Virtue in Aristotle
On April 18th and 19th, King’s College London will host a conference on the topic of virtue in Aristotle, with an emphasis on how this theme emerges in works other than the Nicomachean Ethics. Our speakers will be Giulia Bonasio (Durham), Daniel Ferguson (KCL), Elena Cagnoli Fiecconi (UCL), Margaret Hampson (St. Andrews), Jozef Müller (UC-Riverside and Hamburg), Karen Margrethe Nielsen (Oxford), and Daniel Wolt (Bilkent). For more information, please email Daniel Ferguson (). We thank the British Society for the History of Philosophy, as well as the Mind Association and King’s College London for their generous support.
Adorno's 'Sexual Taboos and Law Today' – Sixty Years On
This hybrid one-day symposium on Theodor W. Adorno's essay 'Sexual Taboos and Law Today' will be held at the University of Warwick on 25 February 2023 and on Zoom. The event is bringing together scholars from the fields of legal studies, psychoanalysis, pedagogics, social theory, and philosophy to revisit Adorno's controversial essay in times of #MeToo, identity politics, and heightened public concern for gender equality and transgender right.
This symposium has been organised with the generous support of the Aristotelian Society, the Society for Applied Philosophy, the British Society for the History of Philosophy, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. For further information, please see our website or email Antonia Hofstätter ().
2023 Keeling Graduate and Early Career Conference in Ancient Philosophy (KGC)
The 2023 Keeling Graduate and Early Career Conference in Ancient Philosophy (KGC) will be an open-themed, two-day event on Ancient Greek Philosophy, featuring six talks from postgraduate students and early career researchers, as well as two keynote lectures. We are delighted to confirm that our keynote speakers will be Dr Margaret Hampson (St Andrews) and Dr Joachim Aufderheide (King's College London). The 2023 KGC is to take place at the Department of Philosophy, University College London, on 10th – 11th March 2023. The event has been organised with the generous support of the Keeling Centre for Ancient Philosophy at UCL, the British Society for the History of Philosophy, and the Aristotelian Society.
MindGrad 2022
MindGrad is a long-standing annual graduate Philosophy of Mind Conference held under the auspices of the Warwick Mind & Action Research Centre. This year, MindGrad 2022 will take place on the 19th and 20th of November in the Zeeman Building of the University of Warwick a full schedule and further details can be found on the WMA webpage: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/research/researchcentres/wma/graduates/mindgrad/schedule/. There will be 6 papers delivered by graduate speakers from across the UK and Europe along with 2 keynote speaker talks. This year, we are delighted to announce that Professor Lucy O'Brien (UCL) and Professor Adrian Moore (Oxford) will be giving the keynote talks. Attendance for all is free. If you are interested in joining the event, please email .
Northern Association for Ancient Philosophy Conference 2023
The Northern Association for Ancient Philosophy (NAAP) aims to foster an inclusive community of ancient philosophers and to promote current research in ancient philosophy by scholars of all career levels. The 2023 meeting takes place at the University of St Andrews, 11-12 April 2023, and will feature talks from Peter Adamson (LMU/KCL), Patricia Clarke (Aberdeen), Sophia Connell (BBK), Ellisif Wasmuth (Essex), and two UK based graduate students. The event is fully accessible and open to all, and we especially encourage graduate students and early career researchers to attend. Please contact organisers Margaret Hampson () and Alex Long () for further information, particularly if you have accessibility needs.
BIPPA Regional Conference on Women in the History of Ancient Philosophy
The BIPPA regional conferences are one-day events created to foster a sense of community among Philosophy postgraduates working on the same region of the UK or Ireland, and on related themes and areas of Philosophy. The first BIPPA regional conference for Wales, the Midlands and the West of England will have as its title 'BIPPA Conference on Women in the History of Ancient Philosophy', and will accept talks from graduate students working on any topic related to women in the history of Philosophy up to the medieval period. It will be hosted by Warwick University, and Caterina Pellò (Nottingham University) will deliver a keynote address. The conference is due to take place in February 2023. For further information, contact Pablo Dopico Fernandez ()
"(In)justice in Ancient Philosophy", the Twelfth Annual Cambridge Graduate Conference in Ancient Philosophy
"(In)justice in Ancient Philosophy", the Twelfth Annual Cambridge Graduate Conference in Ancient Philosophy, will be held March 17-18 2023 at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge. Taking a broad geographical approach to the ancient world, the conference seeks to interrogate ancient philosophical accounts of justice and injustice, and to examine issues such as gender, race, citizenship and imperialism within ancient philosophy, its socio-political context and related reception history. Keynote speakers are M.M. McCabe and Shaul Tor. Contact: Quinton Gardiner () .
