Our three day virtual conference organised by Warwick Economics PhD students will bring together international PhD research from across the globe.

The 10th annual Warwick Economics PhD Conference will be hosted virtually this year. Our three-day conference organised by Warwick Economics PhD students brings together PhD research from across the globe.

Date:8-9 June 2022
Location: University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

This is a student-led conference organised annually by PhD students at the Warwick Economics Department, supported and attended by the Warwick Economics Department and members of the faculty.

Conference Programme and Meeting Link

The Conference Programme is available to view here.

About the PhD Conference

Find out more about how the PhD conference first began.

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Previous Years

Learn more about previous conferences.

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Application

Find out more about the application form and details about the application process.

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Contact

Our Campus is in Coventry, a city that lies at the very heart of England and is easy to get to by road, rail and air.

related:https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/events/phd-conferences

Raffaele Grandoni: “Vital dialogues: Georges Canguilhem on the history of science”

This week Raffaele Grandoni will present his paper 'Vital Dialogue: Georges Canguilhem on the history of science'.

Abstract:

The main feature of the post-Foucauldian historical epistemology (e.g. Hacking, A. Davidson) lies in retracing how the social, cultural and political context determines the emergence of scientific concepts and, in turn, how science plays a role in the government of populations and individuals. However, this tradition fails to provide a normative standpoint from which to judge how relations between science and non-scientific activities affects our lives. A solution, I claim, can be found in one of the sources of these authors: the French philosopher and historian of life sciences Georges Canguilhem.

With my talk, I will address how in grounding it on a vitalist philosophy, Canguilhem turns the history of science into a tool for ethically evaluating political uses of scientific concepts, without introducing any normative criteria from the outside. I will show that Canguilhem’s history of science shares the main feature of post-Foucauldian historical epistemology – i.e. revealing the role of socio-political values in the formation of scientific concepts and retracing the process through which they acquired their autonomy – while also providing the tools for an inherent ethical critique concerning processes of normalisation legitimised by science. My idea is that by defining life as the living being’s unconscious creation of better ways to relate to its environment, Canguilhem developed a critical approach to all attempts (including scientific ones) to uniform human subjectivities under strict norms. From this, I claim that this vitalist background does not only enable Canguilhem’s history of science to evaluate socio-cultural-political influences on scientific concepts, but it also entrusts it with the ethical aim of opposing (from an objective standpoint and without undermining science’s validity) science-led policies that constrain human beings’ capacity to autonomously create their own norms.