Publications

Unsettling Ideas and the Power of Style

Budapest. Photo by Bruce Mars

This paper by Sharon Rider was a keynote address held at the fifth annual meeting of the Registers of Philosophy Conference, at the Institute of Philosophy of the Research Center for the Humanities at the Hungarian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Budapest. The conference series explored various styles, genres and linguistic manners of philosophical writing and speaking – i.e. the range of voice within philosophy.

The topic for Registers V was the unity of form and content in philosophy.
How uniform really philosophy today? Is the homogeneity of styles dangerous for philosophy itself? Are there themes that only fit well with some genres or styles? What is the exact connection between content and form? Should philosophers pay attention to genres practiced outside of academia? The conference addressed the problems of content and form in philosophy both from historical and contemporary perspectives, from the viewpoint of analytic and continental philosophy, as well as from the standpoint of styles that fall outside the scope of academic philosophy.