British Society for the History of Philosophy Annual Conference

Registration deadline: 31 March 2019

Key Information

Location: King's College London, Strand Campus, London
Dates: Wednesday 24 April - Friday 26 April 2019

Contact: bshp2019@kcl.ac.uk

The BSHP gratefully acknowledges support from King’s College London Philosophy Department and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

Programme and Plenary Speakers

In addition to concurrent sessions, the programme will include the following plenary speakers:

• MM McCabe, King’s College London (Ancient Philosophy);
• John Marenbon, University of Cambridge (Medieval Philosophy);
• Susan James, Birkbeck College (Early Modern Philosophy);
• Michael Beaney, King’s College London and Humboldt University of Berlin (Historiography);
• Karyn Lai, UNSW, Sidney (Chinese Philosophical Tradition);
• Cristina Chimisso, Open University (20th Century Philosophy).

BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 

Annual Conference – Provisional Programme

The BSHP gratefully acknowledges support from King’s Philosophy Department, and King’s Arts & Humanities Faculty.

WEDNESDAY 24 April

9:30-11:00 (Great Hall)
Introduction & Ancient Philosophy Plenary
MM McCabe (King’s College London), Glaucon, Gyges and the Good

11:00-11:30 Coffee Break

11:30-1:00: Four Concurrent Sessions

Venues: Great Hall; Small Committee Room; Council Room; River Room

1) Symposium: The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle

• John Sellars (Royal Holloway), Introduction
• Michael Griffin (University of British Columbia), Commentary as Philosophy in Late Antiquity 
• Sir Richard Sorabji (King’s College London & Oxford), How Greek Philosophy spread from two directions to Khushru I, king of Persia from 531 CE

2) Early Modern Philosophy

• JD Lyonhart (University of Cambridge), Wrangling about Innate ideas? Reflections upon Locke and Cudworth
• David Bartha (Central European University), Locke, Berkeley and Malebranche on divine nature 
• Jon W. Thompson (King’s College London), Individuation, Identity, and Resurrection in Thomas Jackson and John Locke

3) Modern Philosophy

• Andrew Cooper (University of Warwick), Coleridge on the science of life
• Rory Phillips (University College London), Fichte on Optimism and Pessimism
• John-Baptiste Oduor (University of Essex), Schelling’s solution to the conflict between Metaphysical Rationalism and Freedom in the Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism

4) 20th Century Philosophy

• Sophia M. Connell (Birkbeck College London), Alice Ambrose and Early Analytic Philosophy
• Sean Crawford (University of Manchester), Dorothy Wrinch on Judgment as a Multiple Relation 
• Sebastian Sunday (University of Oxford), Austin on analysis

1:00-2:00 Sandwich Lunch, provided by KCL catering (Venue TBC)

2:00-3:15 Medieval Philosophy Plenary

• John Marenbon (University of Cambridge), Rethinking Medieval Western Philosophy

3:15-3:30 Short Break

3:30-5:00: Four Concurrent Sessions
Venues: Great Hall; Small Committee Room; Council Room; River Room

1) Ancient/Medieval Philosophy

• Jesse Johann Wilson (University of Southern California), Better than Best: A Puzzle about Happiness in Aristotle and Aquinas
• María Elton Bulnes (Instituto de Filosofía, Santiago), Why is Thomas Aquinas not a compatibilist? 
• Carlo Cogliati (King’s College London), Aquinas and Nishida

2) Early Modern Philosophy

• Paola Romero (London School of Economics), Kant & Hobbes on Political Conflict 
• Giovanni Gellera (Université de Lausanne), Sympathy for the Hobbes, A Scottish Calvanist Reception of Hobbes in the manuscript of James Dundas's Idea Philosophiae Moralis (1679)

3) Modern Philosophy

• Patrick J. Connolly (Lehigh University), Susanna Newcome’s Moral Philosophy
• Mariagrazia Portera (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities – Edinburgh), Charles Darwin on beauty: a reassessment of his English and Scottish aesthetic sources
• Michael J. Futch (University of Tulsa), Selfhood and Substance: Bowne’s Theory of Personal Identity

4) 20th Century

• Landon D. C. Elkind (University of Iowa), The Search for Logical Forms: Logical Atomism as Term Busting
• Jordi Fairhurst (Universidad de las Islas Baleares), The ethical subject and the willing subject in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
• Shunichi Takagi (University College London), Complex ≠ Fact’ (Wittgenstein, 1 July 1931)

