The BSP Annual Conference this year is in the wonderful city-by-the-sea that is Brighton, in the UK. The event runs over three days from the 21st to 23rd of May, and is hosted by the Philosophy Department at the University of Sussex. Happily, (for me, at least!) I’ll be a speaker at the event – along with 60 or so other speakers and six keynotes.

The event is titled ‘Heidegger 50 years on – Is There Still a God That Can Save Us?’, and this theme (as well as the date the conference is being convened) refer to both the 50th anniversary of Heidegger’s death and his ‘infamous’ (to quote the event’s call for papers) 1966 interview with Der Spiegel published posthumously in 1976 soon after his passing. BSP conferences usually have a much more amorphous framing, this year is very interestingly very different – which is a result of the great idea and generous hosting offer the society had from Prof Tanja Staehler and Prof Mahon O’Brien at the University of Sussex. There’s gonna be a lot of Heidegger!

I am no Heidegger scholar – however. So why did I submit an abstract to speak at the event? I wasn’t going to, and applied very late in the game. However, the question in the subtitle, the event’s framing, the question ‘Is There Still a God That Can Save Us?’, kept on nudging me. This was because my current research and writing is on Nietzsche – and a key idea in Nietzsche’s philosophy is the death of god: god is dead. 

How could any 20th century philosopher, let alone Heidegger who was steeped in Nietzsche, say something like this without them deliberately, intentionally confronting the idea of the death of god? So, that’s what I decided to talk about – Nietzsche and the death of god. And as I was thinking about this and putting together a plan and the abstract, an exciting approach to Nietzsche’s death of god occurred to me which I am quite convinced wouldn’t have happened without this event and theme!

Anyhow – the BSP event is – as the overview puts it ‘very much a “Heidegger and…” conference’. Accordingly, there are approaches spanning the so-called continental and analytic spectrum on subjects as diverse as film, poetry, AI, technology, religion, art, ecology, colonialism, medicine, healthcare, mathematics, culture, gender, metaphysics, and war from a whole host of speakers and keynotes also touching upon writers such as Derrida, Scarry, Stiegler, Foucault, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Nancy, Stein, Fink, Freud, Kant, Weyl – just to mention a few. Not much – if any – Nietzsche tho. Other than my paper – so that is nice.

My paper is titled ‘Nietzsche, the death of god & the rebirth of tragedy’ – which may give a hint as to where I am going with this to any Nietzsche readers out there…