| Abstracts of 500 words should be submitted by November 1st
1999 to: Dr. John Mullarkey, Philosophy, School of Humanities and
Social Sciences, University of Sunderland Priestman Building,
Green Terrace, Sunderland SR1 3PZ. Tel: 0191 515 2171 Fax: 0191
515 2229 Email: john.mullarkey@sunderland.ac.uk
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Sunderland Business School and the Centre for Studies in
Contemporary Approaches to Philosophy, University of Sunderland,
UK, announce a preliminary call for papers for "Bergson and the Social
Sciences," a multi-disciplinary conference on practical
philosophy to be hosted in collaboration with the Department of OR and HRM, University of
Northumbria.To declare the need for a return to the work of Henri Bergson may well seem
premature in the face of philosophy's singular resolve to ignore the enormous significance
and influence of this man's thought at the beginning of the twentieth-century. Yet no
philosopher has been as important to our age as Bergson. At the threshold of the
twentieth century, he reset the agenda for both philosophy and its relationship with the
natural and human sciences. Concerned with examining and extolling the phenomena of time,
change, and difference, he was at one point held as both 'the greatest thinker in the
world' and 'the most dangerous man in the world'. Yet the impact of his ideas was so
all-pervasive that, by the end of the Great War, it had become impossibly diffuse.
In a manner imitating his own cult of change, the Bergsonian school seemed to depart from
the scene almost as quickly as it had arrived on it. As part of the current resurgence of
interest in Bergsonism both in Europe and North
America, this conference will address the particular significance of his work for the
social sciences. Bergson's writing lends
itself to such a dialogue in that it addressed issues, like bodily intentionality and the
radical indeterminacy of time, that have recently taken a leading theoretical role in the
social sciences. While his ability to straddle theoretical boundaries originally
left Bergson himself in an intellectual no-man's land, perhaps it is the social sciences
today which can act in favour of his work: in particular, recent developments in
organisation and cultural theory can allow his thought to speak to us again with the same
exciting force and vitality that met its first appearance one hundred years ago.
Harwood Publications, who feature critical studies of Bergson in their catalogue, are
co-operating with the conference with a view to publishing a book from the submissions.
Papers accordingly are invited that address any aspect of Bergson's relationship to and
relevance for the social and organisational sciences, including his impact on other
thinkers who followed him, his relation to the postmodern, and the broader movement of
"process philosophy" with which he is associated.
Speakers confirmed include: Prof. Pierre Guillet de Monthoux
(University of Stockholm); Prof. Robert Chia (University of
Essex); Prof. Keith Ansell Pearson (University of Warwick);
Frederic Worms (University of Lille)
The conference is being organised by Prof Stephen Linstead (SBS) and Dr. John Mullarkey
(Philosophy) at Sunderland, and hosted by Prof Heather Höpfl (Northumbria).
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