Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy

About

LCCP is envisaged as an open space for stimulating discussion, critical debate and inventive co-operation in the Dutch philosophical community. It does not pursue a specific agenda but welcomes different readings of our shared philosophical situation, because it believes that deeper understanding is fostered both by immersion into the debates that traverse our field and by exposition to divergent views. LCCP is not a theory, it is a space in which theories can meet.

Members

The present members of the community work on Kant, post-Kantian German philosophy, 20th-21st century French philosophy and more generally the so-called continental philosophy in the areas of methodology, ontology, aesthetics, ethics, and political theory. They share an interest in German Idealism (especially Hegel and Schelling) and Nietzsche studies; they are committed to furthering the phenomenological tradition (especially Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas); they study existentialism (especially Sartre, de Beauvoir, Kierkegaard and Unamuno); they follow the complex ramifications and confrontations of these traditions in German critical theory and French post-structuralism (for example Adorno, Foucault and Derrida). Their work is informed by radical immanent materialism (inspired by Deleuze and Guattari), as well as contemporary debates on ecology and technology. The members of the Centre share the conviction that philosophy needs constant critical encounter with its history, in order to change its relation to this history from simple provenance into a fruitful genealogy of the present. They believe that the investigation of these traditions should not take place merely as history but as an ongoing, evolving task in present conditions.