Events
Please Note: The list below is not exhaustive, and contains mostly recent or upcoming events and opportunities.
Past Events
2015
Contemporary philosophy of religion has been richly informed by important work in metaphysics and epistemology. At the same time, there has not been nearly as much work done at the intersection of philosophy of religion and meta-ethics or normative theory. To help inspire more good work in this area, Christian Miller (Wake Forest), Mark Murphy (Georgetown), and Chris Tucker (William and Mary) are organizing a series of annual workshops on theistic ethics for at least the next three years.
Among the speakers will be Robert Audi, Garrett Cullity, Rosalind Hursthouse, Karen Jones, Jeanette Kennett, Nicholas Southwood, and Christine Swanton
This interdisciplinary conference project seeks to investigate and explore the nature, significance, and practices of forgiveness, and where applicable, related ideas of reconciliation. Forgiveness and/or reconciliation raise a variety of questions that touch on a vast array of academic disciplines — peace and conflict resolution, social work, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literature, history, philosophy, psychology, political economy, etc. In cases of significant transgressions, social tensions, and even international conflicts there are questions of what counts as forgiveness and how it moves from the level of individual to community, national and/or international relationships. This conference will examine full range of this complexity. To encourage innovative trans-disciplinary dialogues, we welcome papers from all disciplines, professions, and vocations. We also invite submissions from people involved in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who have been involved with truth and reconciliation initiatives, forgiveness and peace, hostage situations and other instances of trauma and abuse. We also seek participation from people representing civil service/governmental agencies, legal professionals and people involved with diplomacy.
Abstracts are invited on the topic of intellectual humility. These are welcomed from areas including virtue theory, epistemology, philosophy of religion, theology, philosophy of science, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of education. Postgraduates and those early in their career are encouraged to submit. It is intended that the conference papers contribute towards an edited volume on intellectual humility.
Abstracts of no more than 400 words should be sent to [email protected] by February 28. Decisions will be made by March 7.
This conference is funded by a grant from the St. Louis University Intellectual Humility Project (Templeton Foundation) and organized by the Oxford Brookes Intellectual Humility Cluster Research Group.
The Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics is an annual essay competition open to scholars who are within fifteen years of receiving a Ph.D. or students who are currently enrolled in a graduate program. Independent scholars may also be eligible, and should direct inquiries to the Editor of Oxford Studies in Metaethics Russ Shafer-Landau, at shaferlandau (at) wisc.edu. The award for the prize-winning essay is $10,000, and winning essays will be published in Oxford Studies in Metaethics. The recipient of the award will be expected to present his or her paper at the Annual Wisconsin Metaethics Workshop, Sept 18-20, 2015, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Res Philosophica invites papers on the topic of virtue and the emotions for the 2015 Res Philosophica Essay Prize. The author of the winning paper will receive a prize of $3,000 and publication in the associated special issue of the journal on the same topic. Submissions for the prize will be automatically considered for publication in the journal’s special issue unless otherwise requested.
This annual Arizona Workshop features new work in normative ethical theory broadly construed, to include not only issues about the right and the good, but meta-theoretical questions about the project of developing and defending normative ethical theories.
Keynote Speakers, 2015 Workshop
Stephen Darwall – Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy, Yale University
David Schmidtz – Kendrick Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona
Call for Abstracts
Abstracts are welcome in any area or on any topic in normative ethical theory (to be distinguished as well as possible from metaethics, political philosophy, and applied ethics).
Abstracts should be 2-3 double-spaced pages and are due no later than Monday June 2, 2014. Please send abstracts by email to Mark Timmons at [email protected]. Those who presented at the 2013 or 2014 workshops are not eligible for presenting at the 2015 workshop. A program committee will evaluate the submissions and decisions will be finalized by early July, 2014.
Susan Wolf – Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy, UNC, Chapel Hill
The third annual conference of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Values, University of Birmingham.
2014
Call For Abstracts
The 2014 Tennessee Value and Agency “TVA” Conference will take place all day November 7 & 8 (travelers may want to arrive on Nov. 6 and depart on Nov. 9) on the University of Tennessee Campus, 1210 McClung Tower. The conference will focus on (rethinking) the relationships between practical reason, moral judgment and moral sense/sensibility/sentiment in the moral life, with an eye toward bringing structure and clarity to the aims and ambitions of current work in moral psychology and moral theory. Keynote speakers will be Amelie Rorty (Tufts) and Talbot Brewer (UVA). To have a paper considered for presentation, please submit a 500 word abstract (for a paper no longer than 4000 words, or 40 minutes presentation time) by July 1, 2014, to [email protected]. The authors of abstracts/papers selected for presentation will be notified by August 15, 2014, and the conference program will be set and announced by September 1, 2014. Please direct questions (but not abstracts) to David Reidy, [email protected].
