Organizers
Agnė Valatkaitė, Dr. Gregor Bös, Dr. Luz Christopher Seiberth
Workshop Description
Over the past two decades, theorizing about intentionality has been marked by a turn away from naturalistically oriented attempts to identify a purely causal relation that bestows intentionality. This shift is evident, for example, in the Phenomenal Intentionality Research Programme (e.g., U. Kriegel, A. Mendelovici, Horgan & Tienson), and arguably brings analytic debates on intentionality into closer proximity with the contributions of Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology.
Many contemporary theorists approach the question of intentionality in what may be described as a transcendental mode of inquiry, even if they do not explicitly employ that label. This includes enactivists such as Mark Rowlands, researchers working within the Phenomenal Intentionality framework, and scholars at the intersection of psychiatry and phenomenology (e.g., Melihar, Fuchs, Heinz, Zahavi). We contend that these approaches engage in transcendental philosophy, even if prevailing theoretical contexts often discourage the use of such “contentious” or “unfashionable” labels.
We observe that the question of intentionality itself may require being addressed in the mode of transcendental philosophy. Inquiring into the necessary structural features of any sense- or meaning-making framework arguably amounts to doing transcendental philosophy. Moreover, we find this mode of philosophy employed in both Husserl’s and Sellars’s philosophies on intentionality, and in the case of both philosophers we detect significant structural similarities in the results of this inquiry. Thus, this workshop seeks to explore the philosophical resources of these two thinkers not merely for purposes of comparison, but in order to draw on their shared insights for the advancement of contemporary theories of intentionality.
The workshop is centered around two objectives:
- Bringing together the resources of Sellars’ and Husserl’s philosophies to theorize intentionality.
- Reflecting on the transcendental method and its explanatory power in the (current) philosophy of mind; exploring the possibility of naturalistically oriented transcendental philosophy.
The workshop follows a “Collective Research” model: Junior, mid-career scholars and established experts are invited to pool their expertise together for the aim of theorizing intentionality. Researchers whose work explicitly engages the question of intentionality and the philosophies of Sellars and Husserl are invited to present core arguments, followed by formal responses by colleagues working in related fields.
Speakers
- Prof. Dr. Danilo Manca, University of Pisa (TBC)
- Dr. Gregor Bös, KU Leuven
- Agnė Valatkaitė, KU Leuven
- Dr. Luz Christopher Seiberth, University of Potsdam
Respondents
- Dr. Sybren Heyndels, Charles University, Prague
- Alexander Porto, University of Pittsburgh
- Prof. Dr. Julia Jansen, KU Leuven
- Prof. Dr. Emanuele Caminada, KU Leuven
- Batoul Sukkar, KU Leuven
- Prof. Dr. Henning Tegtmeyer, KU Leuven
- Prof. Dr. Eric Myin, University of Antwerp (TBC)