Marina Barabas, a fellow at our Centre, is organising 6th Colloquium on the Modalities of the Good, which will take place 8. 8. 2018 - 10. 8. 2018 at Academic Conference Centre, Husova 4a, Prague 1.
The Colloquium on the Modalities of the Good seeks since its beginning in 2009 to facilitate a conversation between thinkers of broadly speaking Platonic tradition in ethics, and to open it to the philosophical public. The tradition is marked not only by its commitment to absolute value and to the irreducibility of basic ethical concepts, but also by viewing understanding less as a work of reason than of thought and thus also of emotions. Internal to this conception, and so to the tradition itself, is thus the problem of how to approach the issues: of the relation between the what and the how in philosophical, particularly ethical, thinking. Reflection about the give-and-take between the substance and the method goes back to Socrates' and Plato's exploration of the philosophical dialogue. It characterises not only thinkers who acknowledge their kinship to Plato, such as Søren Kierkegaard or Simone Weil, but also some who do not, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein. Contemporary 'Platonic' tradition, associated in English-speaking philosophy with the names of Roy Holland, Iris Murdoch, Peter Winch, Raimond Gaita or Cora Diamond, is marked by this dual concern, and the Colloquium thematises to an equal extent the problem(s) of ethics, of thinking about ethics and of ethical thinking. For those same reasons, the Colloquium is emphatically a col-loquium: a conversation about issues of shared interest, offered for discussion by the speakers, rather than a forum for presenting 'finished' results.
Speakers and invited participants:
Arthur Archer (Tilburg University)
Marina Barabas (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic)
Michael Campbell (Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice)
Sam Clark (Lancaster University)
Christopher Cordner (University of Melbourne; Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice)
Christopher Cowley (University College Dublin)
David Levy (University of Edinburgh): Goodness and the Good
Hugo Strandberg (Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice)
More information is available at the conference website: http://www.flu.cas.cz/cz/6th-colloquium-on-the-modalities-of-the-good