Most of the English-speaking world understands Continental philosophy only from German and French sources. This collection investigates how that tradition is transformed if we trace the impact of Continental philosophy from further east. How does this expanded European context change how we understand what makes this philosophy “continental”? Of particular interest are essays that engage with the legacies of Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida (e.g., phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction) within what we typically understand as Central or Eastern Europe.

Is there an Eastern European understanding, practice, or experience of Continental philosophy? Who are the major figures? What are their critiques of and contributions to 20th-/21st-century thought? Is language the only obstacle to Anglophone acceptance of these thinkers and their texts?

Possible Topics Include

• The Role of Phenomenology in the Velvet Revolution
• Deconstructing the Soviet Union
• Authenticity and the Apparatchik
• Roman Ingarden’s Phenomenology of the Work of Art
• Reassessing Derrida’s Reading of Jan Patočka
• Reception of Phenomenology Behind the Iron Curtain
• Gustav Shpet’s (Unknown) Contributions to Continental Philosophy
• Hermeneutic Problems of Translating Husserl
• France Veber’s Theory of Aesthetics
• Язык as the House of Being
• Historicity qua/contra Historical Materialism