May 28, 2020
Dear East-West Philosophers’ Conference Participants:
| We hope that you and your families and friends are faring as well as possible in these difficult and uncertain times. If we had not been forced by the COVID-19 pandemic to postpone the Conference, |
| we would now be all together here in Honolulu, happily immersed in the extraordinary program promised by the 12th iteration of the East-West Philosophers’ Conference series. Looking forward, we thought it best to keep in touch with everyone, and to keep you informed on our plans as they evolve. At this juncture, we are committed to hosting the Conference from May 21-28, 2021. To this end, we have secured our meeting venue, the East-West Center’s Imin Conference Center, and have provisionally updated the program schedule to reflect the new dates. But the future course of the coronavirus pandemic remains uncertain. Our current thinking is that by the middle of the fall season, we will probably be in a better position to see what the global situation is likely to be in May 2021, especially with respect to restrictions on international travel and social distancing measures. On or about the middle of October 2020, we will contact you again with a further update on the status of the Conference. We will see if this is the time for you to provisionally confirm your intention to participate. Maybe it will still be too soon. In any case, in registering your response, decisions can then be made about opening up the Conference for additional individual and panel abstracts. While the events of these last several months have been extraordinarily challenging, they have served to reinforce the relevance of the Conference theme of “Walls: Thinking through Insularity.” Again, for many of us, the walls that have confined us have also been the site of some precious family time, and an occasion to focus on our different projects. We are committed to continuing the East-West Philosophers’ Conference series and are looking forward to welcoming you to the islands. |
| Yours truly, Roger T. Ames, UH Peter D. Hershock, EWC Tamara Albertini, UH |