Abstract submission details:
Please send proposals of ca. 500 words to [email protected] before 1 May, 2014. Notification of acceptance: 10 May, 2014. Each presentation will be allocated 20 minutes + 10 minutes for discussion.
Deadline for abstracts: 8 June 2014
Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy
VIRTUES AND ARGUMENTS
Deadline for submission: September 1, 2014
GUEST EDITORS
Andrew Aberdein (Florida Institute of Technology)
Daniel Cohen (Colby College)
OVERVIEW
Virtue-based approaches have made substantial contributions to ethics and epistemology. They have also found application in more unexpected fields, including the study of argument. Virtue Argumentation Theory mandates a shift in focus from acts and objects, or processes and products, to agents. Thus, Virtue Argumentation Theory brings a set of difficult but important new questions into focus, particularly about arguers' conduct in inter-agent transactions. At the same time, Virtue Argumentation Theory also provides new signposts leading to their resolution. Several authors have recently begun to suggest answers to these questions. This special issue will consolidate and extend their work.
POSSIBLE TOPICS
What impact does the virtue argumentation theory approach have on the principles of argumentation and argument evaluation?
Should virtues of argument be reliabilist or responsibilist?
Which virtues are needed for each of the different roles in argument (protagonists, antagonists, judges, spectators)?
Why argue? What motivates the virtuous arguer?
When, with whom, and about what should we argue?
Are virtues of argument intellectual, epistemic or ethical virtues? Or are they a distinct type of virtue in their own right?
Is it possible for an agent to have some but not all virtues of argument?
Examinations of specific virtues (or vices) of argument, such as fairmindedness or intellectual humility.
Might cognitive limitations, or fast and frugal heuristics, be virtues of argument?
How do virtues of argument differ from skills?
Are the virtues of argument culturally relative?
Papers are invited for the 2014 annual conference of the British Society for Ethical Theory, to be held at the University of Cambridge. The subject area is open within normative ethics, metaethics, moral psychology, applied ethics, and the history of ethics.
Helping others in need through charitable giving and work is surely just obviously a good thing. If we see that someone is starving and we have some food going spare, then it seems self-evident that we ought to give it to them. Perhaps not: perhaps charity, insofar as it hacks at the branches of society’s problems and not its roots, is part of the disease, not the cure.
There are (at least) two central aspects of this debate, which might be termed ‘ethical’ and ‘political’. The first is about what we do as individuals; the second is about the role of charity as social institution. And of course, how these aspects connect and diverge is crucial and controversial. This conference aims to think through the ethical and political issues of charity, and their interconnections, with people from diverse backgrounds: charity workers and recipients of charity as well as theoreticians on charity from a variety of academic disciplines.
The Legal Reasoning, Virtue and Politics Workshop is designed to foster reflection on the relations between legal reasoning and the concept of virtue with a view to assessing some key political and ethical aspects of legal reasoning which have been peripheral in the prevalent rule-based approach to it.
The conference will last two days. In the mornings there will be plenary sessions with lectures of invited speakers (each lecture 1h including discussion). In the afternoons there will be sessions in groups (each presentation about 30 min. including discussion). We are also planning a panel discussion which will be devoted to the main topic of the conference.
31 March 2014 - 300-500 word abstract to be submitted (format doc/docx).
15 April 2014 – latest notification of acceptance.
20 May 2014 – Payment deadline.
6 June 2014 - Conference commences.
The workshop will focus on the role played by values — epistemic or otherwise — in scientific inquiry, and its implications for the manner in which science is used to inform policy and for the way in which science is funded and organized. Preference will be given to submissions that touch upon both themes in the title.
