Keynote Speakers
Graham Priest
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center
Best known for his invention, thorough elaboration, and defence of dialetheism, the view that some contradictions are true, Graham Priest has published extensively in the field of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics (East and West), and the history of philosophy (East and West). He taught at the University of St Andrews (UK), the University of Western Australia, the University of Queensland, and Melbourne University and he is a past president of the Australasian Association for Logic and the Australasian Association of Philosophy.
While the technicalities of his writings on logic go far beyond the reach of regular mortals unfamiliar with formal logic, Graham also excels in making complex ideas and problems accessible to a general audience. For a taster, compare this article with the above link on dialetheism.
His major publications include:
In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent (OUP, 2nd (extended) ed., 2006 [1st ed.: 1987])
Beyond the Limits of Thought (OUP, 2nd (extended) ed., 2002 [1st ed.: CUP, 1995])
Logic: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2000)
Towards Non-Being : The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality (OUP, 2005)
Doubt Truth to be a Liar (OUP, 2006)
An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic: From If to Is (CUP, 2nd ed., 2008 [1st ed., 2001])
One: Being an Investigation into the Unity of Reality and of its Parts, including the Singular Object which is Nothingness (OUP, 2014)
Barry Sandywell
Honorary Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of York
Working between sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, and visual studies, Barry Sandywell has published very likely the most extensive study on self-reflection, the three-volume Logological Investigations (Routledge, 1995-1996):
Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason (vol. 1)
The beginnings of European theorizing: reflexivity in the archaic age (vol. 2)
Presocratic reflexivity: the construction of philosophical discourse c. 600-450 BC (vol. 3).
This ambitious study examines the role and history of reflexivity in Western thought and literature from Antiquity to modern and contemporary culture.
Barry also co-edited with Ian Heywood Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual (Routledge, 1999). He has recently written a comprehensive deconstruction of European visual discourses/narratives, in the book Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms (Ashgate, 2011) and The Handbook of Visual Culture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) and taught a wide range of subjects at York from phenomenology to critical theory and social thought.
He is currently editing (with Stanley Raffel) a collection of essays on Analytic Sociology (associated with the work of Alan Blum and Peter McHugh) with the title The Reflexive Initiative: the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing (Routledge, forthcoming).
Frank Zipfel
Senior Lecturer (Akademischer Direktor) in Comparative Literature, University of Mainz
Focusing on literary and narrative theory, fiction theory, and aesthetics as well as on questions of hybridity, Frank Zipfel has made a major contribution to the discussion and clarification of the terminology related to the concept of fiction(ality) in literary criticism with his book (as yet unfortunately available in German only) Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität. Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft (Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2001). In it, he unravels the complex linguistic, literary, ontological, narrative, reception-related, and pragmatic aspects of fiction(ality).
He also co-edited with Axel Dunker Literatur@Internet (Aisthesis, 2006), with Danielle Dumontet Ecriture Migrante/Migrant Writing (Olms, 2008), and with Dieter Lamping, Sandra Poppe, and Sascha Seiler Handbuch der literarischen Gattungen (Kröner, 2009).