The London Post-Kantian Seminar

There is a growing number of faculty members, early career researchers and postgraduates across the London universities with expertise in post-Kantian philosophy. However, there is no intercollegiate forum for collaborative work in the area. The inception of a network for London researchers in post-Kantian thought will directly support collaboration and scholarship, provide mentoring opportunities for young academics, and open space for public engagement in the field's sub-disciplines of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. We will achieve this by facilitating six workshops over the seminar's first two years. The workshops will rotate between London-area partner universities, and culminate in a major conference at University College London. There will also be two major talks for the broader public. Overall, the seminar will establish a long-term productive scholarly environment that will harness the potential of London to be a world-leading centre for research in post-Kantian philosophy.

'Post-Kantian philosophy' concerns the demanding and exciting work of European thinkers from the turn of the 19th century to the present who inherited the philosophical revolution begun by Kant. This revolution gave philosophy a radically new staring point in the human conditions of knowledge and action. However, it raised further questions about what precisely these conditions are, whether there are non-human alternatives, and what science can tell us about these conditions. As we become increasingly aware of our psychological, material, historical, and environmental limits, these post-Kantians questions are as pressing as ever.

Over the past decade, post-Kantian philosophy has become a major area of research in Anglophone academia. This is for several reasons, including the abundance of new English translations of historical texts originally published in German and French, digitised versions of lesser-known texts, and the growing respectability of European thought in English-speaking countries. New scholarship demonstrates the exciting potential of post-Kantian philosophy to enhance and extend contemporary debates by:

(a) explicating the methods of transcendental argument and dialectic employed by post-Kantian thinkers and illustrating their relevance for methods of conceptual analysis favoured by contemporary thinkers,
(b) taking advantage of the perspective that post-Kantian philosophy's historical distance affords on our ways of thinking today, and
(c) recognising the family resemblances between questions that motivated 19th- and 20th-century post-Kantians and those questions that drive contemporary philosophers.

Several key academic cities have fostered this growth; Chicago (Chicago-Area Consortium of German Philosophy), New York (New York German Idealism Workshop), and Berlin (Berlin Consortium of German Studies). However, there is yet no forum in London, let alone the UK, that aims to promote and enhance research in post-Kantian philosophy. This is not due to lack of personnel; not only are there several professors who have been working on post-Kantian philosophy in London for many years (Gardner, Gemes, Osborne, Stanford, Malabou), but the growing interest in this area has led to a large number of new London hires (Callanan, Stern, Huddelston, Leech, Bruno, Sinclair, Whistler). The proposed Seminar will take advantage of the new growth and concentration of expertise in post-Kantian philosophy to establish London as an international centre for scholarship in the field.

This is a unique style of application. We are not seeking to fund a single line of inquiry, but rather to facilitate scholarship in a growing field. As PI and Co-I, our role is primarily to equip and empower colleagues across London, with a focus on training young scholars. Our proposal takes a holistic approach in seeking to establish a scholarly network that will collaboratively direct the research agendas and outputs of the LPKS.

To ensure that the identified beneficiaries fully engage with the network, our model of impact is to create a mobile hub that will promote innovative research and provide opportunities for peer-to-peer training and support. The pathways to impact can be summarised under five headings:

1. EVENTS: At the core of the LPKS are three tiers of events aimed to engage potential beneficiaries on separate levels. The termly seminars will be mobile, moving between the six representative philosophy departments, each centred on a theme of specialisation in post-Kantian philosophy. The annual conference will showcase and expand world-leading research in post-Kantian philosophy, ensuring maximum contact between London-based and international researchers. We will provide travel bursaries for select postgraduate and early career researchers from across the UK to attend the conference. The public lectures will enable those from non-philosophy backgrounds in London to access and benefit from the research of the LPKS. Open to a general audience and easily accessible in central London, the talks will increase public engagement with philosophical investigations into the nature of intelligence and its bearing on scientific inquiry, and the nature of truth and its demands on freedom of expression. We will actively promote the talks through accessible media, including Facebook, twitter and mailing lists across London.

2. COMMUNICATIONS ACTIVITY: To ensure that the network's beneficiaries can engage with these outcomes, the LPKS will feature a centralised website that will make available and promote the outputs of our activities. The website, along with connected twitter and Facebook accounts, will notify beneficiaries of upcoming events and also present the results of workshops, both as pre-published papers and recorded lectures. These will be available to international beneficiaries, shared through other post-Kantian consortia in major world cities. The online repository will improve teaching and learning prospects for teachers and students interested in post-Kantian philosophy. Journal and edited volume publications will be produced by all LPKS events. They will serve to widen and advance burgeoning areas in post-Kantian scholarship, attracting readers in the field globally and at all levels.

3. COLLABORATION: The events have been structured to encourage the co-production of knowledge and to share the responsibilities of training, both on a peer-to-peer level, and between senior academics and postgraduate and early career researchers. The collaborative focus of the LPKS will lead to further grant initiatives and spinoff projects.

4. SKILLS: Early career researchers and postgraduate students will be invited to participate in LPKS workshops. These events will provide valuable experience aimed at developing skills in research preparation and presentation, advancing academic standing, and expanding existing professional networks.

5. MILESTONES AND MEASURES OF SUCCESS OF IMPACT ACTIVITIES: To measure beneficiaries' engagement with the planned outcomes of our events and thus to measure the ongoing success of the LPKS, we will track users' interface with the project at several levels. Our postgraduate assistant will monitor the website's online impact by comparing website hits with traffic on adjacent social media platforms that will be used to increase LPKS's visibility. Workshop attendees will provide feedback on events to improve future planning and contact information to widen the project's participant pool. We will establish ongoing contact with the editors from major journals and presses in our field, to ensure the widest scope of potential readership. Finally, we will keep in touch with early career and postgraduate scholars to see how the LPKS enhances the early stages of research in post-Kantian philosophy (entry to graduate programs, academic appointments, etc.) in the months following the project's initial two years.