Phenomenology, the Digital, and the Virtual

 

Call for Abstracts

28-29 August 2027, Fudan University (Shanghai, China)

https://sites.google.com/view/nfpr-2027

 

Organisers: Chang Liu (Fudan University), Lan Ying (Zhejiang University)

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Keynotes:

Shaun Gallagher (University of Memphis)

Nicolas de Warren (The Pennsylvania State University)

Zhongwei Li (Zhejiang University)

Zhida Luo (Sun Yat-sen University)

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Conference Description

With “Phenomenology, the Digital and the Virtual” as the theme of the Sixth Biennial Conference of the Network for Phenomenological Research, we hope to bring together phenomenologists and scholars from related fields to examine the transformations of contemporary experience and their implications for phenomenological philosophy.

 

Since the emergence of phenomenology at the beginning of the twentieth century, the lifeworld that phenomenologists inhabit and seek to describe has undergone profound transformations. Husserl could analyze the experience of mistaking a mannequin for a real person in the street; today, phenomenologists may equally ask how virtual objects, such as those encountered in Elden Ring, are experienced as present, spatially situated, and practically meaningful. Heidegger’s analyses of everyday practical involvement acquire new significance when building, exploring, and interacting take place within virtual environments such as Minecraft.

 

Yet the relevance of the phenomenological tradition to contemporary digital experience extends well beyond Husserl and Heidegger. Edith Stein’s analyses of empathy and the experience of other minds invite renewed reflection on forms of interpersonal encounter mediated by avatars, artificial agents, and digital interfaces. Moritz Geiger’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience offers resources for examining new modes of attention, absorption, and aesthetic engagement in interactive and computational environments. Roman Ingarden’s analyses of the ontological structure of artworks and of objects whose determinations are partly left open provide an especially suggestive framework for reconsidering the status of virtual objects, fictional worlds, and interactive digital artifacts.

 

Max Scheler’s accounts of affectivity, value, and social experience can likewise be brought to bear on technologically mediated forms of emotional and communal life. Sartre’s analyses of imagination, absence, embodiment, and the gaze acquire new relevance in environments in which presence and absence, visibility and anonymity, are technologically reorganized. Finally, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment and perception offers a powerful point of departure for investigating how bodily habits, sensorimotor capacities, and perceptual fields are transformed through interfaces, immersive media, and virtual spaces. The digital and the virtual thus do not merely introduce a new collection of objects for phenomenological description; they also provide a field in which many of the central concepts developed across the phenomenological tradition can be tested, extended, and reformulated.

 

Digital technologies no longer function merely as external tools. They increasingly mediate perception, memory, communication, work, sociality, and self-understanding. Smartphones, social media, algorithms, digital platforms, databases, and artificial intelligence shape the practical horizons within which everyday life unfolds. At the same time, datafication transforms activities, habits, and interactions into information that can be recorded, processed, predicted, and reorganized.

 

The virtual raises a related but distinct set of questions. Virtual worlds, video games, avatars, augmented and virtual reality, telepresence, digital twins, and online communities are now significant domains of human experience. Within them, people perceive and act, encounter others, acquire skills, form attachments, inhabit spaces, and participate in shared practices. The virtual therefore calls for renewed reflection on embodiment, perception, action, selfhood, intersubjectivity, spatiality, temporality, presence, absence, reality, and worldhood.

 

Recent developments in artificial intelligence, robotics, cyborg technologies, brain–computer interfaces, and other emerging systems further complicate established distinctions between human and machine, natural and artificial intelligence, and physical and technologically mediated interaction. They also raise a fundamental methodological question: whether phenomenological concepts developed primarily for human experience can, or should, be extended to artificial systems.

 

The conference therefore asks not only what phenomenology can tell us about digital and virtual technologies, but also what these technologies may require phenomenology to rethink about its own concepts and methods.

 

Topics of Interest

We invite contributions from phenomenology and closely related philosophical approaches, including analytic philosophy of mind, cognitive science, AI philosophy, and videogame studies. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

 

• Phenomenology of digital and virtual environments

• Virtual reality, augmented reality, video games, and virtual worlds

• Artificial intelligence, generative AI, embodied AI, and robotics

• Cyborgs and human–machine interaction

• Digital embodiment, avatars, virtual identity, and intersubjectivity

• Social media, online communities, platforms, and algorithms

• Datafication and technological mediation

• Memory, attention, perception, imagination, and presence in digital environments

• Spatiality, temporality, agency, affordances, and skill in virtual environments

• Phenomenology, postphenomenology, enactivism, and philosophy of technology

• Methodological, ethical, social, and existential questions concerning digital and virtual technologies

 

Submission Guidelines

Please send your proposal to timeasker@yahoo.com by 31 January 2027.

 

Your proposal should include:

 

• A presentation title

• An extended abstract of approximately 800 words

• A brief biography of the author

 

All submissions will undergo peer review. Following the review and selection process, successful applicants will be notified by email no later than 28 February 2027. Applicants who have not received a notification by that date should understand that their proposal has not been selected.

 

Please note that the number of available slots for selected speakers is limited, and that the rejection rate is therefore expected to be higher than usual for conferences of this kind.

 

Important Dates

31 January 2027 — Submission deadline
28 February 2027 — Notification of acceptance by email, no later than this date
28–29 August 2027 — Conference at Fudan University, Shanghai

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About the Network for Phenomenological Research (NfPR)

This is the fifth edition of the Biennial Conference of the Network for Phenomenological Research (NfPR). The NfPR proudly looks back on four previous conferences, held at the University of Munich (2017), the Universities of Neuchâtel and Zurich (2019), the University of Liège (2021), and the University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (2023), University of Okayama (2025).

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