Category Archives: Events

UK Sartre Society conference 2023

Exciting news! Rethinking Existentialism is the topic of a book symposium at this year’s UK Sartre Society conference.

Critical responses to the book will be presented by Matthew Eshleman (UNC Wilmington), Kate Kirkpatrick (Oxford), and Komarine Romdenh-Romluc (Sheffield). Jonathan Webber will respond.

The conference includes keynote addresses from Annie Cohen-Solal (Milan) and  François Noudelmann (NYU) and a wide range of talks on Beauvoir and on Sartre in parallel sessions.

The conference will be held at the beautiful Maison Française d’Oxford on Monday 3rd and Tuesday 4th July.

Full information is available at the registration site.

Photograph of the Maison Française d'Oxford building and its garden, with a statue in the foreground.

Interview on the Microphilosophy podcast

There hasn’t been much Rethinking Existentialism news to report since the arrival of Covid-19.

Logo of Microphilosophy podcast

But now there is a new podcast!

Julian Baggini interviews Kate Kirkpatrick and Jonathan Webber about the contemporary relevance of the works of Beauvoir and Sartre.

The interview was recorded live at St George’s in Bristol towards the end of the pre-Covid era. It is now an episode of one of the longest and slowest running podcasts in the world, Microphilosophy.

It is freely available here.

Climbing trees, stereotypes, and a weekend course

Two online articles have been published in the past few months.

Climbing Trees and Raising Children with Simone de Beauvoir is a short article at the New Statesman website that argues for an existentialist approach to parenting based on Beauvoir’s moral philosophy and analyses of childhood and motherhood.

Against Type is a longer essay at Aeon magazine that argues for a range of contributions that a renewed attention to existentialism can make to the psychology and ethics of stereotyping and implicit bias.

Jonathan Webber will be presenting ideas from Rethinking Existentialism at a weekend course in January 2020 in Oxford. The course will feature talks by Kate Kirkpatrick, author of Becoming Beauvoir, an important new philosophical biography being published in August 2019.

Screenshot from New Statesman website 11th May 2019.

Oxford event and new online article

The next event is at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford at 11am on Saturday 1st December.

This is an interview by Nigel Warburton in the best room of the best bookshop in the world.

There will probably be (early) festive drinks and nibbles. There will certainly be books.

Please do come along if you can! To help them gauge numbers, you can register your interest online.

And a new online article has just been published: The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Existentialist.

Book Launch in Cardiff and Publication in North America

Rethinking Existentialism on bookshop shelf.Rethinking Existentialism is published in North America this week. The best way to buy it is probably through A Libris.

But I don’t know anything about book buying in North America, so if you have a better idea do let me know.

To celebrate the full release of the book, there is a book launch party in Cardiff on Tuesday 25th September at Ride My Bike café, 26 Park Place, Cathays, 6pm-8pm.

The café will be serving cakes, teas, coffees, beers, wines, ciders, juices, and fizzy pop.

There will be some books. There will be brief words about the book, probably around 6.45.

Everyone is welcome!

 

Rethinking Existentialism in Psychotherapy: a conference

Rethinking Existentialism in Psychotherapy
Wednesday 13th January 2016
10.00 – 16.30

Montague Room, Senate House
Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Each session will include presentations followed by general discussion.

10.00
Arrival, with tea and coffee

10.30-12.00
Legacies of Colonialism
Lennox Thomas, psychotherapist and vice-chair of the Refugee Therapy Centre
Jonathan Webber, philosopher at Cardiff University

participants are to make their own arrangements for lunch

1.00-2.30
Drama and Play
Eva Koumpli, psychodrama psychotherapist
Rebecca Pitt, researcher at The Open University

Tea and coffee

3.00-4.30
The Lived Body
Katherine Morris, philosopher at Oxford University
Miles Clapham, consultant psychiatrist and Lecturer at the Philadelphia Association

Just £10 for standard registration, £5 for students/unwaged.
Registration is now open.

The Future of Existentialism: a workshop

The Future of Existentialism
Call For Papers

Submissions are invited for a one-day workshop on existentialism for people considering doing postgraduate research on the theoretical, biographical, or literary works of Beauvoir, Fanon, Sartre or other existentialist thinkers.

Each participant will give a short paper analysing or applying some aspect of existentialism.

Participants should have, or be currently studying towards, a Bachelors or Masters degree in a discipline relevant to their paper. The event will include a session on applying for postgraduate research study in the UK.

Accommodation, meals, and UK travel expenses for all participants will be provided by the workshop, which will be held at Cardiff University. The venue will be fully accessible.

To apply to participate, please send a paper of no more than 3000 words (all inclusive) or a one-page Mumford Method handout (what’s that? – see here). The deadline is strictly 5pm GMT on Friday 4th December 2015.

Papers will be selected by anonymous review. Please ensure that your paper or handout does not include any information that could identify its author. Please give your qualifications in the email itself.

For any enquiries or to apply for a place, please email me.

Simone de Beauvoir workshop: 25 November 2015

Simone de BeauvoirOne-day workshop on the philosophy of
Simone de Beauvoir.

Aberdare Hall, Cardiff University.
9.30 – 6.00.

Update: There are no more places available at this workshop.

Talks:

Beauvoir’s Methods of Ethics
Rafe McGregor (Leeds)

Metaphysics, Existentialism and Political Categories in The Second Sex
Stella Sandford (Kingston)

Beauvoir and the Ambiguities of Motherhood
Alison Stone (Lancaster)

Beauvoir on Masculinity: Thinking about the First Sex and Beyond
Ursula Tidd (Manchester)

Beauvoir’s Derivation of the Categorical Imperative
Jonathan Webber (Cardiff)

 

Workshop and conference recordings now on YouTube

Two talks from the Fanon workshop are now available on YouTube –

Fanon at 90 – Lewis Gordon (Connecticut)

Medicine and Colonialism – Azzedine Haddour (UCL)

This workshop followed on from the UK Sartre Society conference on existentialism, race, and gender. All talks from that conference have been posted online by the UK Sartre Society.

All of these are available through the project YouTube channel.

Fanon workshop poster