INTERPHIL · The international congresses and the transnational shaping of philosophy (1900-1948): Spaces – Struggles – Identity – Knowledge
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2023-01-01 → 2025-12-31
- EU contribution
- €255,768
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
The international congresses and the transnational shaping of philosophy (1900-1948): Spaces – Struggles – Identity – Knowledge
The project addressed a simple but neglected question: how did philosophy become a modern academic discipline with a recognised identity, institutional boundaries, and international authority? To answer it, the research used the first ten International Congresses of Philosophy (1900–1948) as a privileged observatory, treating them as moments where philosophers negotiated what counted as “philosophy,” who could legitimately represent it, and how national traditions interacted within a shared European arena. This matters beyond the history of ideas because disciplines shape education, public debate, and the production of knowledge. The project shows how aspirations to international cooperation coexisted with competition, stereotypes, and political constraints, and how the conditions for intellectual exchange can be strengthened or undermined by wider historical forces. The action pursued four overall objectives: reconstructing the international networks connected to the congresses; analysing struggles and collaborations (including the diplomatic uses of philosophy); studying disputes over philosophy’s boundaries in relation to neighbouring disciplines; and identifying the topics, concepts, and authors that achieved international legitimacy. The main conclusion is that the congresses functioned at once as arenas of dialogue and as arenas of rivalry. Philosophy’s disciplinary identity did not emerge only from abstract debates: it relied on long-term institutional reforms, stabilising devices such as curricula, handbooks, journals and reference works, and recurring boundary conflicts. The internationalisation of philosophy was also strongly shaped by geopolitics, especially after 1918 and under authoritarian regimes, which altered participation, exchanges, and the balance of symbolic authority.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
INTERPHIL analyses the construction of philosophy’s disciplinary identity by studying the first ten International Congresses in Philosophy (1900-1948), relating them to the emergence in Europe of a new academic space that aimed at unity across different schools of thought. Today, the still persistent cleavage between the “analytic” and “continental” ways of practicing philosophy, hyper-specialization and hyper-production suggest that the project of a philosophical unity was not achieved. The majority of philosophers currently acknowledge the uncontrollable pluralism of the discipline and have abandoned the dream of a transnational community aiming at collectively defining the discipline and at discussing its main advancements. Still, this dream had important consequences, as it fostered the emergence of institutional spaces of intellectual exchange. At the beginning of the 20th century, for the first time in history, the International Congress in Philosophy, organised, then supervised by a French group over almost fifty years, aimed at achieving this philosophical exchange and unity. The group of philosophers involved got progressively larger, and had to arbitrate disputes between different participants and include or co-opt subalterns or self-excluded European and non-European groups, such as those from Russia. How did these actors deal with the contradiction between ambitions of universalism and rising nationalisms? INTERPHIL adopts an inter-disciplinary and multi-scalar approach in order to explain the constitution of a transnational philosophical space, the formation of philosophical ideas of Europe and the participation of philosophers in international institutions such as the League of Nations. The approach is socio-historical: bibliometric, lexicographic, sociological, historical and philosophical.
Original text from CORDIS.
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Data: CORDIS, © European Union