Something of relevance for grad students who also work in ethics or applied ethics:

The graduate students of the Department of Philosophy at Virginia Tech are hosting their fifth annual conference on 7-8 November 2008. The topic of the conference is Twentieth Century Ethics, and the keynote speaker is Simon Blackburn.

Graduate students are invited to submit papers in metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics, or on the development of ethics throughout the century. Papers should be no longer than 3500 words (20-30 minutes presentation), and should include a short abstract of 200-250 words. Please prepare them for blind review and email as a MS Word document to Heather Oldham by 1 October 2008. Also include a separate cover sheet with your name, the paper title, your mailing address, email address, telephone number, and institutional affiliation.

Download the full CFP: Human Rights and Justice in Immigration

The Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is organizing an international conference designed to examine various normative aspects of immigration regimes with an emphasis on the Israeli immigration regime. The conference will examine actual arrangements for immigration in Israel and other countries, and will explore what could be considered desirable universal arrangements for immigration, taking into account the cultural as well as the economic interests of both potential immigrants and their hosts. The conference will be the culmination of the work of an interdisciplinary research group on these issues, which has been working together at the Minerva Center since early 2007.

The conference is scheduled for 25-27 May 2009, and will take place in Jerusalem. Recipients of this Call for Papers are invited to submit proposals to present a paper at the conference. Authors of the selected proposals will be offered flight expenses to Israel and accommodations for the three days of the conference.

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A two-day seminar will be held at the University of Leicester on 25-26 September as part of the ESRC Research Seminar Series. The seminar will cover the three main themes of the series: politics, multiculturalism and media.
A keynote guest public lecture will be given by human rights lawyer Phil Shiner entitled: ‘The UK Torture Team: British Use of Coercive Interrogation Techniques from Northern Ireland to Iraq’.

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The Center for Applied Ethics and Philosophy (CAEP) will host the Third International Applied Ethics Conference on 21-23 November 2008 at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. From the CFP:

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Something for grad students:

For the fourth year running, Res Publica (the journal of the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy) will be awarding a prize for the best paper submitted by a current postgraduate student in 2008.  This may be in any area of moral, legal or social philosophy, and should conform to the normal requirements for submissions - please see the website address below for details.

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In addition to several other hats that I wear, one of these hats is co-convener of the Global Justice and Human Rights (GJHR) Group. This group is funded by the UK’s Political Studies Association (PSA).

Each year the GJHR Group is given sessions at the PSA annual conference: last year, we put on our first sessions since coming into existence a few months before. Each was very well attended and we have been awarded up to four sessions for the next annual conference.

The next PSA annual conference will take place at the Manchester Conference Centre from 7th-9th April 2009. The conference website is here.

If any reader would like to present a paper at this conference, then please send your expression of interest to me here no later than 10th September 2008. I would require a proposed title and brief abstract.

These conferences are well attended, regularly attracting over 500 delegates: the PSA annual conference is the second largest political science conference in the world, second only to APSA’s annual conference. Manchester is a fantastic city to travel to as well, if you have not visited the city before.

The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love invites papers for the upcoming conference “Sexual Selves” to be held on May 1-3, 2009 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Keynote Speakers will be:

Martha Nussbaum (Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago) and

Cressida Heyes (Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality, University of Alberta)

Invited speakers include:

Scott Anderson
Ellen Feder
Deirdre Golash
Richard Mohr
Johanna Oksala
Melissa Orlie
Laurie Shrage
Anita Superson
Ludger Viefhues-Bailey

The theme of the conference (“Sexual Selves”) is sexuality and sexual identity. Papers will consider themes of sexuality and sexual identity understood from epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical perspectives. We encourage both continental and analytic approaches to these issues.

Papers should not exceed 4000 words in length.
Abstracts should not exceed 150 words.
Send your document as an email attachment to Helga Varden.

Submission Deadline: October 15, 2008

Submissions in any area of philosophy are welcome. More info here. There’s also an undergraduate essay contest (same deadline).

The University of Aarhus, Denmark, is hosting an international conference on Rousseau and Revolution from 13-15 March 2009. From their CFP:

Fidel Castro once told a journalist that one of his masters was Jean-Jacques Rousseau and that he fought Batista with a copy of the Social Contract in his pocket. This anecdote, true or false, calls attention to an aspect of Rousseau’s philosophy which is often ignored or forgotten in academic discussions, namely that his philosophy has often been used, for good or bad, to inspire and legitimize revolutions and rebellions, beginning with the French Revolution.

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The New University of Lisbon is hosting a conference on current research on global justice and the nation state on 23-24 October 2008. From the CFP:

Within philosophy and the social sciences, global justice, the nation, and the state are among the most discussed topics in recent years. Despite the considerable amount of scholarly work devoted to the topic, we still lack consolidated views with regard to the evolution of legal and political institutions beyond the boundaries of the nation-state as well as to their capacity of tackling matters of global justice. Recent international debate focused on the “new international order” set out in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the US reaction, which led scholars to focus their attention on legal international institutions, political unilateralism, multilateralism, etc.

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Those of you with an interest in the morality of war (of that are looking for an excuse to visit San Diego in January) might be interested in giving a talk at the ISME’s 2009 Symposium. I’ve pasted their call for papers below; as you can see, the conference themes are broad enough that even those that do not typically write on war may find it a congenial place to present some of their work. I really enjoyed last year’s symposium - the participants included not only philosophers but also political scientists, legal scholars, historians and serving and retired military officers of varying ranks (many of whom had, or were working toward, advanced degrees in philosophy or political science). The non-philosophers’ knowledge of other domains (e.g. the law of armed conflict or the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice), and especially the military personnel’s experience in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait and elsewhere, more than compensates for the frustration that sometimes results from sharing one’s philosophical work with those not trained in philosophy.

