capacity.

Speakers: John Adlam, Michael Bach, Paul Benson, Derek Bolton, Fabian Freyenhagen, Wayne Martin

Participation is free, but seating is limited: advanced registration is required. To register please visit the website: http://autonomy.essex.ac.uk

The Essex Autonomy Project

UCLan conference on René Girard: politics, violence and the sacred

POLITICS, VIOLENCE AND THE SACRED:

Exploring René Girard’s thought in Security and International Studies

University of Central Lancashire, UK

23-24 May 2013

“Order in human culture certainly does arise from an extreme of disorder, for such disorder is the disappearance of any and all contested objects in the midst of conflict, and it is at such a point that acquisitive mimesis is transformed into conflictual mimesis and tends toward the unification of conflict against an adversary.”

René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World

RATIONALE

René Girard (1923) is arguably one of the most important scholars of our time. His corpus of reflections on religion, violence and mimetic theory has been acknowledged as one of the most striking approaches to human culture ever presented, to the point that it has been argued that his work has changed forever “the way we think about who and where we are” (Philosophy and Literature). In recent years, his thought has been studied and explored in many academic fields, including anthropology and literature, philosophy and sociology, history and psychology. These studies have generated a number of Girard-inspired research engagements and projects as witnessed by the creation ofThe Colloquium on Violence & Religion (COV&R) and Imitatio. Despite the strong assonance between Girardian themes and contemporary international issues and security challenges, scholars have not yet explored the implications of Girardian ideas for Security and more broadly International Relations.

The aim of the Conference is bring together a range of scholars in international relations, security, social and political theory which may develop a multidisciplinary engagement with René Girard’s work and its relevance for contemporary International Studies. A Special Issueof a journal and/or an edited volume is also envisaged as an outcome of the event.

Keynote Speakers includes:

Dr Michael Kirwan, Head of Theology, Heythrop College, University of London and author of Girard and Theology (New York & London: Continuum, 2009); Discovering Girard (London: Darton, 2004)

Dr Scott Thomas, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of Bath, and author of The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

We invite potential participants from across these disciplines to submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by February 15^th 2013drawing upon, but not limited to, such issues as:

THEORY

The relation between violence, the sacred and the “political”

Comparisons between Girard’s thought and that of other classical thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Carl von Clausewitz, Reinhold Niebuhr, Carl Schmitt, Max Weber, Hans Morgenthau, George Bataille, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben

Religion, sovereignty and the sacrality of borders

The international system and the “mimetic” balance of power 

The transcendence/immanence split and political mediation

Christendom, political theologies and the origins of modernity

War, peace and the victimization process

Biopolitics and the sacrality of violence

ISSUES AND CASE STUDIES

“Mimetic rivalry” and foreign policy

Fundamentalisms, extremisms and the scapegoat theory

Terrorism, human security and “sacrifice”

Capitalism, desire and the victimization of the “other”

Revolutions, “mimetic desire” and the scapegoat

Nuclear deterrence, imitation mechanism and (in)stability

Financial crises and the vicious circle of rivalry

Please send abstracts with “2013 Girard Conference” in subject line to:

Dr Antonio Cerella: acerella@uclan.ac.uk

Conference blog: http://renegirard2013.wordpress.com/

Please address any inquiries to:

Dr Antonio Cerella

Lecturer in International Relations

School of Education and Social Sciences

University of Central Lancashire

Preston PR1 2EH

Lancashire, UK

Office: +44 (0) 1772 892798

The Social Aetiology of Mental Illness (SAMI) Training Program 2013–2014 Postdoctoral Fellowship

The Social Aetiology of Mental Illness (SAMI) Training Program 2013–2014 Postdoctoral Fellowship.  

Application Deadline: March 01, 2013 (5:00pm EST)

The Social Aetiology of Mental Illness (SAMI)Training Program is now accepting applications for the 2013-14 Postdoctoral Fellowship program.

The SAMI training program is a CIHR Strategic Training Initiative in Health Research Training Program based at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the University of Toronto, and includes international partners from across the globe. Fellowships are for 1 year, fully funded, research-based, and will help top-class research students further develop their skills in investigating the social aetiology of mental illness.

Deadline: March 1, 2013 (5:00pm EST). Please visit the SAMI Training Program website for more information on how to apply.

CONFERENCE WITHDRAWN: Philosophy and Psychiatry: The Next Hundred Years

Oxford conference 20th July 2013

"A preliminary announcement and call for papers was published recently in connection with this conference. 

Two of our invited speakers have pointed out that the programme as announced was not representative of the full range of diverse contributors to modern interdisciplinary work in philosophy and psychiatry: it failed in particular to reflect the key roles not only of ethnic minority groups and women but also, and crucially, of people who use services (including carers) as well as people who provide them.

Although only a preliminary programme which had not as yet been through INPP or local review and vetting procedures we regret the error and are withdrawing the event.

2013 is an important year for philosophy and psychiatry as the centenary of Karl Jaspers’ General Psychopathology and a number of celebratory events are being organised. The Oxford Sumer School in ‘Mind, Value and Mental Health’ (www.conted.ox.ac.uk/ox_ppss) and the publication of the 50th volume in the IPPP series, Giovanni Stanghellini and Thomas Fuchs’ ‘One Century of Jaspers’ General Psychopathology’ (www.oup.co.uk/series/ippp) have already been announced. Additional events offering in particular opportunities for submitted papers/posters and will be announced in the near future."

Bill Fulford on behalf of INPP

One-Day Conference & Lecture (London) “Christopher Boorse and Commentators: applying the Biostatistical Theory of Health to Mental Disorder”

“Christopher Boorse and Commentators: applying the Biostatistical Theory of Health to Mental Disorder”

Friday, 7^th December, Room 405, Philosophy Department, King’s College London

Christopher Boorse is well-known for his development of the Biostatistical Theory, a naturalistic account of disorder as dysfunction. His account continues to be widely discussed, but – although it is meant to apply to both somatic and mental disorder – it has received comparatively little attention in literature on mental disorder.

