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PG Work in Progress Seminar

About the WiP

The Postgraduate Work in Progress (WiP) Seminar is a student-organised session intended to provide all philosophy graduate students, and occasionally graduate students undertaking philosophy projects in other departments, with the platform to present and discuss their ongoing research.

All philosophy PGs, whether MA, MPhil, or PhD, are encouraged to attend, and faculty members and visitors to the department are very welcome. No extensive knowledge of the week’s topic is necessary.

The seminar offers an invaluable opportunity for graduates to present their work in a friendly, supportive, unassessed setting, and receive vital peer-review feedback and tips, allowing them to improve and practise defence of their work, as well as to get to know and socialise with fellow students and members of the wider department.

Seminars normally take place on Thursdays, from 5:00pm until 6:15pm in S2.77, and can also be attended online on via Teams. The title and abstract for each talk along with a Teams link is circulated to all PG students on a Monday.

The format will consist of a roughly 30-minute presentation of a paper, followed by a roughly 30-minute open discussion and Q&A.

Current term schedule

A list of seminars occurring in the current academic term can be found below.

Term 2 (2023-2024) Schedule

Thursday 11th January - Aurian De Briey - 'From Heidegger's social ontology to his answer to the technological challenge'
Thursday 18th January - Emily Boocock - 'Some Characteristic Features of Extremist Ideology'
Thursday 25th January - Chris Hall - 'Knowing What We're Doing'
Thursday 1st February - Sara Gorea - 'Sideways music and sideways obligations'
Thursday 8th February - Gustavo Ruiz da Silva - 'Paul Veyne: Elegiac Storiography'
Thursday 15th February - Lumeng Liu
Thursday 22nd February - Simon Gansinger
Thursday 29th February - Efan Owen
Thursday 7th March - Harland Cossons
Thursday 14th March - Oscar North-Concar

Previous term schedule

Term 1 (2023-2024) Schedule

Friday 6th October - Clarissa Mueller - 'A Phenomenology of Neurodivergence'
Thursday 12th October - Eve Poirier - 'Plausible Abstractions: The role of fiction, truth and history in Genealogy and State of Nature Philosophy'
Thursday 19th October - Aurian de Briey - 'The Articulation between Liberty and Happiness'
Thursday 26th October - Ben Campion - 'Videogame Photography Returns: Photography versus ‘the Photographic’
Thursday 2nd November - Elias Girma Wondimu - 'Mixed-Raced Inclusion: Revising Existing Definitions of Race'
Thursday 9th November - Johan Heemskerk
Thursday 16th November - Haley Burke
Thursday 23rd November - Fridolin Neumann
Thursday 30th November - Oscar North-Concar - 'A Problem For Objectivism in Ethics'
Thursday 7th December - Marco Rienzi

Notes for presenters

There is no strict minimum or maximum limit on paper length, and you may present an entire paper, a chapter of a thesis, an article, or outline the scope of a project, etc. The general recommendation is 3000-5000 words, as your work should be amenable to summation within 30 minutes.

Please provide your title and abstract to the WiP organisers by the end of the Sunday on the week you are presenting.

Please keep in mind that the seminar is best used to gather valuable suggestions with which to improve to your work, and to gain experience in presenting your work. As such, your work does not need to be a watertight, polished piece, but may be a draft or substantial set of notes. You are welcome to share work at all stages of the writing process.

Contact the organisers

If you would like to present at the WiP or have any questions about it, please email both Chris Hall (Chris.Hall.1@warwick.ac.uk) and Grainne O'Shea (Grainne.O-Shea@warwick.ac.uk).


 

Next talk:

Thursday 8th February 2024, 5pm, S2.77
Gustavo Ruiz da Silva: 'Paul Veyne: Elegiac Storiography'

WiP Organisers 23/24:

Chris Hall (Chris.Hall.1@warwick.ac.uk)

Grainne O'Shea (Grainne.O-Shea@warwick.ac.uk)

   

 

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Postgraduate Work in Progress Seminar

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Location: S0.08/online

Mostyn Taylor Crocket’s ‘Towards a Genealogy of Modernity: Time and History in Althusser, Balibar and Foucault’.

Abstract

In this paper I investigate the possibility of a genealogical study of modernity. Foucauldian genealogy is an important historical approach but is one that has, I argue, been unable to properly analyse what I call combinatory phenomena (e.g. modernity or capitalism). I suggest that this inability stems from genealogy’s rejection of totalization. I claim that turning to Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar’s contributions to Reading Capital can provide us with a way of understanding ‘combinatory phenomena’ which does not lapse into a totalization. I show how their critique of traditional historical periodization and their theory of ‘heterogenous temporalities’ allows us to understand the social formation as constructed out of multiple times and histories. Finally, I show how this can serve as the theoretical basis of a method which investigates the connections between genealogies in producing ‘combinatory phenomena’, taking Foucault’s genealogies as my examples.

 

 

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