Scottish Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy XI
After a three-year hiatus in 2020-2022 caused by Covid-19, the Scottish Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy (SSEMP) will now resume. SSEMP XI is the eleventh edition of a yearly international workshop that brings together established scholars, young researchers and advanced graduate students working in the field of Early Modern Philosophy. SSEMP welcomes papers on any topic in early modern philosophy (broadly defined to mean pre-Kantian philosophy ranging from late Renaissance philosophy to the early Enlightenment). Keynote speakers for this edition are Jennifer Marusic (Edinburgh) and Philippe Hamou (Paris-Nanterre). It takes place on 4-5 May 2023 at the University of St. Andrews. Deadline for submissions of abstracts is 15 December 2022. Contact: Mogens Laerke ()
American University in Bulgaria – AUBG
Date: June 21–23, 2022
Resp: Diego Lucci, American University in Bulgaria, and the John Locke Society
Keynote Speakers: Sorana Corneanu (University of Bucharest) and Shelley Weinberg (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
The 2022 John Locke Conference will gather scholars interested in any aspect of Locke’s oeuvre, with the purpose of encouraging research on this important author and promoting interaction between experts in different disciplines, such as philosophy, theology, education, political theory, intellectual history, and economic thought. Paper proposals concerning any aspect of Locke’s thought, his influences, and his impact are welcome. Paper proposals shall be submitted by the deadline of December 31, 2021 via email to Prof. Diego Lucci at and shall consist of the following two documents:
1: An anonymous abstract of 500 to 750 words, preceded by the paper title. In order to ensure blind review, the abstract shall not contain any information that could identify the author.
2: A short bio of the author of no more than 150 words, preceded by the paper title.
The abstract and the short bio shall be in two different MS Word files, both in .doc or .docx format and both attached to one email message to Prof. Lucci. Files in different formats (e.g., .odt, .pdf, .rtf, etc.) will not be accepted. Paper proposals that do not meet the aforesaid criteria will not be accepted. Paper proposals submitted after the deadline of December 31, 2021 will not be accepted.
All paper proposals will undergo a blind review. Only a selected number of papers will be accepted for presentation at the conference. Each presenter will be given 30 minutes to present their paper at the conference, and each presentation will be followed by a 10-minute Q&A session. All those submitting a paper proposal will be notified of the outcome of their submission, via email, by the end of February 2022.
Attendance by those not delivering a paper is welcome and free. Although there is no registration fee, those not delivering a paper shall register by April 30, 2022 by contacting Prof. Diego Lucci at:
For more information see the conference webpage (which also includes a link to an info sheet on the venue of the conference, travel, accommodation, and other practical aspects of this event): https://www.aubg.edu/2022-john-locke-conference
University of Edinburgh
Date: TBA
Resp. Alix Cohen (Edinburgh) / Andrew Chignell (Princeton)
The aim of our conference is to explore the claim that Kant provides an invaluable resource for thinking about epistemic responsibility. Our distinctive approach is to combine an analysis of (1) Kant’s account of epistemic normativity, and (2) its implications for contemporary epistemology. The first aspect tackles systematic questions about how to draw a contemporary Kantian account of epistemic normativity from Kant’s texts. Kant scholars work with divergent views about his conception of reason. How do these divergences determine the range of what is possible as a Kantian account of epistemic normativity? Which Kantian account promises the greatest traction in contemporary debates? The second aspect aims to employ the resources provided by Kant’s distinctive conception of epistemic normativity – and which have remained untapped by our colleagues working in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of mind – to open new perspectives for an epistemic account of normativity grounded on the powerful tools provided by a Kantian conception of agency and rational autonomy. To this effect, the conference will invite both Kant scholars and contemporary epistemologists and philosophers of mind to bring Kantian approaches to bear on contemporary debates on epistemic normativity and cognitive virtue.
University of Kent, Canterbury
Date: TBA
Resp: Kelli Rudolph (Kent) / Aldo Dinucci (Sergipe, Brazil)
In a world where communication among distant strangers is growing, and concerns over the authenticity of news are ever present, persuasion is more important than ever. What makes an argument persuasive? What are the mental conditions necessary for people to identify something as persuasive? Like us, the Stoics were occupied by these questions. Our aim is to bring together experts to discuss aspects of logic and epistemology related to the Stoic notion of persuasion (pithanos). For the Stoics, the persuasive is linked essentially to the representation (phantasia) of an object, grasped by reason that grounds true thinking. To elucidate the nature of this link we ask three fundamental questions: What makes logical propositions and arguments persuasive? What are the mental factors that allow people to perceive something as persuasive? Is persuasion a genuine part of the Stoic taxonomy of representation? Answering these questions provides a clearer understanding of ancient Stoicism, while also enriching our understanding of the notion of persuasion today.
