delimiting limits

DELIMITING LIMITS, 8th Annual University of South Florida Graduate Student Conference,March 13-14, 2015
Visiting Keynote: Mark Wrathall
Faculty Keynote: Lee Braver

This conference explores various ways of delimiting limits, in relation to being and thinking, to activities which bear on and engender experience, knowledge, and expression.

We invite interpretations of and contributions to this topic from a variety of perspectives. Avenues of thought which may be addressed include, but are not limited to, the following:

- a Kantian metaphysical legacy and the noumenal limit;
- post-Kantian anti-metaphysical legacies and the existential limit to transcendental philosophy;
- a theological limit to philosophical questioning, reason, and knowledge;
- the 'unthought' and the limits of what is thinkable (and how this relates to thinking itself);
- limits of 'the public': the individual, self, and the private speaker and addressee;
- limits of kinship and tradition: deterritorialization, defamiliarity, and de-family (beyond the oedipus complex);
- polyamory, polymorphous perversity, and the limit(lessness) of desire;
- bodily limits: dis/ability and crip theories;
- post-nationality, anarchy and the limits of citizenship, rights, sovereignty;
- the margins of philosophy (the canon and its self-perpetuating limits): critical race theory, liberation theology, MEChA, feminisms;
- the strange, uncanny, monstrous;
- the sublime in art praxis and the limit of sense and representation;
- queerness and the limits of binary;
- 'the border' qua inter/national, identity, or micro-politics;
- liminal cases in ethics, the development of ethics at the limits of morality;
- temporal limits: death, ecstasy, the conditional tense (futurity);
- law and legal limits of acceptable and appropriate behavior, the limits of the norm especially in relation to social justice;
- psychopathology and the limits of dis-ease: what pathologizing reveals about the human condition;
- intuition, discovery and the limits of scientific methodology;
- animality and the limits of humanness;
- ambiguity and the limits of self-ownership, ipseity, property;
- modal possibilities at the limits of propositional logic;
- analytic-continental divide and the limit of discipline

We welcome submissions of no longer than 3,000 words from graduate students as well as advanced undergraduates. We especially encourage contributions from underrepresented perspectives in philosophy for a special session sponsored by Minorities and Philosophy (MAP). Please prepare submissions for blind review, and include name, title, and institutional affiliation on a cover page. Submissions and inquiries should be sent to:[email protected].

Deadline for papers to be considered for the conference: January 4, 2015.