This workshop assembles scholars working on some of the major currents in  Continental philosophy in order to examine the conceptual foundations, historical transformations, and contemporary challenges of social criticism. From Kant’s critical philosophy to Foucault’s re-articulation of the Enlightenment project in terms of a historically situated practice of critique focused on the role that power/knowledge plays in the process of subject formation, this workshop seeks not only to affirm the centrality of social criticism to the field of Continental philosophy but to ask what that tradition demands of us now. Our problem will engage classical phenomenology, structuralist and post-structuralist forms of interpretation, deconstructive displacements of conceptual stability, as well as feminist philosophies of difference and postcolonial critiques of universalism. Attention will be paid to the role of critique within literary theory, aesthetics, and cultural criticism, where questions of ideology and interpretation intersect with broader social and political concerns. By foregrounding questions of interpretation, standpoint, and historicity we seek not only to question the supposed neutrality of criticism but to better understand the relationship between critique and daily life. In this respect, our workshop will test what it means to engage in practices of philosophically inspired forms of critique that interpret and disturb the world.

Program:

9:40 Welcome and Opening Remarks, Joseph Tanke

10:00 Marie-Eve Morin, “Jean-Luc Nancy’s Flat Ontology: A Thinking of Being for Our Times?”

11:00 Zsolt Bagi, “Emancipation as Affective Empowerment: A Spinozian Approach to Social  Theory and Social Activism”

12:00-12:40 Break

12:40-1:40 Péter Csato, “Metalepsis, Truth-Telling, and the Ethics of Interpretation”

1:40-2:40 Andrea Timár, “Art, Politics and the Social: Reading Brecht with Arendt and Rancière

2:40-3:00 Break

3:00-4:00 Joseph Tanke, “AI as a Problem for Social Philosophy”

4:00-5:00 Csaba Olay, “Regional Identity and the Narrativity of National Identity”

5:00-5:10 Break

5:10-6:10 Gábor Boros, “After Ego”

6:10-6:30 Closing Remarks, Balázs Trencsényi, Director, Institute for Advanced Study, CEU