University of Warwick
Date: TBA
Resp. Dino Jakusic (Warwick), Lorenzo Serini (Warwick), Irene Dal Poz (Warwick)
The aim of the third edition of Warwick Continental Philosophy Conference is to investigate the roles of history in the Continental philosophical tradition. Is history a “tool” utilised by Continental Philosophy? Or does Continental Philosophy make the phenomenon (in contrast to the discipline) of history the very object of its investigations? What is Philosophy of History? Finally, is Continental Philosophy an historical period in the history of philosophy? Our goal is to problematize all these questions and to think critically the relevance of history for the Continental canon.
University of Durham
Date: TBA
Resp. Myrthe Bartels (Durham); Andy Hamilton (Durham)
This conference is the follow up to the very successful conference on the same theme, held 11-12 July 2019 at Durham University. As before, the purpose of the upcoming workshop is to investigate the reception of ancient thought on music in the history of the philosophy of music. The conference will probe how ideas on music, beauty and harmony from classical antiquity were taken up and repurposed in the subsequent history of the philosophy of music, and how they featured in the thought of the relevant philosophers. The conference brings together scholars specialising in the history of the philosophy of music, in order to create a platform for discussing how philosophers from the Early Modern period until the 21st century took their inspiration from, and in this process interpreted and created their own ideas of, ancient Greek music and central concepts in ancient musical thought. It will trace in what ways their own philosophy of music was indebted to, and led to the creation of, a certain view of ancient musical aesthetics and how their own theories made use of that.
University of Warwick
Date: TBA
Resp. Mert Can Yirmibes (Warwick); Filip Niklas (Warwick)
This conference aims to interrogate and examine the terms ‘Objectivity’, ‘Idea’ and ‘Nature’, as they feature in G. W. F. Hegel’s seminal work, The Science of Logic. ‘Objectivity’ forms the middle section of the treatise called Subjective Logic - the logic that treats explicitly conceptual structures - while the ‘Idea’ forms the final section of this treatise and of the Logic as a whole. It is at the end of this purely logical enterprise that Hegel argues that philosophy, as logical thinking, must systematically move from a consideration of what is altogether logical and self-contained to a consideration of what is extra-logical and defined by externality, namely, nature. The conference is the third installment of a series of conferences that closely examines the contents of Hegel’s dialectical logic. While this conference, and its predecessors, are greatly focused and text-heavy, the idea has always been to open the contents of this difficult treatise and examine them in light of contemporary concerns and to make Hegel’s philosophy more readily available to anyone interested in logic, metaphysics and the basic categories of reason.
Trinity College Dublin
Date: TBA
Resp. Giulio Di Basilio (Trinity College Dublin)
With this initiative we set out to bring together a number of scholars currently working on Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics (henceforth EE). The workshop will be held in the Plato Centre at Trinity College Dublin. It is concerned with the crucial Aristotelian notion of practical wisdom (φρόνησις), in the context of Aristotle’s lesser-known ethical work, viz. the EE. The workshop intends to provide a platform to young researchers working on the EE and to more established scholars in order to further our understanding of Aristotle’s EE.
University of St. Andrews
Date: TBA
Resp. Stephen Read (St. Andrews); Barbara Bartocci (St. Andrews)
The Workshop on Theories of Paradox in the Middle Ages has two main aims: to make better known the treatments of paradoxes in the middle ages; and to provide a forum for discussion of medieval theories of paradox and connections with contemporary solutions. Paradoxes seized the attention of logicians in the middle ages, and were used both as tests for the viability of theories of logic, language, epistemology, and possibly every philosophical issue, and also in the specific genre of insolubles (logical paradoxes) as needing a theoretical solution, usually involving issues about signification, truth, knowledge and modality. Numerous theories were developed, not only in the Latin West, but also in the Islamic world and in the Byzantine tradition. Some of these theories are well known, others barely investigated, if at all. This workshop is an opportunity for academic researchers, students and any extra-academic person who has interest in the subject to discuss and contrast a range of these theories and consider their advantages and drawbacks, and their relation to more recent theories of paradox and antinomy.
Birkbeck College
Date: Recurrent
Resp. Susan James (Birkbeck); Clare Carlisle (King’s College London)
Over the last few years the London Spinoza Circle has invited leading Spinoza scholars to speak about their research. The seminars (open to the public) take place at Birkbeck College and last for two hours, and the audience will mainly be made up of academics and students from the various London Colleges.
Keble College, Oxford
Date: 15-16 February 2020
Resp.: Katharine O’Reilly (King’s College London); Peter Adamson (Munich); Jenny Rallens (Oxford), Ursula Coope (Oxford)
Aspasia, Hypatia, Sappho, Lucretia, Cleopatra, Diotima, Lavinia, Monica, Hecuba, Macrina, Radegund: the names of women intellectuals and the whispers of their powerful influence on philosophy, politics, literature, and education are scattered through the ancient evidence. Who were these women teachers and philosophers, thought-leaders and theorists of Antiquity? Beyond how they are presented and used by male authors, how might their own thoughts and voices be fossilized within these ancient texts and other artefacts– and what methodological tools do we need to develop in order to excavate them? What can be recovered of the distinctive ideas and methods these women contributed to philosophy, literature, theology, or politics? This Symposium aims to bring together scholars from across the humanities disciplines to discuss women intellectuals in Antiquity.
