PPA+ Conference

Philosophy, Politics, Anthropology & Allied Disciplines

Keynote: David Graeber (LSE) & David Wengrow (UCL), ‘The Myth of the Stupid Savage: Rousseau’s Ghost and the Future of Political Anthropology’

Call for abstracts: The basic premise of PPA+ is that the fields of philosophy, politics, anthropology, and other social sciences have much more in common than is typically acknowledged. Philosophical claims about human beings had to start somewhere and, indeed, they usually began as basic empirical generalisations about the nature of human societies. Anthropology began as an offshoot from the field philosophy in the early 19th century and it continues to carry the same fundamental set of theoretical building blocks with it into the present day. Politics and other social science disciplines have comparable origins, typically traceable to moral philosophy. As an interdisciplinary conference and scholarly society, PPA+ aims to articulate the theoretical principles, methodological orientations, and empirical data that form the basis of philosophy, politics, anthropology and allied disciplines as traditionally distinct fields. Through this collaboration, we hope to identify persistent shortcomings and biases in our thinking about the nature of human social life ways and to find better ways forward.

Predecessors of this conference were held in New Orleans for the last three years. This year’s conference will be hosted by the University of Amsterdam’s Departments of Anthropology and Political Science.