Call for Papers

We would like to encourage you to participate in the 35th International Wittgenstein Symposium. If you want to present a paper please consult our Instructions for Authors. Before you send your paper to the organizers, please make sure that you have duly registered (see Registration). Please note especially:

  • Papers must be written in English or German.
  • Papers must be sent to the Organizers by 30th of April 2012.
  • Papers must not have been published or accepted for publication elsewhere.
  • The accepted papers will be published.
  • The time slots for sections talks are 40 minutes, including a minimum of 10 minutes for discussion. Hence, only papers will be accepted that can be delivered within maximally 30 minutes.

The Wittgenstein-Symposium Ethics – Society – Politics will come back to, and trace the possible connections between, questions that have last been discussed in Kirchberg in 1996 – Current Issues in Political Philosophy – and 1998 – Applied Ethics. In liberal Western societies, one can observe an increasing politicisation of ethics and, vice versa, an equally increasing ethicisation of politics – a phenomenon that has been termed “etho-politics” by British sociologist Nikolas Rose. With increasing frequency, ethical values are mobilised as motives and justifications for socio-political action while, in turn, moral problems are becoming a subject of political negotiations.
The question of possible (inter-) relations between moral attitudes, civil society and institutions in modern liberal democracies is of particular significance to applied ethics, as it tends to diverge from the well-established liberal principle of neutrality in expecting the polity to make advance decisions on what constitutes the Good Life, and in seeking to fill perceived policy vacua on the grounds of ethical considerations.
While there is a fairly long-standing public discourse of this kind to be found in the field of bioethics, broadly defined, concerning the increasing possibilities of human medicine, it appears that public awareness of issues in the areas of other ethical specialities, such as environmental ethics (cf. climate change), business ethics (cf. financial crisis), or ethics of risk (cf. risk society), is a more recent phenomenon. Yet by now, there is hardly any area of public or private life for which there is no dedicated ethics – be it ethics of governance, be it computer, nano- and neuro-ethics, or be it reproductive ethics and ethics of dentistry, just to name a few.
One may trace the root of this phenomenon to the increasing complexity, scale and scope of scientific, technological and organisational activities in modern societies, which both thrive and depend on an increasing amount of knowledge – which may not be limited to scientific and technological expertise. Through the establishment of ethics committees in many areas of society, ethical expert knowledge diffuses into all realms of human coexistence, and with it diffuses the power of legitimising scientific and political action that builds upon such knowledge. Consequently, ethical expertise gains social significance and public attention. Moreover, ethical issues are increasingly treated on an interdisciplinary level, thus becoming a subject both of meta-ethical inquiry and of political discourse.
On the background of these observations, the symposium Ethics – Society – Politics shall serve as a platform for discussing questions in ethical theory and practice, in view of various dimensions of political and social life.

You can download the Call for Papers and the Outline of the Sections with this link.