University of Leeds
Date: 8-9 January 2020
Resp. Alex Aylward (Leeds)
Many philosophers, particularly those interested in the sciences, are now committed pluralists of various forms. It is accepted that monist accounts of kinds, investigative methods, explanation and values are insufficient. But how does pluralism effect how philosophers treat both our own history and the history of science? In the history of philosophy we encounter many differing reconstructions of the same episode, often utilising different historiographical frameworks, and thus emphasising different aspects of the target phenomenon. Sometimes differing accounts are explicitly presented as competing with one another. But their being in competition seems to imply that there is a single, true account regarding the domain at hand, or at least that pluralism regarding our accounts of philosophy and science’s history is importantly restricted. Turning the mirror brings a group of historians of philosophy and HPS-ers together to discuss the nature of disagreement and method in our own disciplines in light of scientific pluralism.
Maison Française d’Oxford
Date: 5 December 2019
Resp. Mogens Læekz (CNRS-Maison Française d’Oxford)
“Innocent Wars” is a one-day workshop dedicated to philosophical and intellectual networks between France, Holland and the British Isles in Early Modernity. It brings together senior and junior scholars, and PhD-students. It is co-organized between the Laboratoire d’Excellence COMOD at the University de Lyon, the Maison Française d’Oxford (MFO) and, hopefully, the BSHP.
First workshop: 1 December 2019 (London)
Second Workshop: 27 March 2020 (Cambridge)
Third workshop: TBA (Oxford)
Resp.: Christopher Benzenberg (Cambridge), Maya Krishnan (Oxford), Nicholas Currie (University Collge London).
The Loxbridge Kant Series aims to connect a growing community of analytic Kant scholars in three vibrant academic centres of the UK. The plan is to run three one-day workshops a year, with one in London, one in Cambridge, and one in Oxford. For each of the three workshops, we invite two speakers from each department: one faculty member (keynote speaker) and one graduate student.
Birkbeck College
Date: 21 November 2019
Resp. Susan James (Birkbeck), Clare Carlisle (King’s College London)
The London Spinoza Circle has been putting on talks for the last few years and has attracted some of the most influential names in Spinoza studies. This year it is extending its activities. We have organised a graduate workshop, to take place at Birkbeck College on 21st November 2019) at which six graduate and postgraduate students will present their work to an audience of staff and fellow students. Our aim is to provide promising students in the field of Spinoza studies with helpful and varied feedback on their research.
Kingston University
Date: Recurrent
Resp. Marie Louise Krogh (Kingston)
The Historiography of Philosophy Working Group is a recent initiative that aims to provide a frame for junior scholars (PhD students and early-to-mid-career researchers) to rigorously interrogate the relation between contemporary philosophy and the history of philosophy. Considering the paucity of current UK research on the topic, such a group is intended to foster a community of researchers interested in this topic, so as to seed future collaborations and substantial funding bids. To facilitate this, we propose a monthly meeting which will foreground the methodological, epistemological and political questions that might be posed in regard to the construction of ‘the history of philosophy’. For, while it is hard to imagine what philosophy would be without its history, precisely what this history stands for, as excavation or method, archiving or systematizing, is less often explicitly thematised, especially in English-language philosophical contexts.
University of St. Andrews
Date: 13-14 September 2019
Resp. Antonino Falduto (St. Andrews), Jens Timmerman (St. Andrews)
The international conference The Early Critique of Kant’s Moral Philosophy aims at presenting the first reception and critique of Kant’s moral philosophy at the end of the 18th and the very beginning of the 19th century. In this way, it aims at satisfying what is one of the most urgent desiderata of the scholarship in the history of philosophy through a comprehensive analysis of this reception history. The uniqueness of the present conference is that of dealing not only with more known authors (like Reinhold, Jacobi, Fichte, Schiller, Hegel), but also with lesser known, forgotten figures of the constellation in question, like Christoph Gottfried Bardili, Johann August Eberhard, Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, Johann Günther Karl Werdermann, Gottlieb August Tittel, and Maria von Herbert.
