Southampton Kierkegaard Conference!

I’ve been invited to give a paper at an exciting Kierkegaard conference at the University of Southampton in the UK. The conference will take place from 5-6 of September 2024. It will be the “Launch Conference of the ERC Advanced Grant Project “The Ethics of Doubt — Kierkegaard, Scepticism and Conspiracy Theory.”

The conference blurb, sent to me by the organizer, Genia Schönbaumsfeld, reads

While ancient sceptics regarded scepticism about knowledge as a way of life, philosophers from Descartes to the present day have viewed it primarily as an intellectual problem that requires only a theoretical solution. The aim of this conference is to challenge this contention by focusing on the “existential” dimension of doubt — i.e., the way in which skeptical problems affect the whole person. For example, Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, has proposed that doubt and anxiety are intrinsically linked, and, hence, that doubt may not just be an epistemic vice (if it is one), but also a character failing that consists in a refusal to confront (and to try to overcome) certain forms of angst, such as, for instance, a refusal to face up to the radical contingency and fragility of the (human) world and to take refuge in a “scapegoating” scenario, where super-powerful, hidden agents are to blame: Descartes’ Evil Demon, on the one hand, or say, a “Deep State” controlling our actions on the other. The conference aims to explore these issues from a number of different philosophical perspectives (both Kierkegaardian and non-Kierkegaardian) and to bring together Kierkegaard scholars and epistemologists, working in both theoretical and applied areas of the subject.

This conference looks really exciting! Academic conferences are rarely so relevant to contemporary concerns as this one clearly is. This conference promises to demonstrate the importance of the study of the humanities, and in particular, of philosophy, to the project of navigating our way through the increasingly confusing morass of what is often referred to as the “information society.”

Confirmed speakers include:

Yuval Avnur, Scripps College; Lucy Campbell, University of Warwick; Annalisa Coliva, University of California, Irvine; James Conant, The University of Chicago; Rick Anthony Furtak, Colorado College; Stephen Mulhall, University of Oxford; Marilyn Piety, Drexel University; Duncan Pritchard, University of California, Irvine; Mark Tietjen, The Stony Brook School.

I plan to post updates on the conference with more detail. In the meantime, however, you can always check out the “Events” page of the Ethics of Doubt project!