Speakers include:
Andrew Light, Philosophy and Public Policy, George Mason University David Levy, Economics, George Mason University Wendy Parker, Philosophy, Durham University Sandra Peart, Leadership Studies, University of Richmond Daniel Sarewitz, Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes, Arizona State University J.D. Trout, Philosophy, Loyola University
Trust enables prima facie goods such as co-operation, knowledge sharing, and fulfilling personal relationships. Distrust, however, causes social conflict, isolation and anxiety. Of course, we should only trust and distrust those who are worthy of such (dis)trust; but what does trusting or distrusting another amount to, and what does such an attitude represent about the one (dis)trusted? Asking this leads to further questions; does your being trusted to x thereby obligate you to x, even when that trust was misplaced? Why can believing testimony based on trust be justified, when having evidence of speaker veracity seems to negate any role for trust? What is the relation between trusting as an act (A can decide to trust B with her PIN number) and as a feeling (A is reassured that B won’t steal from her)? Is that feeling a doxastic or an affective/emotional attitude, and what is its representational content? Furthermore, can the trust we hold toward institutions such as the government or toward a broad social group, and the normative demands associated with such trust, be analysed in the same terms as the trust we have toward e.g. a friend or family member? This workshop brings together four of the world's foremost philosophers of trust to present and invite discussion on their current research, and will be of interest to those working in moral and political philosophy, philosophy of action, epistemology, emotion and psychology, and the social sciences.
09.00 - 09.30 Welcome
09.30 - 11.00 Bennett Helm 'Trust: An Emotion of Respect'
11.00 - 11.30 Tea/coffee
11.30 - 13.00 Katherine Hawley 'Trustworthy Groups and Institutions'
13.00 - 14.00 Lunch
14.00 - 15.30 Paul Faulkner 'The Problem of Trust'
15.30 - 16.00 Tea/coffee
16.00 - 17.30 Richard Holton 'Trust as a Two-Place Relation' co-authored with Jacopo Domenicucci (Ecole Normale Supérieure )
18.00 - Close
Speakers at this interdisciplinary symposium will discuss the nature of virtue and its development, from ancient notions to contemporary science, evolutionary and religious views, individual and community approaches in a variety of family, schooling and work settings. We will also discuss the possibility of starting an interdisciplinary society on the development of virtue.
This conference will look at the relation between integrity and social conditions, communicative contexts, public obligations, and institutional structures. It will explore the ways in which they create or undermine the conditions for integrity. With contributions from philosophers, historians, social theorists, health scientists, and sociologists.
WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY, WINSTON-SALEM, NC. One year non-renewable Postdoctoral Fellowship in Philosophy beginning fall 2014. The position will be associated with the Character Project (www.thecharacterproject.com), which is funded by a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. AOS and AOC open, but some significant research focus must be on issues related to character or virtue broadly construed. This is a research position with no teaching responsibilities, intended for early-career researchers interested in advancing their scholarship. Candidates must have a Ph.D. conferred by the start date. Those already in temporary or tenure-track positions are welcome to apply to spend a year at Wake Forest University. Candidates should send a cover letter, CV, and writing sample by email attachment to [email protected], or if that is not possible, to The Character Project, Box 7332, Department of Philosophy, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109. The deadline for receipt of applications is April 4, 2014. Wake Forest University is an EEO/AA employer, and welcomes and encourages diversity and seeks applicants with demonstrated success in working with diverse populations. It seeks to recruit and retain a diverse workforce to maintain the excellence of the University, and to offer students richly varied disciplines, perspectives, and ways of knowing and learning.
Abstract: Many philosophers have claimed that intentional activity must be directed at some (apparent) good. Cases of habitual agency appear to contradict this claim and have therefore been held to be non-intentional. I argue that much habitual activity is intentional and so the claim must be abandoned. Habitual agency is intentional, even where there is no good in the manifestation of the habit, provided the habit manifested is itself good (i.e. is itself a virtue).
A talk by Dr. Edward Harcourt
Abstract: The boundaries between vice and mental illness have been discussed since Plato and Aristotle first identified vice with mental illness (and virtue with mental health) 2500 years ago. There seems little doubt that psychoanalysis continues the long tradition of thought launched by Plato and Aristotle concerned with the relation between human nature and 'the good life', and making these continuities visible helps to rescue the ethical dimension of psychoanalysis from the scientific self-images which were more dominant in its early days. Nonetheless, there are many aspects of the equation of vice and mental illness that need to be questioned. Even Plato and Aristotle described cases of 'madness' which don't fit their own "vice = illness" theory. Conversely, aren't they too optimistic in thinking that all cases of badness are cases of mental illness of some kind? This talk will explore the boundary between vice and mental illness in the light both of philosophy and of psychodynamic theory.
Keynote addresses:
Tamar Schapiro (Stanford University): The Influence of Inclination on the Will
Gary Watson (USC): On the Importance of Having a Life
2013
The International Society for Military Ethics 2013 Conference
Intellectual virtues are the character traits of a good thinker or learner. They include traits like curiosity, open-mindedness, attentiveness, creativity, intellectual humility, and intellectual perseverance. This conference brought together scholars and teachers from several fields to explore what intellectual virtues are, why they are important to education, and what it looks like to educate for intellectual virtues.