This one-day conference and lecture offer the unique opportunity to see Chris person; he has not been in Europe for over thirty years. It will also give a chance to discuss whether and how his account can be extended to apply to psychiatry. The conference and lecture should be of interest to philosophers of medicine, psychiatry, science and mind, as well as to psychiatrists, medical professionals and other health-care practitioners with an interest in philosophy.

Conference Program:

10:45 – 11:15 

Registration; Coffee and Tea

11:15 – 12:15 

Thomas Schramme, Professor of Practical Philosophy, University of Hamburg.

“Mental Disorder as Mental Dysfunction”

12:15 – 1:30 

Lunch

1:30 - 2:30 

Elselijn Kingma, Wellcome Research Fellow, King’s College Centre for Humanities and Health/Department of Philosophy.

“Three Reasons why our Concepts of Mental Disorder and Physical Disorder Differ”

2:30 – 3:30 

Rachel Cooper, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Lancaster University

“Precisifying Concepts: the Case of Mental Disorder”

3:30 – 4:00 Afternoon Tea

Lecture

4:00 – 5:30 

Christopher Boorse, Professor in Philosophy, University of Delaware

“Is Grief a Pathological Condition?”

This conference and lecture are organised jointly by the Department of Philosophy/Centre for Humanities and Health, King’s College London. Attendance is free, but please do confirm your attendance by sending an email to Julia Howse [Julia.howse@kcl.ac.uk] so we can judge numbers for catering.

Narrative structure and underlying reality?

I’ve mentioned here before that Laura Buckley is researching older people’s conceptions of wellbeing. She is exploring this through photographs taken by participants and using narrative analysis to explore their discussions of the significance of the pictures. In a supervision with Joy Duxbury and Bernie Carter this week, I was struck by the hint of a worry which is related to a previous worry.

The previous worry was this. Those who use narrative analysis in qualitative social science (let’s call them ‘narrative theorists’ and the approach ‘narrative theory’ for speed) seem to be tempted by two claims either one of which may be true but probably not both. They often stress the ubiquity of narratives (“Even a conversation at a bus-stop is a narrative”). But they also chart the internal structure of narratives (“All narratives have a moral” “There is always a Trickster”). It seems – albeit contingently – highly unlikely both are true. The more the interesting claims about the internal structure of narratives (eg the division into say seven elements of any narrative), the less likely that narratives are ubiquitous or of universal application to apparently non-narrative social situations (eg all conversations at bus-stops). One would expect, rather, it to be true of particular literary genres. The more the appeal to universal application, the less likely that all utterances in social situations form a narrative with a particular internal structure. My entirely informal survey of discussions with narrative theorists (not at UCLan, I hasten to add) is a fondness, nevertheless, for both claims.

The new worry – which is less straight forward and may be unfounded – goes something like this. If narrative theory really charts interesting and contingent aspects of the structure of the utterances of social science subjects then it contrasts with, say, a grammar theorist’s view. A theory of the grammar of a language – a grammar – is a sizeable achievement. But it does not provide an insight into the content of utterances: just the linguistic vehicles for expressing them. By contrast, the narrative theorist says things like ‘every narrative has seven elements:...’, which could obviously be false. If what makes the grammarian’s claims true is the structure of English, say, or the structure of English as spoken in C21 Preston, or the innate structure of human depth grammar, what would make the narrative theorists claims true?

Here is a thought. What they chart, intellectually riskily like any brave social scientist, are the contingent social practices of, say, C21 conversational participants. We can imagine the participants in contemporary Preston initially explicitly following some rules of good style in the way that one might follow the rules of haiku or lipogram construction and then this becoming second nature. The narrative theorists chart these conventions. But now suppose that we are interested in the views of wellbeing expressed by these subjects in conversations and that we ask them. If we attend to the form of the narrative (every narrative has a moral; every narrative has seven elements:..) that they offer in reply we run two related risks.

First, we will be examining not the structure of the subjects’ conception of wellbeing but rather the structure of their conversational engagement and that is looking in the wrong place. Second, if we do not realise this and set out the structure of what results (the moral; the seven elements etc) we run the risk of thinking that their conceptions of wellbeing are in some way narratively structured when in fact it is merely a contingent way of giving them expression. (Imagine that we investigate two groups who reply on two different kinds of narrative to set out their conceptions of wellbeing. Have they distinct conceptions of wellbeing or the same conception undergoing different conventional forms of expression?) The way to avoid this is to model narrative structure on grammatical structure. But if so, the substantive claims about narrative structures will be undermined.

(This worry parallels a worry about the relationship of the conceptually structured realm of appearance and the underlying noumenal realm on a two world reading of Kant. Once the noumenal realm is part of a composite picture, the process of conceptualising it in one way (rather than another) looks to be distorting of what is really real. One needs to think that the structure is not a substantive mediation but merely a way of letting the reality shine through.)

Free public lecture by Thomas Pogge on Global Justice

18:00‐19:30, 22 Nov 2012 Greenbank Lecture Theatre

“Millions of poverty-related deaths can be avoided through global institutional reform… Ordinary citizens can play a crucial role.” Thomas Pogge

This lecture and a subsequent panel discussion with Doris Schroeder, Samuel Ujewe and Tim Thornton will introduce Pogge’s world‐leading research on moral obligations in the 21st century.

The public lecture will be preceded by coffee and tea from 17:30 to 18:00

For more info contact Ian Norris RSEnquiries@uclan.ac.uk 01772 895871