Despite the fact that phenomenology has often criticized varieties of philosophical or scientific naturalism, phenomenology offers rich resources for reflecting on the shape of the lived experiences of nature. Such reflection can investigate the constitution of nature through literature, art, or natural or social science; it can ponder how the value of the natural world is given ethically and politically in contemporary experience(s); it can contemplate whether there is a “nature” or essence to nature, even whether there is something called “nature” that can be distinguished from what is not nature (e.g. the “artificial” or “synthetic”) and experienced in its own unique way; it can investigate the character of the lived experience of extra-human life–especially plants and animals–and how the members of the other-than-human world might experience and constitute us as humans.
Keynote speakers
Prof. Thomas Nenon (University of Memphis)
Prof. Ted Toadvine (Pennsylvania State University)
Prof. Nisha Gupta (University of West Georgia)
Proposals of 250 words or less for papers on any of these themes are especially welcome, but papers on other themes relating to the topic “Phenomenology and Nature” are also invited. Papers that bring phenomenological methods or contents into dialogue with work in fields like environmental studies, environmental humanities, critical phenomenology, eco-phenomenology, eco-psychology, and Anthropocene Studies are also welcomed. We also invite submissions on other topics within the scope of phenomenology in the human sciences and interdisciplinary phenomenology. Whereas we will be featuring renowned scholars from around the world, we also especially encourage beginning researchers and students to submit papers as well. Befitting its name, ICNAP is keen to receive proposals from scholars from many different academic disciplines whose work interacts–critically, appreciatively, or developmentally–with the research approaches and contents in disciplines other than and beyond their own.
The conference will be hosted virtually by the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center and the Department of Psychology at Duquesne University.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words for twenty-minute paper presentations to phenomenology.nature.2025@gmail.com at the latest by March 15th, 2025. Please include the name of the author, affiliation, and the title of the presentation.