Calendar | Conference

Back to the Things Themselves! 2023 – CRISIS

Toronto, 27 May- 2 June 2023

Official Website
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Venue

York University, Toronto

BTTTT! is solely interested in the phenomenological practice of carefully and attentively describing the appearances of things in their concrete, lived givenness, without drawing on metaphysical, scientific, or other explanatory preconceptions. We ascribe to no single “orthodox” phenomenological method. Indeed, we embrace diverse approaches to “the things themselves,” so long as these approaches are focused on encounters with experience untainted by conceptual impositions. The goal should be to live behind one’s own eyes, to heed the call of things, and to attempt to give things their own voice as purely as possible, so as to reveal their sense and significance within their larger matrices of lived meaning.

The theme for our 2023 panel is CRISIS. In his own time Husserl wrote of the crisis of the European sciences; our present historical moment finds us surrounded by a multitude of crises worthy of careful phenomenological analysis. In the teeth of a once-in-a-century pandemic that has decimated the global population, we are confronted with crises of social antagonism, political polarization, and looming environmental catastrophe, as well as crises of information, evidence, epistemology, and truth. BTTTT! 2023 invites those engaged in phenomenological practice to delve into these and other instances of crisis that have unsettled the intersubjective, disrupted the horizonal structure of experience, and undermined our shared sense of world. We seek original descriptions of various dimensions of the life-world in crisis.