University College Dublin
Date: 12 September 2019
Resp. Georgios Petropoulos (University College Dublin)
The conference brings together phenomenologists and Ancient Greek scholars with the aim of discussing the relation between phenomenology and Greek philosophy. Phenomenology, broadly construed, is the study of the meaningful structure of human experience. It is a philosophical tradition that begins with Edmund Husserl, develops and takes a different direction with Martin Heidegger, and is still practiced today, contributing to disciplines like psychology, education and political science. While the contribution of phenomenology to the study of the self, the body and interpersonal relationships has been widely recognized, there is another contribution made by phenomenology that only recently has begun to attract the attention it deserves. It is a well-known fact among phenomenologists that Husserl and Heidegger understood phenomenological philosophy as having a special relation to Ancient Greek philosophy. Both phenomenologists and scholars of Ancient Greek philosophy are increasingly becoming interested in examining the way in which phenomenology sheds new light and re-appropriates Greek philosophy.
Pembroke College, Cambridge
Date: 11-12 September 2019
Resp. Matyáš Moravec (Cambridge), Sam Sokolsky-Tifft (Cambridge), Florian Fischer (University of Siegen), Zoe Walker (Cambridge), Theo Borgvin-Weiss (Cambridge)
Thus far the thought of Henri Bergson (1859-1941), one of the most influential theorists of time of the twentieth century, has primarily been excluded from styles of philosophy outside the somewhat problematically called “continental” tradition. In the past few years this has, for the first time, started to change: his work has begun to receive rigorous and ingenious reassessment from philosophers across the field of analytic philosophy. The aim of this conference, and the ensuing publication of essays which will follow, is to capture this moment and use it to provide a definitive introduction of Bergson into the world of analytic philosophy, expanding and reassessing Bergson’s legacy and producing a major permutation in the philosophy of time. Furthermore, this conference attempts to use the wide-ranging scope of Bergson’s philosophy as a point upon which to build bridges between different philosophical and scientific disciplines and traditions: in particular, philosophy of religion, philosophy of memory, and history of philosophy, with a particular view to Bergson’s somewhat complicated reception in England at the beginning of the last century.
Cambridge University
20-24 August 2019
Resp. Sophia Connell (Birkbeck College)
Aristotle’s great explanatory biological treatise, Peri Zoion Morion (On the Parts of Animals), is fundamental to our understanding of his metaphysics, philosophy of science, and theoretical psychology. No other work in the Corpus contains and ties together so many diverse aspects of his thought. The Parts of Animals begins by setting out the procedures to be adopted when giving an account of animal parts. Each animal has a unified essence which all the parts are coordinated to achieve and enhance. As well as giving us a sense of the fundamental procedures in biological explanation, the work also provides a view of many other important aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy. For example, it gives us a detailed account of the composition of parts from the most basic ingredients to the most complex mixtures and structures, so as to reveal the intricacies of Aristotelian matter. The treatise also features important discussions concerning the soul and the senses, including the role of the bodily parts in the actualisation of these capacities, particularly the heart and blood. In addition to this, we find a series of interesting normative assessments which overlap significantly with Aristotle’s political and ethical thought. Over the past 50 years, Aristotle’s biological works have rightly become recognised as a crucial part of his oeuvre. The aim of the proposed conference is to bring together a team of leading international scholars, both well establishing and up-and-coming, who will lend a fresh perspective to a treatise that has now made its way to the centre of upper-level teaching and research on Aristotle. It is critical now to consolidate recent progress on the study of the Parts of Animals and to further develop these insights toward new lines of inquiry.
University of Bristol
Date: 11-12 August 2019
Resp. Martin Sticker (Bristol), Joe Saunder (Durham) United Kingdom Kant Society Annual Conference (£500)
This conference brings together Kant scholars, philosophers working on contemporary issues in a Kantian tradition and Kant critics. The conference is open to new takes on already established (textual and philosophical) problems of Kant’s philosophy, raising new and unnoticed issues, as well as discussing the broader systematic and historical implications of Kant’s philosophy.
Durham University
Date: 11-12 July 2019
Resp. Myrthe L. Bartels (Durham)
the purpose of the conference is to investigate the reception of ancient thought on music in the history of the philosophy of music. The conference will probe how ideas on music, beauty and harmony from classical antiquity were taken up and repurposed in the subsequent history of the philosophy of music, and as related to other parts of the thought of the relevant philosophers. What notions from antiquity did philosophers from later ages single out? How did those philosophers interpret the ancient musical and aesthetic concepts? How did they approach the fact that the music itself from antiquity was lost, and why did they nevertheless reflect on it? What role did later perspectives on ancient music and ancient thought on music have in the development of a theory of aesthetics? The conference brings together scholars specialising in the history of the philosophy of music, in order to create a platform for discussing how philosophers from the Early Modern period until the 21st century took
their inspiration from, and in this process interpreted and created their own ideas of, ancient Greek music and central concepts in ancient musical thought. It will trace in what ways their own philosophy of music was indebted to, and led to the creation of, a certain view of ancient musical aesthetics and how their own theories made use of that.
