The University of Reading

Invites you to the Ratio one-day conference

The Philosophy of Body

Saturday 28th April 2001
Lecture Theatre, Faculty of Letters & Social Sciences

The speakers are:

Hubert Dreyfus
University of California, Berkeley

Sean Kelly
Princeton University

Quassim Cassam
University of Oxford

Alison Adam
University of Salford

The provisional programme is as follows:

9 – 9.30  Registration and coffee
9.30 – 11 Merleau-Ponty on the body (Sean Kelly) and discussion
11 – 11.30 Refreshment break
11.30 – 1 Gender/Body/Machine (Alison Adam) and discussion
1 – 2.15 Lunch
2.15 – 3.45 Title TBA (Quassim Cassam) and discussion
3.45 – 4.15 Refreshment break
4.15 – 5.45  Samuel Todes on the Philosophy of Body (Hubert Dreyfus)
and discussion 5.45 – 6.30 Reception (sponsored by Blackwell
Publishers)

  Conference Dinner

The full registration fee is £30, which includes refreshments and
lunch.  There will be some student bursaries at £12 and full
registration, to include the Conference dinner, is £50.  Please
register as early as possible. Make cheques payable to “The University
of Reading”, and send them to: Jean Britland, Department of
Philosophy, University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AA. Enquiries via
e-mail to [log in to unmask]

This conference is supported by The Forum for European Philosophy, The
Mind Association and Blackwell Publishers.   The papers given at this
Conference, plus some additional invited papers, will be published as
a special edition of Ratio by Blackwells in 2002.

This is the eighth in the Ratio  series of one-day conferences which
have featured speakers from across the USA and Canada as well as from
the UK. Previous attendance levels, particularly of graduate students,
have proved that one-day conferences are popular because costs to
participants can be kept to a minimum.

The aim of the Conference

There has been increasing philosophical interest within Anglophone
philosophy in the last few years in the body, and it seems likely that
this interest will continue to increase, if not explode, over the next
decade. It seems that there are several contributing causes. The first
arises from an interest in what distinguishes human beings from
computers. A second cause has been the continuing rapprochement
between so-called analytic and continental philosophy. In continental
philosophy, specially within the work of the phenomenologists and in
Merleau-Ponty in particular, there has been a concern with
embodiedness, from which analytic philosophers are gradually realising
they have something to learn. A third cause has been the development
of feminist philosophy within the last 40 years, in which
embodiedness, to begin with especially sex and gender, but later much
more generally, has played a central, indeed, defining, role.

The conference is primarily aimed at philosophers working within the
Anglophone tradition, with the goal of discovering what might be
learnt from the work of philosophers who have worked, or drawn upon,
the phenomenological tradition, and, in particular, from the work of
Merleau-Ponty. There has recently been a growing interest among
Anglophone philosophers in the work of Merleau-Ponty. The speakers at
the conference reflect the various strands which have led to the
current philosophical interest in the body. Quassim Cassam, whose work
 on the Self in the tradition of Peter Strawson, draws upon
Merleau-Ponty in his latest book. Sean Kelly, from Princeton, has
research interests which centre around the philosophical,
phenomenological, and cognitive neuroscientific aspects of perception.
The philosophers most important to his project are Merleau-Ponty and
the Oxford philosopher Gareth Evans. Kelly will be giving a paper on
‘Merleau-Ponty on the body’. Alison Adam, from the Information Systems
Institute at the University of Salford, is the author of the recent
Routledge book “Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine”.
She will be speaking at the Conference on connections between issues
in AI and the human body and gender. Our main speaker is Hubert
Dreyfus of Berkeley. His paper for the conference will be on the
contemporary philosopher, Samuel Todes, (Northwestern University)
whose pioneer work on the Philosophy of Body draws fruitfully drawn
upon phenomenological understanding.

The Ratio Conference for April 2001 thus continues the theme of
some
previous Ratio conferences of the ways in which the analytic tradition
can learn from philosophical work in other traditions, and of the
development of a convergence of interests which may have been
masked
by the more entrenched attitudes of the last few decades.

Michael Proudfoot
Conference Organiser

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