Category: Personalism

Robert Cummings Neville is Professor of Philosophy and Systematic Theology at Boston University. He is formerly the Dean of the School of Theology at BU and is author of over 25 books, including his recent three-volume Philosophical Theology (SUNY Press, 2014-15), as well as Religion in Late Modernity (2002), The Truth of Broken Symbols (1995), The Cosmology of Freedom (1974), The Tao and the Daimon (1981), Boston Confucianism (2000), and many others. He is well known as a leader in comparative philosophy and theology and as a critic of personalism and process thought.

13th International Conference on Persons

Ralph Ellis received his PhD in philosophy at Duquesne University and a postdoctoral M.S. in Public Affairs at Georgia State University. He has worked as a social worker as well as teaching philosophy, and is interested in applied phenomenology and integrating the social sciences with philosophy of mind. His books include An Ontology of Consciousness (1986), Theories of Criminal Justice (1989), Coherence and Verification in Ethics (1992), Questioning Consciousness (1995), Eros in a Narcissistic Culture (1996), Just Results: Ethical Foundations for Policy Analysis (1998), The Caldron of Consciousness: Affect, Motivation, and Self‑Organization (2000), Love and the Abyss (2004), Curious Emotions (2005), Foundations of Civic Engagement (2006, co-authored with Jim Sauer and Norm Fischer), How the Mind Uses the Brain (2010, co-authored with Natika Newton), and a critical thinking textbook, The Craft of Thinking. Ellis is also co-editor with Peter Zachar of a book series, Consciousness & Emotion (www.benjamins.nl/jbp).

13th International Conference on Persons

Lodging will be at the Boston Common Hotel at the rate of $169 per night (plus tax), which is very affordable by Boston standards and is within easy reach of Boston University. When making reservations, mention the International Conference on Persons to get the conference rate. Space is limited, so it is best to reserve early, 617-933-7700, or you can reserve your room through the hotel website by clicking the “BOOK NOW” tab on the hotel’s main page. It will ask for the dates. Please fill in August 3 through 7 (even if you plan to stay longer). It will direct you to a list. Choose the room that fits your needs. The next page will be for advance payment – it is non-refundable. In the “Special Requests” box on that page, fill in that you are attending the International Conference on Persons, and if you need days apart from August 3-7, put that information there. You will be contacted for further adjustment of the reservation.

We have also reserved a block of rooms at Boston University. These are suites of four single rooms (each with one single bed) connected by a common area, with limited kitchen facilities, and available for $67 per person per night. This option will make sense for those who are traveling alone and on a limited budget. If two are traveling together they would have to sleep in separate rooms, share a bathroom, and pay $67 each (i.e., $134 together), and this means the hotel will probably be the more attractive option. But for those traveling alone with a limited budget, the BU apartment style dormitory is the best option. For this option, send an e-mail to the conference e-mail address with the word “accommodations” in the subject line and you will be contacted from there.

For overflow, or for those who want something a little bit snazzier, we recommend The Boxer Hotel. It is located on the Green Line of the Boston T and is a straight and easy ride to Boston University. There is no special conference rate, but the rates are very reasonable by Boston standards (starting at about $216 per night), and they are aware that we are referring people as overflow for the conference.

Call for Papers

Last week I spoke at the British Personalist Forum’s excellent conference on British Contributions to Personalist Philosophy: Duns Scotus to the Present Day in Oriel College, Oxford. Several prominent personalists and historians of British philosophy were in attendance, and Raymond Tallis was a special guest speaker (see the programme). I read a revised version of a paper from a conference on British idealism in 2013, ‘In Defence of the Personal Idealist Conception of the Finite Self’, with an added extensive, informal introduction.

I want to congratulate Richard Allen, Alan Ford, Simon Smith and my other friends in the BPA for this major success and step forward in the development of their group and its important scholarly events. This is how they described the aims of their conference:

“Although John Grote (Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge) in 1865 named his own philosophy ‘personalism’, hardly any other British philosophers have been designated, by themselves or others, as ‘personalists’, save perhaps for the ‘Personal Idealists’ of c. 1885-1920.

Nevertheless some have focused upon personal existence and the freedom, responsibility and dignity of the individual person who is also a person in relation to other persons, and other philosophers have at least dealt with one or more aspects of distinctively personal existence,  and have done so in terms, concepts and categories truly appropriate to persons as distinct from ones applicable only to sub-personal or impersonal entities or those of merely formal logic.

The aim of this conference is to bring to wider notice those British philosophers who have made such contributions to personalist philosophy, not only to amend the historical record which has often neglected them, but also to suggest why they are worth reading today.”

Aug. 3rd to Aug. 7th, 2015

Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

Papers in any area or discipline are welcome, so long as their themes are of concern to the ideas and concepts of persons, personhood, and personality as a philosophical, theological, psychological, social, political, historical, creative or linguistic concern.

Papers must not exceed a length of 3000 words and should be prepared for blind review.

In the e-mail sent with the submission, we require the following eight items:

1.  Word count – 3000 words maximum

2.  Author’s name

3.  Academic status (professor, unaffiliated, graduate student)

4.  Institutional affiliation (if any)

5.  Mailing address

6.  E-mail address

7.  The paper’s title

8.  An abstract – 200 words maximum

Submission deadline for abstracts is MAY 25th, 2015. Abstracts will be accepted on that date, with full texts of paper due by July 1.

Submissions which do not include items 2-8 (if only abstract is being submitted) will be disqualified. Word count is due when full paper is submitted. No more than one submission by the same author will be considered.

Email as an attachment a copy of your paper and/or abstract in rich text format to:

PersonsConference2015@gmail.com

Papers and/or abstracts will be reviewed by a committee. Notification of acceptance will be made via email in early June.