Royal Holloway, University of London
Date: 8-10 July 2019
Resp. Nathan Widder
The Deleuze & Guattari Studies Conference is the major annual meeting of scholars engaged with the work of 20th Century French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The 2019 conference, to be held on 8-10 July 2019 at Royal Holloway, will be the first time the event has been held in the greater London area, and the first time since the inaugural conference held at Cardiff in 2008 that it has been in the UK. The conference theme is “From Sense to Machinic Becoming.” The conference will take place on the 50th anniversary of the year of Deleuze’s publication of The Logic of Sense; of Guattari’s composing “Machine and Structure,” a review of that work and of Deleuze’s earlier Difference and Repetition; and of the pair’s first face-to-face meeting. The conference theme aims to capture this important moment of transition that sees the close of Deleuze’s earlier solo period, built primarily around creative and heterodox re-readings of major and marginal figures in the history of philosophy, and the beginning of his and Guattari’s collaborations, which would lead towards new forms of revolutionary social and political thought.
King’s College London
Date: 27-28 June 2019
Resp. John Callahan (King’s College London), John Sellars (Royal Holloway), Joachim Aufderheide (King’s College London)
Cicero praises Socrates for having called down philosophy from the heavens to the marketplace. Arguably, Socrates has also called philosophy into people’s lives. He reproached his fellow-Athenians for living un-philosophically. But what does it mean to let philosophy into one’s life? What does it mean to live philosophically or the opposite? In recent years the work of Pierre Hadot has received increasing attention, in particular his conception of philosophy as a way of life. Hadot’s work focused on ancient philosophy, claiming that in antiquity philosophy was understood not merely as a series of abstract arguments or theoretical claims but also, and more fundamentally, as a guide to how to live. A number of scholars have taken up this model and used it to reinterpret a range of figures in the history of philosophy, either to shed new light on well-known thinkers or to rehabilitate others who have been overlooked. The framework, that philosophy can constitute a way of live, raises several crucial questions that should be addressed as part of using it fruitfully. Should the aim of philosophy be to bring philosophical troubles to an end within one’s life? Or is the aim to perpetuate such concerns? To what extent is writing and reading philosophical texts supposed to bring about a change of mind in the writer or speaker? Is philosophical practice supposed to accommodate and vindicate already-existing life commitments or is it supposed to challenge such commitments? Should philosophy be a way of life that everyone should adopt or is it reserved only for those disposed to it? We have two goals. First, by bringing together scholars who work different periods in the history of philosophy we expect to explore different answers to the questions raised. In particular, speakers are expected to examine the ways in which the notion of philosophy as a way of life might offer a useful framework for thinking about how philosophers in the past conceived the subject.
Durham University
Date: 26-27 June 2019
Resp. Elsa G. Simonetti (Durham)
The objective of this conference is to explore the reasons for the paramount success that the concept of ‘revelation’ enjoys during the first Imperial era. This workshop will gather, and aims at building lasting relations among, experts from different fields of study (philosophy, history, theology), from Durham, the UK, and abroad. The chronological focus of this workshop is placed on the I-IV centuries AD, an age in which the notion of ‘revealed truth’ is appropriated by different philosophical schools as well as religious, ethnic, and cultural groups (such as Jews, Christians and pagans), who employ it to define their respective identities and traditions, to articulate their reciprocal (and not always peaceful) interactions, and more broadly to construct their own worldview — a far-reaching endeavour, whose effects are still visible today.
University of Exeter
Date: 20-21 June 2019
Resp. Kirsten Walsh (Exeter)
This workshop is an annual event hosted by an informal network of UK academic departments with a programmatic commitment to practising and promoting history and philosophy of science (HPS) as an integrated discipline. Starting with UCL and Leeds, this network now includes Durham, Exeter, Cambridge, Aberdeen and Nottingham, and is very open to adding further departments. Participating departments take turns in hosting the annual workshops. We believe that a productive interaction of the philosophy of science and the history of science is essential to the health and development of each discipline, and that this relationship needs to be re-activated and rejuvenated after significant neglect in recent years. For each workshop, members of participating departments organise thematic sessions focused on the methodological exploration of the integration of the history and the philosophy of science; attendance is open to any members of the UK academic community. Student participation is strongly encouraged, and each year there is a session devoted to teaching. All previous events have been highly successful, not only in providing a venue for a serious yet friendly and open forum for the discussion of relevant issues, but also in building and strengthening the community of scholars and students committed to integrated HPS.
University of Warwick
Date: 6-8 June 2019
Resp. Mert Can Yirmibes (Warwick); Filip Niklas (Warwick)
This conference aims to philosophically examine ‘Actuality’ and ‘Concept’, as it features in Hegel’s seminal work, The Science of Logic. ‘Actuality’ is the final section in the second division of the Logic, concerning the logic of philosophically key concepts such as ‘substance’, ‘necessity’, ‘causality’. It is on the basis of these, Hegel argues, that the logic of ‘concept’, ‘freedom’ or ‘self-determination’ emerge. The conference continues the project of last year’s conference ‘Examining Hegel’s Idea of Essence: Reflexion, Ground and Appearance’, also held at the University of Warwick, namely to cover the entire ‘Doctrine of Essence’. The previous conference in this series was well-received, and we hope to continue its success with this conference.
