DePaul Grad Student Conference CFP: “The Question of Critique”

Conference Date: February 14 - 15, 2013

Deadline for Submissions: December 15th, 2012

Send Submissions to: DePaul.Philosophy@gmail.com. 

Perhaps nothing has so persistently impacted the course and character of post-Kantian Western philosophy as the idea and practice of critique: ever since its explicit appearance on the philosophical scene, it has irrevocably shaped the horizon of modern thought. Marking its encounter with the absence of any external recourse by which to ground the legitimacy of its content and methods, modern thinking has never stopped being critical. And whether it has seemed to have been overtly epistemologically or politically directed—exploring the legitimation and limits of knowledge claims, or interrogating oppressive social structures and imagining their possible alternatives—thought has since this time assumed an attention to all, as well as to its own, conditions of and claims for legitimacy. Hence, to note the ubiquity of critique in modern thought is to also note the ubiquity of the co-implication of epistemology and politics.

This becomes important given that, with the incredible surge in popular dissent following the financial crisis of 2008, the need for rigorous critique, and especially the critique of political economy and state power, seems to have presented itself with renewed force. At the same time, the waves of austerity following the 2008 crisis have threatened philosophy departments across the world, forcing academic philosophers and university administrations to reexamine their own importance, relevance, and endurance—a kind of institutional self-criticism, as it were.

This conference therefore proposes to facilitate renewed conversation on the topic of critique, and allow a space in which contemporary practices of critique might be brought side by side with contemporary revaluations of the nature, scope, and limits of critique—this conversation as a whole thus engaging that way in which the need for political critique is never without renewed calls for the self-interrogation of the purview of philosophy.

We are accepting submissions from current graduate students on topics including, but not limited to the following:


the problem of defining critique as an idea, as a method, and as an ethos;
the senses and uses of critique in Kantian philosophy and its ethical and political as well as ontological and epistemological implications;
the responses and challenges to critical philosophy in post-Kantian philosophy;
the question and problem of a 'meta-critique' of critique;
critique of traditional metaphysics from Kant forward;
questions of Enlightenment, modernity, and revolution;
the historical emergence and conceptual articulations of the problem of a ‘critique of the present’; critique and genealogy;
history of critique as an attitude, extending to pre-Kantian texts and figures;
the legacies of critique in 'critical theory' and other forms of theory (including feminism, queer theory, postcolonial theory and race theory);
critiques of identity, especially the intersection of identities;
new forms of critique in contemporary aesthetic and cultural criticism;
critique and crisis;
political critique and the critique of political economy;
critique of ideology;
critique of everyday life.

We are also soliciting papers discussing critique in the work of specific thinkers from the history of philosophy or from non-Western traditions of philosophy.