[PHILOS-L] UPDATED CfA Lebensphilosophie and the Sciences || September 11 & 12, 2025 || Ghent, Belgium

[Dries Josten]

Caution: This email originated from outside of the University. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognise the source of this email and know the content is safe. Check sender address, hover over URLs and don't open suspicious email attachments.

CfA: Workshop “Lebensphilosophie and the Sciences.”

 

Ghent University (Belgium), 11-12 September 2025

Lebensphilosophie or “Philosophy of Life” as a movement in the history of philosophy is difficult to characterize. Many of the philosophers associated with the movement (such as Nietzsche, Dilthey, or Eucken) never identified their own work by using the term, and as such the movement has largely been used by later authors in order to draw attention to shared features of their thought. One such shared feature that is often cited is a general anti-scientific tendency. This stress on the aspects of Lebensphilosophie that are critical of science has led many of its students to overlook Lebensphilosophie’s origins in developments in the natural and human sciences of its time. For this reason, little attention has been paid to the movement’s epistemology and its philosophy of science, with its general reception largely limited to its moral and practical dimensions. This workshop aims to contribute to closing this gap through a better understanding of the philosophy of science and epistemology at stake in Lebensphilosophie.      
            This workshop invites contributions on the epistemology and philosophy of science of authors associated with Lebensphilosophie. In addition, it invites contributions on such authors’ conceptions of Nature, of Life, and of the Human Being, with a particular interest in how they understand life’s and humanity’s place in nature, and the relevance of the study of nature and of life to our understanding of humanity, and vice versa. Lebensphilosophie was not the only philosophical movement of its time which engaged with these topics: at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, philosophers of other schools, such as neo-Kantianism, critical theory, phenomenology, existentialism, and logical or empirical positivism actively engaged with and position themselves towards Lebensphilosophie’s conception of Nature, Life and the Human Being. One crucial stake in this discussion was over the possibility of a philosophy of nature or “Naturphilosophie” and hence the relationship between philosophy and the sciences. For this reason, we are also interested in contributions that address the reception of Lebensphilosophie’s treatment of these issues, such as Heinrich Rickert’s attack on the “fashionable Lebensphilosophie” and Helmuth Plessner’s incorporation of Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie into his own philosophical anthropology. In other words, we welcome contributions on philosophers of life, on philosophers who deal with philosophy of life and closely related topics, as well as on contemporaries (late 19th, early 20th century) who deal with the discussion on the place of (natural) philosophy in relation to the life- and human sciences. We strongly encourage individuals from underrepresented groups to submit.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Dr. Andreas Vrahimis (HU Berlin & Paderborn University/University of Cyprus)

Prof. Arantza Etxeberria (University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU)

Dr. Maurizio Esposito (Università degli Studi di Milano)

Dr. Francesca Michelini (Universität Kassel)

Dr. Boris Demarest (LMU-München/Universiteit Gent)

How to Submit?

Submission Deadline: June 27

Notification of Acceptance: July 18

Send 300-500 words anonymized abstracts of (PDF-format) with the title           “Abstract_LebensphilosophieandtheSciences” (both title of pdf & subject matter of e-mail) to: dries....@ugent.be

 

Scientific committee:

Prof. Giuseppe Bianco (Cà Foscari University)

Prof. Charles Wolfe (Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès)

Prof. Matthias Wunsch (Universität Rostock)

Prof. Gertrudis Van de Vijver (Universiteit Gent)

Dr. Boris Demarest (LMU-München/Universiteit Gent)

Dr. Andrea Mina (Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder))

 

Philos-L "The Liverpool List" is run by the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/ Messages to the list are archived at http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/philos-l.html. Recent posts can also be read in a Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/PhilosL/ Follow the list on Twitter @PhilosL. Follow the Department of Philosophy @LiverpoolPhilos To sign off the list send a blank message to philos-l-unsub...@liverpool.ac.uk.