University of St. Andrews
Date: 7-8 May 2019
Resp. Stephen Read (St. Andrews), Barbara Bartocci (St. Andrews)
The Workshop on History of Arabic Logic has two main aims: to make better known the richness and importance of Arabic logic, that is, logic developed and studied in Arabic-speaking lands from the 8th to the 15th centuries CE; and to provide a forum for interaction and discussion by scholars of Arabic logic. Since the last century, scholars have acknowledged the original and relevant contribution of medieval Arabic philosophers and thinkers to the development of medieval Western logic and, more generally, to the history of logic. The study of logic in Arabic began with the translation project undertaken in the eighth century CE during the Umayyad era, and fostered by the Abbasid Caliphate, whose capital was Baghdad, to make the great works of Greek science, including those of Aristotle, accessible to the Arabic world. The study of Aristotle led in time to important and original creations by such figures as al-Farabi in the tenth century and Avicenna (Ibn Sina) in the eleventh, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi in the twelfth, and al-Tusi in the thirteenth. Avicenna, in particular, introduced novel ideas on the hypothetical syllogism, and on modal and temporal logic. A modified Avicennan logic took the place of Aristotelian logic in Arabic studies of the subject after his time. Arabic logic had a strong but largely indirect influence on Latin medieval logic. Although translations of small parts of al-Ghazali’s and Avicenna’s logic (in a broad sense) were transmitted in Latin, the influence came mainly through translations of the Aristotelian commentaries of Averroes, who was working in Cordoba in Muslim Spain in the twelfth century, in close contact with Christendom.
University of Durham
Date: 17 May 2019
Resp. Jeremy Dunham (Durham), Robert Stern (Sheffield)
While the Hegelian concept of the ‘concrete universal’ was given brief prominence in the speculations of some of the British Idealists at the turn of the nineteenth century, it has languished in relative obscurity since then. However, it is an idea that remains central to the interpretation of both Hegel and these idealists, while also having an unexplored systematic interest for metaphysics today. At the heart of the idea, is an attempt to overcome the apparent tension between the supposed abstractness of universals on the one hand, and the concreteness of individuals on the other, where it is argued that individuals that lack any relation to universals are propertyless and hence empty and abstract ‘Thises', while on the other hand certain universals can made more particular and concrete in such as way as to constitute individuals. The idealists treated this as a crucial move in overcoming certain other key dichotomies, such as those between thought and reality, reason and sensation, rationalism and empiricism. This workshop explores this idea further, by looking at its historical origins in Hegel and the Idealists, but also its afterlife in thinkers such as Iris Murdoch.
Royal Holloway, University of London
Date: 22 April 2019
Resp. Lydia Azadpour (Royal Holloway), Daniel Whistler (Royal Holloway)
The goal of this one-day workshop is to highlight the significance of the work of the philosophical and scientific researcher, Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer (1765-1844) – a figure not only interesting in his own right, but also highly influential in philosophical and scientific thinking at the turn of the 19th century. Not only did he engage with many prominent figures of the day, including Schelling, Schiller, Goethe, and Cuvier, among others, but Kielmeyer has been called ‘the father of philosophy of nature’ due to his profound influence on German Idealism and Romanticism, especially in his attempt to think through the philosophical implications of the life sciences. Despite the breadth of his significance, until very recently the little attention Kielmeyer has garnered in Anglophone scholarship has focused on his response to Kantian critical philosophy. In order to redress the relative neglect his work has faced in Anglophone history of philosophy and science, and to broaden the discussion of Kielmeyer and his impact, the workshop will bring together experts on the period with scholars on various aspects of Kielmeyer and his influence, to exchange ideas and make connections between disciplines. To do so, papers and discussions will further the discourse in three broad areas: (1) interpretation of Kielmeyer’s thought, (2) his influence on contemporaneous philosophy, and (3) his influence on the scientific thought of the day and the future development and specification of scientific disciplines.
Cambridge University
Date: 19-21 April 2019
Resp. Georgy Medvedev (Cambridge); Yu-Jung Sun (Paris I)
This international workshop is designed to bring together PhD students and established scholars who work on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The workshop will focus on one of the central books of the Metaphysics, Book Theta, which explores the concepts of actuality and potentiality. Containing Aristotle’s most extensive discussion of these concepts, Book Theta is crucial for any interpretation of Aristotle’s ontology, theory of knowledge and psychology. The workshop will consist of eight reading sessions during which the whole Greek text of Book Theta will be translated and discussed. Each session will be run by a different participant of the workshop, who will translate his/her section line by line, offer his/her comments and open the floor for discussion. In addition, two papers on Metaphysics Theta will be given by invited scholars. The workshop will end with a wrap-up discussion that will bring together the key themes and points of controversy. As opposed to the usual conference format, this workshop will allow the participants to engage closely with Aristotle’s Greek text and shape the interpretation of the philosophical issues from the ground up. The format is based on extensive discussion of the material at hand. This makes the workshop inclusive and participatory. It is a tried and tested format at the University of Cambridge, which encourages informed debate about a given Greek philosophical text.
