The University of Oxford have announced the Second Annual Postgraduate Conference in Continental Philosophy of Religion. The conference, entitled ‘Religion, Atheism and the Community of Reason in Modernity’, will take place at Regents Park College, Oxford University, on the 22nd September 2008. The confirmed keynote speakers are Prof. Raimond Gaita (KCL) and Dr Mark Wynn (Exeter). Areas of discussion include the relation of reason to religion; the role of religious beliefs, practices and forms of argumentation in philosophical discourse; and the very possibility of religious philosophy. The hope is that these topics with be discussed in respect to both contemporary philosophical debate and the history of philosophy.

They have issued a call for papers of 20-30 minutes from postgraduates and those who have recently obtained their doctorate. ‘We encourage both historical and contemporary engagements and, although we wish to provide a forum for continental philosophy (which we understand in its broadest sense as European philosophy from Descartes to Meillassoux), we welcome papers from other traditions, especially analytic philosophy. Possible topics may include:

Contemporary Issues:

• The persistence of theological tropes in contemporary philosophy (apocalypses and utopias, for example)
• The relation between religious and secular ethics
• The role of emotion in philosophical accounts of the self and practical reasoning
• Cosmopolitanism and communitarianism
• The theological turn in recent phenomenology

Historical topics:

• The early modern project of demystification (Spinoza, les philosophes, Hume)
• The Spinoza controversy and the genesis of philosophy of religion in German Idealism
• Rationalism and atheism in the reception of Hegel (Feuerbach, Strauss)
• The critique of religion in Nietzsche, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis etc
• Polemics against (onto-)theology in French thought in the sixties and seventies (Deleuze, Kristeva and the early Derrida)’

Please send abstracts of between 300 and 500 words to godphil@googlemail.com by the deadline of 20th July 2008. For more details, see http://www.theology.ox.ac.uk/news_and_events/RACRIM.pdf