5:00-5:30 Coffee Break

5:30-7:00 Three Concurrent Sessions

Venues: Small Committee Room; Council Room; River Room

1) Ancient Philosophy

• Derek van Zoonen (University of Groningen), Plato’s Cognitivist Theory of Pleasure in the Philebus
• Andrew Hull (Northwestern University), The Modal Definition of Being in Plato's Sophist
• Emmanuele Vimercati (Pontificia Università Lateranense, Vatican City), Plutarch on Divine Order and Political Government. A Cosmological Reading of To An Uneducated Ruler

2) Symposium: The Needs of Scientific Reason in Kant

• John Callanan (King’s College London), The Boundary of Pure Reason
• Angela Breitenbach (University of Cambridge), Kant’s Broad Conception of Science
• Alix Cohen (University of Edinburgh), Kant’s account of the epistemic role of the feeling of reason’s need

3) Early Modern/Modern

• Peter West (Trinity College Dublin), John Sergeant as a Precursor to Berkeley’s Anti-Scepticism 
• Akos Sivado (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), An Atomism of Biblical Proportions: The Reconciliation of Scriptural and Natural Knowledge in Sir William Petty's Natural Philosophy
• George Tomlinson (Brunel University), Marx and the Philosophical Concept of Life

THURSDAY 25 April


9:45-11:00 (Great Hall)
Early Modern Philosophy Plenary
Susan James (Birkbeck College London), The Power of Philosophical Thinking

11:00-11:30 Coffee Break
11:30-1:00: Four Concurrent Sessions

Venues: Great Hall; Small Committee Room; Council Room; River Room

1) Ancient Philosophy

• Refik Güremen (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul), Synonymy in Genus-Predication in Aristotle’s Categories and Topics
• Harry Alanen (University of Oxford), Aristotle on Instrumental Changes
• Keziban Der (Pamukkale University, Denizli, Turkey), Aristotle: Is Matter Substance or Not?

2) Medieval Philosophy

• Ahmed Abdel Meguid (Syracuse University, NY), Towards a Thematic Reconstruction of the History of Islamic Philosophy: Philosophy as a Critique of Naturalistic Metaphysics 
• Priyam Mathur (Lady Shri Ram College for Women, New Delhi, India), Emancipating Traditional Systems: Exploring Lesser Known Knowledge Traditions within Advaita Vedanta
• Jiang Lu (Sun Yat-sen University, P. R. China), The Problem of Intentionality Concerning Ockham’s Mental Terms

3) Early Modern Philosophy

• Maria Vittoria Comacchi (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), From Aristotle to Plato: Yehudah Abarbanel’s Concept of Love in the Late Fifteenth-century Neoplatonic Debate
• Pärttyli Rinne, Academia Kantiana, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University), Kant and the System of Love of Human Beings
• Jill Graper Hernandez (University of Texas at San Antonio), Lisbon, Redux: Early Modern Women and the Problem of (Natural) Evil

4) Modern/20th century philosophy

• Joel Katzav (University of Queensland), Theodore and Grace de Lagunas’ Dogmatism and Evolution: Studies in Modern Philosophy
• Katherina Kinzel (University of Vienna), Heinrich Rickert on psychologism in historical method 
• F.M. Janssen-Lauret (University of Manchester), Founding Mothers of Analytic Philosophy: The Early Influence of Female Logicians and Metaphysicians

1:00-2:00 Sandwich Lunch, provided by KCL catering (Venue TBC)

2:00-3:15 (Great Hall)
Historiography Plenary
Michael Beaney (King’s College London & Humboldt University of Berlin), Broadening the Canon and Roaming Freely in History of Philosophy: Some Daoist Reflections on Historiography

3:15-4:15 (Great Hall) AGM

4:15-4:45 Coffee Break (River Room)


4:45-6:45 Two Concurrent Sessions

Venues: Small Committee Room; River Room

1) Symposium: British Platonism and Aesthetics in the 17th-18th Centuries

• Organiser: Prof. Douglas Hedley (University of Cambridge)
• Cecilia Muratori (University of Warwick), ‘Out of the Darkness, through the Fire, into the Light’: Dionysius Andreas Freher and the International Legacy of Jacob Böhme
• Christian Hengstermann (University of Münster), Spinoza Kabbalisticus. Henry More and the English and German Pantheism Controversies
• Adrian Mihai (University of Cambridge), Cudworth’s ‘Pleasing Horrour’ and Kant’s ‘das Erhabene’. A Missing Link to Early German Romanticism
• Endre Szécsényi (University of Aberdeen / ELTE University, Budapest), Lord Shaftesbury’s Case: The Problems with Neo-Platonic Aesthetics