Each paper will have a commentator. Those interested in commenting should send a note to PersonsConference2015@gmail.com by May 25^th detailing availability and areas of interest. Persons whose papers are accepted will be expected to serve as commentators, if asked.

Copies of papers will be available by July 1st. E-mails of authors will also be available for purposes of sending your commentary in advance of the conference.

Lodging Details will be announced soon, The Conference will begin with Registration from noon on Mon. August 3rd.  Further details about meals, schedules, and Conference fees will be provided as they become available.

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8th International Conference on Persons. I suggest to Lech Wałęsa that there is reason for Poland be more critical of the EU, and, with its recent experience of totalitarian oppression, to set an example for Western Europe in this regard. Politics were of course inevitable in Wałęsa’s long and important opening address and in the discussion following it, but the role of personalism in recent history was strongly emphasized.

Photo: Marek Gacka

I just came back from the fifth ISKCON Studies Conference, organized at wonderful Radhadesh/Château de Petite Somme in the Ardennes outside Durbuy in Belgium, by Kenneth Valpey and Ferdinando Sardella (who both spoke at the 12th International Conference on Persons in Lund in August) of the ISKCON Studies Institute, a subdivision of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies; the institute publishes the ISKCON Studies Journal. Many old friends attended as well as new faces from different parts of the world. I spoke on ‘Personalism East and West’ (see abstract below).

The Radhadesh website is temporarily offline for technical reasons so I cannot link to it here; awaiting the solution of the technical problems, they refer to this temporary blog. Radhadesh is almost certainly the most important ISKCON temple community in Europe, and the site not only of the temple and of ashramas, but also, and not least, of many important international conferences since the early 1990s. Among them I have attended several ISKCON Communications Seminars and ISKCON Conventions, and one meeting of the Bhaktivedanta Academy of Arts and Sciences, all with many prominent Hinduism and other religion scholars from inside and outside of ISKCON.

Radhadesh has gradually been developed into a first class conference centre with a new hotel – called a guesthouse – next to the château, and an excellent restaurant in an adjacent building. However, I think this was the first time the ISKCON Studies Conference was held here – a couple of years ago I spoke on ‘Conversion, Preaching, and Western Cultural Identity’ at an earlier ISC on the theme of Transmitting the Truth: Education, Preaching, and Conversion in ISKCON, at the equally beautiful Villa Vrindavana outside Florence; as far as I understand, that paper will soon appear in the next issue of the ISKCON Studies Journal. Radhadesh is also the site of Bhaktivedanta College, where ten years ago I taught the introduction to Western philosophy course. Since I was last there, a new building for accommodation of the students, as well as for the college library, had been built. Finally, on the premises is also found the building housing the Bhaktivedanta Library Services.

During this visit to Belgium I also had the opportunity to take photos of some parts of or with certain angles on Poelaert’s Palais de Justice in Brussels which I have not been able to find on the internet, and some of the Parc de Bruxelles by the Palais Royal and the streets next to it. I plan to publish them here. The many beautiful late nineteenth-century buildings on Avenue du Midi south of Place Rouppe, Boulevard Maurice Lemonnier, Boulevard Anspach, and Boulevard Adolphe Max must also be photographed on some other occasion. Especially the first two of these are in a part of Brussels that seems to be quickly slummed now (most of central Brussels is), so that it is not clear to what extent the buildings will be preserved. Buildings of this kind remain continuously threatened all over the world since the process of discovery of the fact that this was a golden age of architecture (as of much else) is still very slow. In some places, they are still almost systematically destroyed, and because of the lack of interest in them, they are not even properly photographed. Hotel Métropole on Place de Brouckère is now Brussels’ only remaining nineteenth-century hotel, and striving to preserve as much as possible of its original design etc. Imaginative historical reconstruction is needed in order to understand how beautiful and well-ordered this area was a hundred years ago. I also had time for a short visit to Leuven.

But I digress. Here is the abstract of my presentation, ‘Personalism East and West’:

This presentation will be an introduction to the comparative study of Eastern and Western personalism, with special reference to the personalism of the theistic form of Vedanta represented by ISKCON. A certain kind of propedeutic to this study is necessary, since without it, the real nature and implications of the differences between the respective forms of personalism are normally overlooked and the similarities to some extent misconstrued and misunderstood. The relevant historical, cultural and intellectual contexts will therefore be outlined, and only with these basic perspectives firmly in place will the presentation move on to a brief overview of the conceptual and terminological histories of “person” and related notions in the West and of comparable ideas in the East. This overview will, for the purposes of the introduction to the subject, be given exclusively in light of and with constant reference to the mentioned fundamental perspectives on the general, constitutive characteristics of and differences between Eastern and Western thought as historically developed. In this way, the presesentation will seek to prepare the ground for a subsequent step in the comparative work, through which, along with more particularized study of individual personalist thinkers, schools, and positions, meaningful East-West relations can be established and possibilities of mutual influence and adjustment and new syntheses fruitfully explored.

Photo by Jean-Pol Grandmont

Photo by Jean Housen

Click for PDF with the abstracts (no abstracts of the papers of the plenary speakers Keith Ward, Juan Manuel Burgos, Fredrik Ullén, and Claes G. Ryn were included):

12th International Conference on Persons

Click for PDF with the conference program:

12th International Conference on Persons

Simon Smith has published a report on the conference on the website of the British Personalist Forum. The BPF is the new name of the Society for Post-Critical and Personalist Studies, started by Richard Allen who organized the excellent 2009 ICP in Nottingham but unfortunately could not come this year; Allen and the BPF publish the journal Appraisal.

12th International Conference on Persons