SOCIETY OF
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHERS CONFERENCE AT HOUGHTON
HOUGHTON,
N.Y.
— The Society of Christian Philosophers' Eastern Regional Meeting will be
held at Houghton College May 18-20. The conference theme is, “The Enlightenment Project, Revisited.”
The Enlightenment is frequently depicted as a period of mounting
skepticism: toward traditional theological claims, first of all, but
also toward substantive metaphysical claims of all kinds. Kant is widely
regarded as a paradigmatic Enlightenment figure, in both respects. A
number of scholars, though, have begun to question this depiction of
Kant, and of the Enlightenment as a whole. These questions will be the
focus of this conference.
This year’s meeting is unusual in that it is jointly sponsored by a
grant-funded group of Kant scholars working toward a volume on
Kant’s theological and metaphysical commitments. It promises to be
an intense and rewarding couple of days, drawing into conversation
two constituencies (Society members and scholars of the modern
period) who don’t often overlap or meet together. In addition to a
number of papers on Kant, the conference
will feature a large and diverse group of papers
on Butler, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Reid, Reinhold, Schopenhauer,
Wallace and others.
Keynote speakers include Karl Ameriks, McMahon-Hank professor of
philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and John Hare, Noah
Porter professor of philosophical theology at Yale University. Other
invited speakers come from Cornell, Illinois, MIT, Princeton, Purdue
and UCSD. A full schedule of the conference can be found at
http://scpmeeting.blogspot.com/.