2) Symposium: Kant Through the Fregean Looking Glass 

• Jessica Leech (King’s College London), Kant and Frege on Singular Judgment and Logical Inference
• Tyke Nunez (Universität Leipzig), Numerability, Logicism, and the Formality of Logic
• Andrew Stephenson (University of Southampton), Formalizing Kant’s Rules: a logic of conditional imperative and permissives
• Mark Textor (King’s College London), Seeing Judgment through the Fregean Lens

FRIDAY 26 April

9:45-11:00 (Great Hall)
Chinese Philosophy Plenary
Karyn Lai (UNSW, Sidney), Working with constraints: navigating the world with Zhuangzi

11:00-11:30 Coffee Break (Great Hall)

11:30-1:00 Four Concurrent Sessions

Venues: Great Hall; Small Committee Room; Council Room; River Room

1) Ancient Philosophy

• Sadie McCloud (Wheaton College), Vice in Aristotle: A Variety of Possible States
• I Xuan Chong (University of St. Andrews), Aristotle on the Unity of the Virtues
• Mike Coxhead (King’s College London), Virtue and the explanation of epistemic value: Aristotle and contemporary virtue epistemology

2) Hellenistic Philosophy

• Katharine O’Reilly (University of Oxford), Cicero Reading the Cyrenaics on the Anticipation of Future Pain
• Alex R. Gillham (Indiana University Kokomo), Epicurus on the Goodness of Knowledge 
• Benjamin Wilck (Humboldt University Berlin), Scientific Definitions and a New Problem for Pyrrhonian Scepticism

3) Early Modern Philosophy

• Giada Margiotto (Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland), Judgment and Volition in Early Modern England: King, Clarke, Collins
• Ruth Boeker (University College Dublin), Thomas Reid on Promises, Social Operations, and Liberty 
• Peter Hartl (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Hume, early modern atheism and the art of theological lying

4) Historiography/Methodology/Philosophy and Science

• Konstantinos Chatzigeorgiou (University of Glasgow), How the Mind-Body Problem Shaped the Historiography of Science: Revisiting E. A. Burtt's The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science
• Emily Herring (University of Leeds), Bergson among the Biologists
• Yael Gazit (Tel Aviv University), History Appropriated: A Change of Perspective on Past Engagement

1:00-2:00 Sandwich Lunch, provided by KCL catering (Venue TBC)

2:00-3:15 (Great Hall)

20th Century Philosophy Plenary
Cristina Chimisso (Open University), Historical Epistemology

3:15-3:30 Short Break

3:30-5:00 Four Concurrent Sessions

Venues: Great Hall; Small Committee Room; Council Room; River Room

1) Symposium: Pyrrhonian Logic, Reconsidered

• Máté Veres (Central European University & Eötvös Loránd University), Sextus Empiricus on sign- inference and proof in PH II
• Johanna Schmitt (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Sextus on the necessary expertise for solving sophisms
• Justin Vlasits (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen), Pyrrhonism and the Dialectical Methods: The Aims and Argument of PH II

2) Symposium: The Dao of Fu: On the Irreducibly Historical Nature of Chinese Philosophy

• Roger T. Ames (Peking University, China), Chinese Culture and its Interpretive Context: The Resolutely Historical, Contrapuntal Nature of Correlative Thinking
• Wu Genyou (Wuhan University, China), Three Metaphysical Approaches in Contemporary Sinophonic Philosophy
• Sarah Flavel (Bath Spa University), Commentary as Philosophy: On Interpretation in the History of Daoist Thinking
• Xiao Ouyang (University College Cork), The Problem of Creativity: a Reflection on Intellectual Progress and Aesthetic Innovation in the Chinese Tradition

3) Medieval/Renaissance/Early Modern

• Idit Chikurel (University of Potsdam), Influences of Greek Geometrical Analysis on Maimon's Notions of Invention and Analysis
• Valentina Zaffino (The Pontifical Lateran University, Rome), Ficino on (pseudo-)Aristotle on Providence
• Bartosz Zukowski (University of Lodz, Poland), Secondary Qualities - Primary Issue. Gradual Subjectivization of Sense Perception and Two Patterns of Early Modern Idealism

