Invitation

Download Call for Papers

The historiography of philosophy is one of the main concerns of the last several decades as philosophers discuss more and more problems regarding the meta-philosophical and methodological discourse. Our workshop aims to investigate some reconfiguration trends of the methodology of Philosophy History from the last decades in a comparative perspective. It will furthermore stress the ability of this field to offer resources for constructing cultural identities.

Important in imposing the preoccupation for the actualized public image of philosophy is the contribution of Richard Rorty; he pointed the attention of philosophical community towards irreversible methodological changes asking philosophers to introduce themselves as authors of methods for logical reconstruction or clarification, or interpreters of scientific outcomes. Such a task for philosophers has been judged as generating pathological symptoms for philosophy as caducity of History of philosophy, respectively the particularization of philosophical discourse until irrelevant, turning philosophy into an entity-multiplication technique.

Anthony Kenny ("Introduction", A New History of Western Philosophy, 2004) recently pointed out that historical philosophy is a source for understanding how people used to think in the past, for interpreting concepts, past philosophies, understanding our own ignorance.

We grant that such debates offer Philosophical Historiography the possibility of comparatist and interdisciplinary approach with important stakes within the History of Ideas and Imagology. Our seminar aims at building conceptual links with researchers involved in these directions: Historians of Philosophy, Classicists, Historians of Ideas, Imagology experts.

We design four directions for our explorations:
- Concepts, methods, practices in Philosophical Historiography - as theoretical background;
- Traditions, inheritance, influence, sources, schools - debates on traditional instruments for Historiography;
- Cultural and social image of philosophy. Representations of philosophers and philosophy - an extension towards comparativism and imagology, based on both diachronic models (such as Models of the History of Philosophy: From the Cartesian Age to Brucker, by Giovanni Santinello) and sinchronicity or even communicational views. An interesting argument in this perspective is the frequent and attractive contemporary discussion of Philosophy as popular discourse, critical to elites and academicity: philosophy as pop art, urban culture (for instance the book of D. E. Wittkower, facebook and Philosophy, part of a well regarded series called Popular culture and philosophy from Open Court Publishing Company din Chicago).
- Philosophy within local and regional context - endeavors objectives connected to exploring new directions, virgin to philosophical historiography in Romania, the relation between methods and concepts of universal Philosophical Historiography and local/regional cultural history. On such ground we anticipate the possibility for introducing Romanian public, both specialized and non-specialized, to philosophical authors that are still unknown such as Gerardus of Cenad, Pelbartus Ladislaus of Temeschwar, Ignatius Batthyani and others.