22 - 24 May 2024, Symposium "Engaging Rationality Today", Lille, France
The international symposium "Engaging Rationality Today" will bring together specialists from multiple disciplines (philosophy, logic, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, etc.) to reflect collectively on contemporary meanings and uses of rationality. The current Western cultural context, which is marked by numerous challenges (war, fake news, A.I., populism) and critiques (post-colonialism, feminism, etc.), requires a reevalutation of the classic notion of rationality. They show the limits of the classical notion, grounded on concepts like objectivity, universality, argumentation, and causal relationships. But accepting every new conception without criteria seems to give way to relativism, thus leading to a dilemma. The symposium "Engaging Rationality Today" aims at tackling this dilemma by creating a space of dialogue between various conceptions of rationality. To do so, it is not only a question of examing what rationality is, but also, and above all, a question of studying the limits, blindspots, and problematic uses of the proposed definitions of rationality. The aim of the present project is to provide a comprehensive view of how rationality is currently understood, from various perspectives (philosophy, psychology, linguistics, etc.). We hope that by examining rationality’s multifaceted aspects, including what falls outside of the proposed definitions, contributors will be encouraged to reevalute their own defninitions through dialogue with others.
True to our multidisciplinary goals, we invite a broad variety of approaches and methods and welcome researchers from any background. If you would like to present, please submit an anomymous abstract (max.of 800 words) in a pdf format. In your application, please mention in which session (or sessions) your contribution would be most appropriate.
To help make each conception of rationality clearer and to facilitate the comparison between conceptions, we ask that each contribution spell out what the author takes rationality to be, to not be, and what remains under-determined. In addition, contributions can (but do not have to) address one of the following pairs of guiding questions. They can also challenge the implied validity of these oppositions: What does rationality involve? What does it rule out? How do we recognize it? What could rationality also be? What are its applications and uses? What are its misapplications and misuses? Does it affect us? Can we resist it? What does it allow us to do? What does it keep us from doing? Does it have diverse articulations? Or, for it to be rationality, must it always be exactly the same?