4) Early Modern Philosophy

• Martin Lenz (University of Groningen), Biased Beliefs: Spinoza on the Interaction of Ideas
• Beth Lord (University of Aberdeen), Spinoza on the theological-political significance of architectural design
• Martin Pickup (University of Oxford), The Infinity of Leibniz’s Infinite Analysis Account of Contingency 

5:00-5:30 Coffee Break (Venue TBC)

5:30-7:30 Three Concurrent Sessions

Venues: Small Committee Room; Council Room; River Room 

1) Symposium: Medieval Arabic Philosophy and its Reception

• Andreas Lammer (University of Trier, Germany), The Early Arabic Reception of Avicenna’sAccount of Corporeality: Matter and Body in the Sixth/Twelfth Century
• Wahid M. Amin (University of Birmingham), Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī and the Problem of Universalsin the Risāla fī taḥqīq al-kulliyyāt
• Anna-Katharina Strohschneider (University of Würzburg, Germany), Which Causes are Studied in Metaphysics? Antonio Trombetta as an Unexpected Follower of Averroes
• Eva Sahr (University of Würzburg, Germany), Averroes’ Theory of First Principles and its Reception in Sixteenth-Century Italy

2) Symposium: Émilie Du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics - A Key Philosophical Text for the Eighteenth Century

• Aaron Wells (University of Notre Dame), Explanation in Du Châtelet’s Institutions de Physique
• Qiu Lin (Duke University), Émilie Du Châtelet’s Views on Space
• Monica Solomon (University of Southern California), Du Châtelet’s Philosophy of Time
• Andrea Reichenberger (Paderborn University), Émilie Du Châtelet on Galileo’s Law of Free Fall

3) Symposium: Why we go Wrong: Evil and Moral Failure in Luther and Kant

• Bob Stern (University of Sheffield), Human Evil and Divine Grace in Luther and Kant
• Irina Schumski (Universität Tübingen), Kant’s Moral Principles in Circumstances of Evil
• Anastasia Berg (University of Cambridge), Evil and the Problem of Moral Self-Knowledge
• Martin Sticker (University of Bristol) & Joe Saunders (Durham University), Beyond the Duty / Self-love Dichotomy 

End of programme.

The BSHP gratefully acknowledges support from King’s College London Philosophy Department and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.


The deadline to register is coming up. To register and see the full programme with nearly 100 papers covering all periods in the history of philosophy please go to:https://www.bshp.org.uk/confevents/annualc

Professor Maria Rosa Antognazza
Chair, British Society for the History of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
King's College London
Strand, London WC2R 2LS -- UK

CALL FOR PAPERS: Othello's Island 2019: The 7th Annual Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Event Date: 15 Apr 2019 to 18 Apr 2019.   Nicosia, Cyprus

A collaboration between the Centre for Visual Arts and Research, Sheffield Hallam University, the University of Cyprus, the University of Kent and the University of Sheffield.

Founded in 2012, Othello's Island is an annual conference looking at Medieval, Renaissance and early modern history, literature, art and other culture, held at the Centre for Visual Arts and Research (CVAR) in Nicosia, Cyprus. It brings together a wide range of academics and research students, from all over the world, to discuss their work in what we describe as a multi-disciplinary event.

​Sometimes the themes of different papers can seem very diverse, but a multi-disciplinary approach means that we encourage participants to listen to a wide range of papers, in different discipline areas, in the belief that this can lead to new, sometimes remarkable, insights.

The Centre for Visual Arts and Research (CVAR), is located in the centre of the old town of Nicosia, capital of Cyprus. In its medieval streets, surrounded by the huge Venetian walls, you will find lovely museums, shops, cafes and restaurants, as well as medieval and renaissance buildings, harking back to the medieval and renaissance period, when Cyprus was ruled by the French Lusignan royal family. Perhaps most notable of the house was the last Queen of Cyprus, Catherine Cornaro, whose portrait was painted by Giorgione, Titian and other Renaissance artists.

For 2019 we are basing the conference around three themes. These are:

• Medieval and Byzantine literature, art, architecture, culture and history
• Shakespeare and his contemporaries
• Early modern women writers

We also welcome proposals for ‘wild card’ papers outside of the above categories. If your proposed paper does not fit into any of the above categories, you are still welcome to submit.

​​​CALL FOR PAPERS - DEADLINE 31 JANUARY 2019

If you would like to submit a paper for possible presentation at the conference please send an abstract and a brief CV (resumé) by e'mail to arrive not later than 31 January 2019.