University of Manchester
Date: 15-16 April 2019
Resp. Jenny Bryan (University of Manchester)
The conference acts as a central point of collaboration in the academic year of scholars and graduate students in ancient philosophy working throughout the Northern parts of the UK. It regularly attracts attendees from the UK as a whole. It provides a context in which graduate students can be exposed to a range of papers on ancient philosophy given by leading scholars in the field as well as for two graduate students to give shorter presentations on their research.
University of Edinburgh
8 February 2019
Resp. Mariagrazia Portera (Edinburgh)
The last few years have witnessed, within philosophy, a resurgence of interest in the notion of habit. In 2018, for example, the British Society for the History of Philosophy devoted its annual conference to “Habit in the history of philosophy”. But habit is a key concept not only in philosophy: indeed, it plays a decisive role in psychology and the cognitive sciences (with the study of the physiological and neurological underpinnings of human habitual behaviour), in sociology (with Bourdieu’s notion of habitus), in anthropology and – perhaps most importantly – in the everyday experience of each of us. We all have habits, from the most idiosyncratic ones to collectively shared customs. The half-day research workshop “Habits in Theory and Practice: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and the Environment” aims at providing a much-needed interdisciplinary exploration of the notion of habit at the interface between aesthetics, theory of practice and environmental issues.
Oxford Brookes University
Date: 15 December 2018
Resp. Dan O’Brien (Oxford Brookes University)
The annual Oxford Brookes International Hume Workshop series continues this year with Hume and the Self follows the successful 2012 Hume and the Virtues, 2013 Why Hume Matters, 2014 Hume and History, 2015 Hume and the Social, 2016 Hume on Miracles and 2017 Hume and Aesthetics. Papers will focus on various aspects of Hume’s account of the self and personal identity, including the relation between pride and self, his scepticism concerning a ‘unitary’ self in Treatise 1, and the relation of Hume’s account to narrative conceptions of self, cognitive science and social media.
University of York
8-9 December 2018
Resp. James A. Clarke (York), Gabriel Gottlieb (Cincinatti)
The conference is the last in a series of four events on early post-Kantian practical philosophy. The events are part of the AHRC Research Network “Reason, Right, and Revolution: Practical Philosophy between Kant and Hegel”. The conference will explore the themes of reason, human rights, and revolution in post-Kantian moral, legal, and political philosophy. The intended audience is historians of political philosophy and of German idealism. The conference should also be of interest to anyone working on eighteenth century philosophy. Attendance is free of charge, and the conference is open to all.
University of Bristol
Date: 16 November 2018
Resp. Kirsten Walsh (Exeter); Tzuchien Tho (Bristol)
This conference, ‘Teaching early modern philosophy of science’ (TEMPOS), aims to address urgent but under examined aspects of teaching history and philosophy of science, with a special focus on early modern philosophy of science and metaphysics, by forming a UK-based network of historians and philosophers of science to collaboratively address these issues. A great chasm of knowledge and skills exists between practitioners and students of the history of philosophy, history of science, and history of the philosophy of science. Especially when these disciplines centre on the early modern period, we find a gap between linguistic competences (Latin, French, German, Italian), mathematical and scientific competences (geometry, physical mathematics, physics), and historiographical competences (reading skills, methods in archival research). Practitioners may be excellent researchers but face immense difficulty in developing pedagogical tools to facilitate the development of these competences within the fields of history of philosophy and science. The aim of this conference is to begin to address some of these challenges and to set up a UK-based research group that will work towards developing effective teaching methods in these fields.
An Post, Ireland
Date: 2018-2020
Resp. Clare MacCumhaill (Durham); Rachael Wiseman (Liverpool)
We are commissioning up to ten specially designed postcards celebrating Iris Murdoch and her philosophy designed by Irish artists or donated by friends of In Parenthesis. 100 postcards will be made available to the public through a ‘slow philosophy’ mechanism (Wittgenstein, whose work these women drew on, suggested that philosophers’ greeting should be ‘Slow down!’). Members of the public will be invited (via website and online and media promotion of the project) to send a postcard (any postcard) with a philosophical question to Murdoch’s birthplace. We will forward 100 of them onto philosophers. The philosophers will respond on an artist-designed postcard and with a commemorative Murdoch stamp. We will post photos of the question-postcard and response on a web platform.
