Call for abstracts
The conference Philosophy and Madness: from Kant to Hegel and Beyond aims to explore mental illness along four lines of research:
1) a historical-cultural perspective that is an invitation to investigate the meaning attributed to mental illness not only in Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophy but also in Philippe Pinel’s treatises and in the flourishing of medical studies between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In the same way, Hölderlin’s poetic production – in particular, but not only, that of the 36 long years spent in the tower of Tübingen – as well as the reflections on genius and madness in Schopenhauer or Nietzsche’s Wahnsinnbriefe will offer great ideas for both aesthetic and socio-political reflection;
2) a linguistic perspective articulated in two ways:
2) a) as an analysis of some of the main terms of the vocabulary of mental illness: alienation, body/mind, contradiction, delirium, idealization, imagination, sleep and dream, temporality, maternal, unconscious, reversal of values, shame, primary shame, identity, etc.
2 b) as a philosophical and psychoanalytical analysis of the language of mental illness – that is, first of all, but not only, the language of delirium – and the psychoanalytic word “cure”.
3) a comparative perspective aimed at examining the contamination between philosophy and psychiatry, from Jaspers to the phenomenological psychiatry of Eugéne Minkowski and Ludwig Binswanger, from Lacan to the present day, bearing in mind the synergy between theories and clinical cases.
4) an aesthetic perspective that focuses on the short circuit between creativity and madness, genius and hypochondria, innovation and transgression both on the basis of specific cases and by investigating the theories on creativity of recent decades, enhanced by reflection on artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences.
The organizing committee will evaluate all the proposals received and will accept a maximum of 15 (3 parallel sessions with 5 speakers each).
Abstracts must not exceed 2,000 characters including spaces. Please indicate which of the perspectives identified in the call refers to the abstract (1,2a,2b,3,4)
The paper must not exceed 24,000 characters including spaces and notes. References should use author-date system, e.g. (Müller 1998, 12-14).
There are 3 official languages of the Conference: German, English, Italian.
Deadline for abstracts submission: 10 February 2019
Deadline for papers submission: 10 April 2019
Submissions should be emailed to: mariannina.failla@uniroma3.it and francesca.iannelli@uniroma3.it