The abstract should include:

Your full name
Your institutional affiliation (if any)
Your e'mail address
The title of your proposed paper
Your abstract (must be in English and not longer than 300 words long).

​In general we will try to let you know if your paper has been accepted not later than 28 February 2019. If you require a decision before 28 February 2019 ​on whether your paper will be included in the colloquium, please indicate this in your e'mail. Usually this will be because you need to make a funding application or other arrangements.

Papers can only be presented in person. We are sorry, we do not allow proxy or Skype-style presentations.

​All proposals and any questions should be sent to Dr Michael Paraskos with the subject line Othello 2019.  You are also advised to visit our website at www.othellosisland.org for more information.

Literature and the Early Modern State

– MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE · 4-5 APRIL 2019 –

IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN THE IDEA OF THE STATE WAS RADICALLY CONTESTED. REFORMATION, DYNASTIC CRISIS, CIVIL WAR, AND POLICIES OF STATE-FORMATION ALL CHALLENGED ESTABLISHED MODELS OF THE STATE.

Recent decades in literary studies have seen an engagement with politics reflected not just in pamphlets and polemics, but spreading through almost every sphere of early-modern literature. At the same time, though, the status of imaginative literature in the history of political thought remains a matter of debate.

This major two-day conference aims to explore how political writing, broadly conceived, interacts with early-modern theories of state. How did writers participate in the state: by imagining it, articulating it, or even performing some of its functions? What conceptual models and scholarly methods are currently being used to understand the state, and how might they inform each other? What important insights can literary studies bring to intellectual and political histories?

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Thursday 4 April

9.15-9.45: Registration

9.45-10.00: Welcome and opening remarks

10.00-11.20: Keynote Lecture

Mark Goldie, ‘Intertextual Whiggism: Political Aphorisms, Textual Appropriation, and Early Modern British Political Thought, 1590-1790’

11.20-11.30: Coffee

11.30-13.00: Session 1A: Rethinking Royalism

• Rachel Willie, ‘William Cavendish, Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Image of the Courtier’
• Niall Allsopp, ‘William Davenant and Cromwellian Sovereignty’
• John West, ‘“I think not on the state”: Women Writing and Reimagining the State in Seventeenth-Century England’

11.30-13.00: Session 1B: Pluralism and Party

• Stephanie Coster, ‘Andrew Marvell’s Anglicans: The Politics of Comprehension and Puritan Whig Ecclesiology in the Restoration’
• Paddy Bullard, ‘State Pluralism and Jonathan Swift’s Politics’
• John McTague, ‘“Some Convenient Order”: The Absolute State of the Dunciads’

13.00-14.00: Lunch

14.00-15.15: Session 2: Imagining the State I

• Paulina Kewes, ‘Translations of State’
• Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Imagining the Early Modern “Deep State”’

15.15-15.30: Coffee

15.30-17.00: Session 3: Crime and Corruption

• Lucy Clarke, ‘“Foreseeing that nothing be done… to the breach of the peace”: failures of local crime prevention in A Yorkshire Tragedy’
• Jason Peacey, ‘Abuses Stript and Whipt: George Wither on Corruption in the Commonwealth’
• Mark Knights, ‘Corruption in Early Modern Literature’

17.00-18.00: Break/visit to the Pepys Library

18.00-19.00: Drinks reception

19.00-21.00: Dinner


Friday 5 April

9.30-10.45: Keynote Lecture

Nicholas McDowell, ‘The Rabelaisian Body Politics’

10.45-11.00: Coffee

11.00-12.30: Session 4A: In Service of the State

• Edward Holberton, ‘Secretaries and Public Diplomacy: Andrew Marvell and Guy Miège in Muscovy’
• Tom Lockwood, ‘“Differences that arise touching places of service”: Sir John Davies, Antiquarianism, and the State’

11.00-12.30: Session 4B: Drama and Deliberation

• Vanessa Lim, ‘Political Deliberation in Troilus and Cressida’
• Joseph Hone, ‘Julius Caesar in Augustan England’
• David Francis Taylor, ‘Cato and the Crisis of Rhetoric’

12.30-13.30: Lunch

13.30-14.45: Session 5: Imagining the State II

• Lorna Hutson, ‘Does the Body Politic Have Knees?’
• Edward Paleit, ‘Robert Persons, William Rainolds, Elizabethan drama and the circulation of political ideas in 1590s Europe’

14.45-15.00: Coffee

15.00-16.30: Round Table: Beyond High Politics

Nadine Akkerman

Ann Hughes
Susan Wiseman