Inaugural Meeting in Ramapo 2009

The inaugural meeting will be held at Ramapo College of New Jersey May 8-9, 2009. Invited lectures will be featured by Professor Jacqueline Martinez, who teaches intercultural communication at Arizona State University, and Leonard Lawlor, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. The titles and abstracts of these lectures are included below in addition to their PDF form through the "Invited Lectures" button above. All of the presentations that have been submitted and accepted by the editorial committee are included in the "Submitted Papers" button above in PDF form.

Twenty-eight other speakers have been chosen to present papers at this meeting. We will list abstracts and, in some cases, completed papers below so that those in attendance will be able to read these beforehand in anticipation of the presentation. We will also include a short biography of each contributor. Soon we will post a program for this meeting as well.

The inaugural meeting of ICNAP is dedicated to the memory of Mary F. Rogers who was an enthusiastic contributor to this organization from the time of its formational meeting in Boca Raton, FL, in 2008. She died unexpectedly on February 27, 2009. Click the following to read her obituary: Mary F. Rogers's Obituary.

In the near future we will have more information regarding lodging, but we have already reserved rooms for about $100 a night.

Invited Lecture Titles and Abstracts

"Interdisciplinary Phenomenology and the Study of Gender and Ethnicity"

  - Jacqueline M. Martinez, Arizona State University

Abstract:

The study of gender and ethnicity (or, equally, sexuality and race) is complicated by the basic ambiguity regarding the meaning and signifying capacity of each of these designations.  A phenomenological approach aids in explicating the specific social, cultural and historical terms in which the designations of gender and ethnicity come to have different meanings and signifying capacities.  Such an explication reveals variously contested boundaries of knowledge-production, and allows for a return to concrete world where meaning, culture, and history are embodied.  The present work examines the study of gender and ethnicity as it has developed in relation to the postmodern and postcolonial challenges leveled against social science, and argues for an interdisciplinary and decolonial phenomenology that neither ignores the existential and embodied reality as experienced by those are designated objects of scientific study, nor valorizes the experience of social objectification or dehumanization.  The present work argues that an interdisciplinary and decolonial phenomenology requires full recognition of the intersubjective conditions in which human recognition (and non-recognition) are possible, as well as a critical approach in assessing how the relationship between experience and perspective leads to the truly insightful understanding emerging in this time and this place.

"Becoming and Auto-Affection (Part II): Who are we?" Full Paper

- Len Lawlor, Penn State University

Abstract:

This essay attempts to retrieve basic insights from Husserl’s last great work, The Crisis, in order to show that the recent project (found in the 1998 collection called Naturalizing Phenomenology) to root phenomenological experience in naturalistic processes results in conceptual absurdity. The basic insights retrieved revolve around the fact that the qualitative side in the experience of the earth cannot be mathematized. These insights are used then to show that the project of naturalizing phenomenology forgets the “principle of all principles” and forgets the kind of variation that one finds in the qualitative side of experience. In short, the essay shows that naturalizing phenomenology is the crisis.