The 2014 Telos in Europe Conference: Call for Papers: The Idea of Europe

The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute is pleased to announce its second biennial colloquium in L’Aquila, Italy. The theme of the conference will be “The Idea of Europe.” A full description of the conference, as well as the call for papers, is available on the Institute’s website.

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Call for Papers: Karel Kosík and Dialectics of the Concrete

Karel Kosík and Dialectics of the Concrete Prague, June 4–6, 2014

A conference organised by the Department for the Study of Modern Czech Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

In 1963 Karel Kosík published his path-breaking book Dialectics of the Concrete. It made an impact on both Marxist and non-Marxist thinkers, in Czechoslovakia and throughout the world. In this work Kosík set for himself an ambitious task—to re-think the basic concepts of the Marxist philosophical tradition and to employ them in the analysis of social reality. In the course of his analysis he touched on a wide array of issues that are still relevant today, including the problem of mystification or the “pseudo-concrete,” the social role of art, the conception of reality as a concrete totality, the conception of the human being as an onto-formative being, the systematic connection between labour and temporality, the relationship between praxis and labour, and the explanatory power of the dialectical method.

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