Date/Time
5/1/2025
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM Central
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM Central
Event Type(s)
Event
Event Description
The Center for Dewey Studies at SIU invites proposals and abstracts for a conferencing marking the centennial of John Dewey’s Experience and Nature.
Location
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
1263 Lincoln Dr
Carbondale, IL 62901
click here for Google Maps
1263 Lincoln Dr
Carbondale, IL 62901
click here for Google Maps
Details
The goal of the conference is to celebrate the centennial of John Dewey’s Experience and Nature. We seek to encourage new interpretations and assessments of the legacy of Dewey’s Experience and Nature that are balanced, historically responsible, relevant, constructive, and critical. In the spirit of Dewey’s own philosophy, we also intend this conference to be forward-looking, asking both what we can learn from Dewey’s own theoretical philosophy and what resources exist in it that can be useful to the problems in contemporary philosophy, humanities, and the sciences, as well as to look into its relevance for the problems of human life and culture. Topics and guiding questions for talks, posters, and panel discussions thus might include, but are not limited to:
- Philosophical method, especially pragmatist, naturalistic, empirical, and cultural.
- What is the relationship between the project of Experience and Nature and the parts of Dewey’s philosophy that is applied, practical, interdisciplinary, and public-facing?
- Naturalistic metaphysics, liberal versus reductive/scientistic naturalisms, naturalism and empiricism, cultural naturalism.
- Philosophy of mind, especially pragmatic approaches to the mind-body problem, embodied and sociocultural theories of mind, the evolution of mind.
- How can Dewey's views of mind and consciousness inform contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, anthropology, and pedagogy?
- How can Dewey’s instrumental understanding of the human intellect, and his call for making social institutions more intelligent, inform the development and application of artificial intelligence and machine learning?
- Reassessing Dewey’s philosophy of meaning, language and communication in relation to experience, nature, and mind.
- Dewey’s account of cognition and science as a response to the complexity and precariousness of nature.
- How can Dewey's view of human embeddedness in nature affect our approaches to climate change, biodiversity, and animal rights?
- How should we rethink the relation of pragmatism to phenomenology in light of Experience and Nature?
- Naturalistic accounts of normativity, values, art, and criticism.
- How does Dewey’s critique of historically entrenched dualisms (e.g., mind/body, subject/object, fact/value, nature/nurture, individual/society) and his emphasis on pluralism support innovative research programs in cognitive science, biology, education, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, philosophy, etc.?
- With a century's worth of hindsight, what developments and changes did Dewey fail to anticipate, and how can his approach be updated for the twenty-first century?
- Dewey and history. What is the place of Dewey’s Experience and Nature in the history of ideas? How should we evaluate Dewey’s philosophical-historical narratives in E&N?
- What critical light can be shed on Dewey’s ideas by contemporary posthumanist, biocentrist, and ecological thought that might revise and further his naturalistic project?
Talks that specifically cite and discuss Dewey’s Experience and Nature are encouraged, but talks on such topics that are broadly Deweyan in spirit are also welcome.
Proposal Formats
- Traditional Talks. Proposals for traditional talks consist of an abstract of up to 500 words, plus a bibliography of sources cited.
- Panel Discussions. Proposals for panel discussions should include a 500-word panel abstract describing the topic, as well as a 1–2-page description of the panel rationale, format, and the contribution of each panelist. Panels should not be loose collections of individual traditional talks; they should have a specific rationale for being presented together, with a format that matches the topic and rationale.
- Poster Presentations. The conference will include a reception and poster session where presenters will share their research with attendees as they walk around to view the posters and talk to the presenters. There are many useful guides for poster presentations for humanities and philosophy conferences online. Traditional talks which cannot find space on the main program will have the option to be considered for the poster session. Proposals for the poster session should consisit of an abstract of up to 500 words, plus a bibliography of sources cited.
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