I particularly want to encourage those that participated in or followed the discussion of David Estlund’s book on democratic authority to submit papers on the (possible) tensions between the morality and legality of war - not least because I’m partly to blame for the conference adopting this theme. As some of you probably know, Estlund has already written on this topic; see “On Following Orders in an Unjust War,” Journal of Political Philosophy 15:2 (June 2007).

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Via Jacob T. Levy:

The Department of Government (FAS) at Harvard University will host its second conference for graduate students in political theory and political philosophy from October 31 - November 1, 2008. Papers on any theme or topic within political theory—from the history of political thought to contemporary normative and conceptual theory—will be considered. Between seven and twelve papers will be accepted.

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The Philosophy Faculty at the University of Bucharest is hosting a conference on Reason in Contemporary Public Space on 14-15 November 2008. From their website:

Is there a place for reason in contemporary public space? Has the Kantian “public use of reason” lost its appeal for our societies, being demoted to the status of a mere philosophical abstraction? The ever-rising importance of marketing (both commercial and political) in setting the public agenda, the growing impact of new media and the increasing tendency of clustering in relatively isolated, and often virtual, communities, might be regarded as justifying the dramatic overtones of the questions above. If elections, customers, debates, fans or friends are to be won by appeal to rhetoric, imagery and emotions rather than argument, isn’t one of the most venerable philosophical traditions to be held guilty of over-rating a specific faculty which might be, after all, just a “slave of passions”?

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I’d like to invite submissions for a semester-long online symposium of papers in political philosophy during Fall 2008 that I would like to host on the website. The idea is that each week a paper will be podcasted on the website by the author and receive comments in response. Symposium submissions will be subject to a process of blind review by a committee of members of the website. Papers in all areas of political philosophy and theory are welcome.

The aim of the symposium is to utilise the resources at our disposal to create a conference experience accessible to every academic in the world, both as a presenter and as a participant. Conference participation is an important part of our research activities as academics, but logistical difficulties and expenses can sometimes make conference travel impossible, especially at the international level. The function of the symposium is to create an online conference in a format designed to elicit as much feedback from fellow academics as possible whilst creating no significant financial or logistical difficulties for participants whatsoever. Those selected will be able to present their papers to an unlimited number of colleagues without having to leave their offices. The papers will be presented on a weekly basis to allow a reasonable time period for comments. The papers will be podcasted to make them as accessible as possible to a wide audience.

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Something that may be of interest to political philosophers working on the significance of disagreement:

Episteme will holds its sixth annual conference at Northwestern University on 26-27 June 2009. The 2009 meeting will focus on the epistemological significance of disagreement. Confirmed participants include Michael Bergman (Purdue), Stewart Cohen (Arizona State), Sherrilyn Roush (Berkeley) and Roger White (MIT).

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Via Simon Kirchin at Ethics Etc., something that may be of interest to political philosophers:

Many philosophers are familiar with the distinction between thin and thick concepts. Canonical examples of thin concepts include goodness and badness, rightness and wrongness. There are supposedly many examples of thick concepts, including cruelty, kindness, beauty, elegance, and curiosity. A number of issues arise in relation to thin and thick concepts. Many might be familiar with a key debate, namely how one should construe the relationship between thick concepts’ supposed descriptive aspects and their supposed evaluative aspects. Do we have here two separable elements, or are they best characterized as essentially inseparable, resulting in a form of evaluation that is more specific than that found in thin concepts?

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Via Fritz Allhoff at the Philosophy Google Group:

The Northeastern Political Science Association will hold its 40th annual meeting on November 13-15, 2008 at the Omni Parker House Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. Proposals for papers, panels, or to serve as a chair and/or discussant must be submitted before June 15, 2008 through the NPSA submission website. (Once on the submission website, create a username and password and follow the instructions.)

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Representation is a journal of longstanding repute. It has been publishing since 1960 and has a general interest in all matters relating to the theme of representative democracy. To this end it has established itself as a recognised journal of record and comment both in the UK and internationally. While building on its present strengths, the new editors wish to expand the journal’s remit and introduce normative concepts of democracy and representation, to consider more than parliamentary versions of representation and to broaden the geographic scope of the journal.

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Via Jon Kvanvig at Certain Doubts:

The University of Copenhagen is hosting a conference on “The Epistemology of Liberal Democracy: Free Speech, Disagreement, and Common Belief” from 20-21 November, 2008. Abstracts of no more than 1000 words, and prepared for blind review, should be emailed to the organising committee by 15 August 2008. Notifications of acceptance will be made by 15 September 2008.

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The Berkeley-Stanford-Davis Graduate Student Philosophy Conference will be held in Wellman Hall at Davis on 5 April 2008. Papers from graduate students at California universities in all areas of philosophy are invited. Papers of about 35 minutes in length (4500 words) should be prepared for blind review and submitted (as MS Word or pdf documents) by 1 February to the organisers. Include your name, affiliation, contact information, paper title, and 100-200 word abstract in the body of the email. Follow the link for more details or contact Brad Morris. This is one of the best opportunities for grad students on the west coast to meet and present their work.