In June, I traveled overseas for the first time since 2019 (and I managed not to get Covid!). London, Dublin, Amsterdam, and Bucharest were my airport destinations; Oxford University, University College Dublin, University of Amsterdam, and Dimitri Cantemir Christian University my academic hosts. The events were ISNS in Oxford; a mini-conference on Nietzsche at UCD (papers by me, Tsarina Doyle [NUI-Galway] and Brian O'Connor [UCD]), and then an afternoon workshop on draft chapters of my co-authored Marx book; an anti-moralist conference on capitalism in the 21st-century in Amsterdam; and the IVR (international legal philosophy event) in Bucharest.
I'll start with travel stuff, which may be of some practical value to readers, and then move to intellectual substance.
Travel
European airports were not in good shape, as widely reported in the media: the departure from Dublin was the worst (one hour on the "regular" security line, but it operated in an orderly way); the departure from Bucharest (surprisingly) was the best, despite other problems there. Arrivals were generally fine, although my wife had a bad experience at Schipol in Amsterdam. Aer Lingus deserves notice for scummy airplane behavior by cancelling my afternoon flight from London to Dublin the morning of the flight, and then rescheduling me for a flight the next morning which was useless. They did refund the flight, and I rebooked on Ryan Air, which was actually quite competent. (Aer Lingus from Dublin to Amsterdam was fine, however.)
Tarom, the Romanian airline that I flew from Amsterdam to Bucharest, and whose lounge I visited in Bucharest later in the trip (they share it with Lufthansa) cannot be recommended. Even in business class at midday from Amsterdam, the "service" consisted of water, tea and coffee. The flight was scheduled to depart at 11:40 am, but they "waited" 50 minutes for passengers allegedly caught in the security line disaster at Amsterdam Schipol (I was in business class to get "fast track" security," which was somewhat better, but still screwed up--Schipol is an embarrassment for a rich country); the passengers who planned ahead apparently didn't count. Even weirder, the only "late" passengers boarded 30 minutes late, but we sat for another 20.
On my departure from Romania, the Tarom lounge at the Bucharest airport (to which I had access as a United Gold member) was not air conditioned. (As one driver told me, everyone in Bucharest calls July "the hot month," but only a few parts of the airport are air-conditioned. Those used to bourgeois comforts are in for an unhappy surprise in Bucharest. Even the DCCU, which hosted the IVR in Bucharest, had only a few air-conditioned rooms, which did not include the auditorium where I delivered the opening plenary address. I commend the couple of hundred of hearty souls who attended under those circumstances! Here are some photos from Twitter.)
Since I was abroad for a couple of weeks, I had to check luggage everywhere I went, and everywhere it arrived on time. So kudos to modern technology and the airport personnel for making that part of travel run smoothly.
Substance
Back in 2015, I organized with some esteemed colleagues the International Society for Nietzsche Studies, as an alternative forum to the existing and rather unsatisfactory Nietzsche societies (NANS and others--although Lanier Anderson, Paul Katsafanas and others are now doing their best to salvage NANS). Nietzsche studies has matured considerably in the last thirty years, with a now strong international group of scholars who are both philosophically and philologically knowledgeable. ISNS has become the forum for those scholars. The recent meeting in Oxford was our 5th (Covid delayed things, obviously), and was extremely rewarding: I learned from both the papers and from the comments of the conference participants. I am particularly pleased by the quality of submissions from junior scholars over the years. After initial support from my colleague Michael Forster (Bonn) and his Humboldt Chair, it is especially gratifying that so many international scholars now pay their own way to come to ISNS, confirming its place as the premier scholarly forum for Nietzsche studies.
University College Dublin has long had the most interesting philosophy department in Ireland, one that is "pluralistic" in the good sense (not the idiotic SPEP sense): it is a major center in the Anglophone world for scholarship on the post-Kantian European traditions (e.g., Maeve Cooke and Brian O'Connor), but faculty there also do important work on analytic philosophy and its history. It is pretty clearly the best philosophy department in Ireland (even allowing for the excellent addition of John Divers to TCD).
Professor O'Connor kindly organized a day-long set of events connected to my visit. Early in the day, we had a mini-Nietzsche conference, feature myself (presenting this), Tsarina Doyle and O'Connor. Doyle offered an ambitious account of Nietzsche's naturalism as including a substantive metaphysical commitment to a view of causal powers (I'm skeptical, but it was well-done); O'Connor, who is now writing a book on Wagner, discussed Wagner's remarkably "progressive" early political writings, contrasting Wagner's views with Nietzsche's. (Ironically, the "progressive" Wagner was contemporaneous with the raving anti-semitic maniac Wagner!) In the afternoon, several graduate students, as well as Professors O'Connor and Cooke, gave me excellent feedback on several chapters of the forthcoming Routledge Philosophers volume on Marx that I am writing with Jaime Edwards. We discussed historical materialism, Marxian economics, and the early Marx, and the book will be improved by this intelligent feedback.
Amsterdam was an unusual event for me, since many of the participants were not philosophers (or legal scholars), but political and social theorists without philosophy backgrounds (the organizer, Enzo Rossi, was an exception, since his training is in philosophy although he is now in a political science department, and he has become the focal point for a vibrant community of European scholars working on realist approaches to political philosophy, against the tide of moralizing blather that dominates in the Anglophone world).
What was particularly striking to me is that everyone, regardless of disciplinary background, was focused on what actually matters. If one spends too much time among self-identified analytic philosophers these days one might think the pressing issues confronting humanity are the latest "epistemic injustice" or the number of "people of color" employed in philosophy departments. By contrast, at this conference the focus was on capitalism, its pathologies, and its future. This conference was a good reminder of how utterly morally ridiculous and trivial so much of analytic philosophy has become.
The final event was the 30th Biennial World Congress of Philosophy of Law & Social Philosophy (IVR), this one in honor of Hegel and Rawls. Outside the Anglosphere, the IVR is the major event in the field of legal philosophy. I attended for the first time in Lucerne in 2019 (the "before times"), and found it quite delightful. Experimental jurisprudence is thriving in Europe, for example, thanks to a group of younger scholars, who were well-represented in Lucerne and again in Bucharest. I have benefitted a great deal over the years from interaction with legal philosophers--many, but not all, legal realists--in Italy, Poland, Scandinavia, France, and Serbia, among other places and the IRV is an opportunity to see many of them.
So I was really pleased to have the opportunity to give the opening plenary address at the 30th World Congress, and I do commend, as noted earlier, the several hundred conference attendees who suffered through that talk in a sweltering auditorium, one of several failures by the host institution. (The legal philosopher Michael Moore [Illinois] chided me at dinner that night for giving a talk that "poured cold water" on the celebration of Hegel and Rawls, but I can imagine many of those there would have welcomed a real bucket of cold water.)
On the other hand, DCCU treated me and the other plenary speakers exceptionally well, and I also had the opportunity to meet Henry Richardson (Georgetown) and Elizabeth Holzleithner (Vienna)--who also gave plentary talks--whom I did not know previously. The IVR is such an important forum for the international community of legal philosophers that I do think they need to interrogate conditions on the ground a bit more carefully, to make sure they are adequate for all the non-plenary attendees. Despite that, I was glad to see friends from Sweden, Spain, and Serbia, and to meet colleagues from Poland, Japan, and elsewhere.
The whole trip was a stark reminder for me of how much we have lost by the inability to gather with colleagues, intellectually and socially, during the pandemic era.
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