The Faculty of Philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam presents a workshop on Gender in Social and Political Philosophy. The workshop will take place on 3 December 2008. The programme is below the fold:

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The Association for Legal and Social Philosophy will be holding its 2009 conference at the University of Edinburgh from 203 July 2009. From the website:

The last two decades have seen profound social and economic changes in all areas of our lives. To name but a few: borders have become both more open and more closed. We have witnessed unprecedented levels of technological development: from new medical technologies such as genetic engineering and cloning, to communication technologies such as the internet and new modes of warfare. Environmental degradation and climate change are now a daily reality.

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Via Simon Kirchin:

The 2009 British Society for Ethical Theory Conference will be held at the University of Reading from 13-15 July 2009. The subject area is open within metaethics and normative ethics. Papers on topics in applied ethics or the history of ethics may also be considered provided they are also of wider theoretical interest. The deadline for submissions is 12th December, 2008. Papers and accompanying particulars should be emailed to Dr. Bart Streumer. Note that ONLY electronic submissions will be accepted.

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The Society for Applied Philosophy 2009 annual conference will be held at the University of Leeds from 26-28 June 2009. The conference will have no specific theme.

Proposal abstracts should be submitted .doc or .rtf file format (300 word limit) and with the email subject line SAP AC2009 Abstract by email by Friday 9 January 2009. All applicants will be notified of a decision by early February 2009

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An announcement from Matthew Festenstein:

‘Deliberative democracy’ has become a dominant, if contested, paradigm in democratic thought. Political philosophers have investigated the conceptual shape and normative desirability of deliberation, rationality, procedural fairness. Empirical political scientists have explored the forms and availability of deliberation in relation to international negotiations, mediation processes, regional and national legislative processes, and various experimental settings. Among practitioners, the dea of deliberative democracy inspired a surge of experimentation with techniques of public participation in policy making, including citizens’ juries, participatory budgeting, electronic town halls, and many other models in environmental, development, health, and planning decisions around the world. Indeed, much empirical work on deliberative democracy has tended to focus on these micro processes, or ‘minipublics’, and to overlook the larger, macro issues which originally inspired the deliberative democracy project. More generally, political enthusiasm for mechanisms such as citizens’ juries has arguably not kept pace with developing conceptual, normative and empirical research.

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The School of Government and International Affairs at Durham is hosting a workshop on “50 Years Since Isaiah Berlin’s Lecture `Two Concepts of Liberty’” on 14-15 November 2008. Speakers include Diana Coole (Birkbeck), George Crowder (Flinders), Katrin Flikschuh (LSE), and Andrew Vincent (Sheffield). Register here.

Via Jacob T. Levy

The Annual Meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy will be held from 28-29 August, 2008, in conjunction with the American Political Science Association, at the Hynes Convention Center/ Boston Marriott Copley Place/ Sheraton Boston Hotel, in Boston, MA.

Conference schedule below the fold:

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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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The Stanford Center on Ethics will be hosting a conference on justice and educational distribution on 17-18 October 2008. The program is below the fold and a website will be posted in due course.

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, and in recognition of the UDHR’s 60th anniversary, the Institute for Law and Philosophy will host a one-day conference featuring panels on a range of philosophical and legal aspects of human rights. Committed participants include Charles Beitz (Princeton), Allen Buchanan (Duke), Roger Clark (Rutgers-Camden), James Nickel (Arizona State), Thomas Pogge (Yale), and Joseph Raz (Columbia/Oxford), with other additions still to come. Details to follow.

Registration is required, and there is a registration fee of $25 ($10 for students). To register, please e-mail and send a check, payable to Rutgers University, to: John Oberdiek, Rutgers University School of Law-Camden, 217 North 5th Street, Camden, NJ 08102.

Organized by John Oberdiek. For details see: http://www.lawandphil.rutgers.edu/upcomingconferences.html

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).

Via Simon Caney, there are some places left for a conference in Oxford on 1 July on the work of Henry Shue. Those interested can sign up here, and have a look at the programme too. Speakers include Charles Beitz, John Tasioulas, Simon Caney, David Rodin, and Tony Coady.

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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