Analyzing Catholic Philosophy
2015 Annual ACPA Meeting
(8 October-October 11)

Theme for 2015 Meeting

May 2014

To our colleagues and members of the ACPA:

We are pleased to invite you to Boston for the ACPA’s 89th annual meeting, to be held in autumn 2015. Our theme will be “Analyzing Catholic Philosophy.” We mean ‘Catholic philosophy’ as both what analyzes and what gets analyzed. As subject of analysis, we hope for works in Catholic philosophy that analyze. The obvious connection here is to so-called analytic philosophy, as it was developed especially by Anglophone thinkers of the past quarter millennium (including what has been called analytical Thomism). Through analyzing logic and language–syntax, semantics, and discourse–this broad movement claimed to reveal the content and structure of our concepts and ultimately of mind, society, morality, and many parts of what is real. With its largely apriorist approach under recent attack from a radical empiricism that was once its ally, as well as from alternative methods, similarities and differences between this ‘analytic philosophy’ and Aristotelian and medieval forms of analysis call for fresh inquiry. Not all worthwhile analysis is logico-linguistic, of course, and we also welcome papers offering divergent philosophical ways, either familiar or novel, of analyzing phenomena and topics, both traditional and long neglected.

With Catholic philosophy as object of analysis, we look for submissions that investigate Catholic philosophy itself in its various forms. What are its principal elements, and how do they connect, interact? What makes some philosophy Catholic? What is Catholic within it, and what is philosophical? Are these two in tension? Complementary? Unrelated? What are its chief types– Augustinian, Thomistic, Franciscan, Jesuit, phenomenological, existentialist, ‘analytic’, etc.–and how do they relate one to another? How can we understand Catholic philosophy as it exists outside the continents that border the north Atlantic? Historical analyses of Catholic philosophy’s various narratives would likewise be welcome and very much in order.

Moreover, we know that to analyze is not restricted to taking something apart in thought, but can extend to breaking it down, dismantling it, in the external world. So, certain projects that seek to ‘deconstruct’ some of our ideas or social systems can also fit within this framework.

We cordially invite you to submit papers on any of these topics, or in any philosophical area, problem, controversy, school of thought, subfield, tradition, or method.

Respectfully,

Jorge L. A. Garcia

ACPA Vice President
Professor, Philosophy Department
Boston College