The Ethical Challenge of Multidisciplinarity: Reconciling ‘The Three Narratives’—Art, Science, and Philosophy
2-6 July 2012, University of Cyprus
Language—and by extension our story telling activities in general—enables us to confront the contingencies of life by answering the immediate question: what’s happening and what is going to happen next. Science also attempts to answer this question. However, there appears to be—at least in the western cultural tradition—a fundamental tension between the literary-artistic and the scientific projects: whereas the artist seeks to recreate human experience, thereby evoking basic ethical issues, the scientist seeks ethically-neutral, evidence-based facts, as the constituents of our knowledge of reality. It is thus left to others—to the philosopher, theologian, critic, or historian—to bridge the theoretical and ethical gaps between the world of ‘fiction’ and the world of ‘fact’, of art and science. Among other things, the ever increasing rate of production of scientific data in the modern age poses a new multidisciplinary challenge: how to address the unresolved/unresolvable tensions between the language of normativity and the language of facticity.
The organizers of the 13th ISSEI Conference invite scholars from various academic fields to discuss the ethical challenge of multidisciplinarity by characterizing the scope, effects and implications of the discontinuities among ‘the three narratives’: to consider how artists, scientists, and philosophers have articulated, explained and responded to them and/or have attempted to reconcile them.
The conference is divided into five sections:
1) History, Geography, Science
2) Economics, Politics, Law
3) Education, Women’s Studies, Sociology
4) Art, Theater, Literature, Culture, Music
5) Language, Philosophy, Anthropology, Psychology, Religion
The full call for papers is available here.
Deadline for submissions: April 15, 2012
Conference Co-Chairs:
Marianna Papastephanou
Dept. of Education
University of Cyprus
61, Kallipoleos St.
P.O. Box 537 Nicosia
Cyprus
Ezra Talmor
Kibbutz Nachshonim
D.N. Merkaz, 73190
ISRAEL
Tel: +972-3-938-6445
Fax: +972-3-938-6588
Email: ISSEI@nachshonim.org.il
