A Mod Guide to this year’s APA Eastern

Going to the APA Eastern next week? The program is packed with exciting papers, addresses and symposia in modern philosophy—many by contributors to this very blog. Here’s a guide to help you navigate the days, mod style.

• Descartes and Cartesianism
• Spinoza
• Conway, Leibniz, Astell, Locke
• Neo-confucian and Buddhist Modern Philosophy
• Hobbes
• Berkeley and John Gay
• Hume
• Kant, Hegel and German Idealism
• Mill, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer
• Nietzsche

 

Descartes and Cartesianism

Metaphysics #1

Sunday, December 28, 9:00 A.M.-NOON
Talks include:
Speaker: Matt Duncan (University of Virginia)
, “I Think, Therefore I Persist”
Commentator: Earl Conee (University of Rochester)

Symposium: The Reception of Descartes’s Philosophy

Sunday, December 28, 2:00–5:00 P.M.
Chair: Kristin Primus (New York University)
Speakers: Thomas Lennon (University of Western Ontario), Lawrence Nolan (California State University, Long Beach), 
Tad Schmaltz (University of Michigan)

Descartes Society
Topic: Cartesianism and 17th-Century Women Philosophers

Sunday, December 28, 5:15–7:15 P.M.
Speakers:
Alice Sowaal (San Francisco State University), “Descartes and Astell on Generosity”
Christia Mercer (Columbia University), 
“Conway and Cartesianism”
Commentator: Karen Detlefsen (University of Pennsylvania)

Society for the History of Political Philosophy
Topic: Eros and Law: Ancients and Moderns

Sunday, December 28, 7:30–10:30 P.M.
Talks include:
Speaker: Andrew Romiti (Catholic University), 
“Jacob Klein on the Cartesian Revolution”

Descartes Society

Monday, December 29, 7:00–10:00 P.M.
Chair: Julie Klein (Villanova University)
Speakers: Alan Nelson (University of North Carolina) and Kurt Smith (Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania), “Synthesizing Descartes on Analysis”
Commentator: Roger Florka (Ursinus College)
Speaker: Andrew Platt (Stony Brook University), 
“Defending a ‘Compatibilist’ Reading of Descartes on the Will”
Commentator: Colin Chamberlain (Temple University)

 

Spinoza

Symposium: Spinoza

Monday, December 29, 9:00–11:00 A.M.
Chair: Julie Klein (Villanova University)
Speaker: John Grey (Boston University), “Necessitarianism and Divine Self-Causation in Spinoza”
Commentator: Alison Peterman (University of Rochester)

Symposium: Spinoza

Monday, December 29, 1:30–4:30 P.M.
Chair: Jason Aleksander (Saint Xavier University)
Speaker: Michael Della Rocca (Yale University)
Commentators: John Carriero (University of California, Los Angeles), Eugene Marshall (Florida International University)

 

Conway, Leibniz, Astell, Locke

Leibniz Society of North America
Topic: Early Modern Philosophy

Sunday, December 28, 11:15 A.M.-1:15 P.M.
Chair: Martha Brandt Bolton (Rutgers University)
Speaker: Daniel Garber (Princeton University), “Monads on My Mind”
Commentator: Edward Glowienka (Carroll College)

Descartes Society

Sunday, December 28, 5:15–7:15 P.M.
Topic: Cartesianism and 17th-Century Women Philosophers
Speakers:
Alice Sowaal (San Francisco State University), “Descartes and Astell on Generosity”
Christia Mercer (Columbia University), 
“Conway and Cartesianism”
Commentator: Karen Detlefsen (University of Pennsylvania)

Substantial Unity: Conway, Locke, and Leibniz

Tuesday, December 30, 1:30–4:30 P.M.
Chair: Edwin McCann (University of Southern California)
Speakers: Martha Brandt Bolton (Rutgers University), Matthew Priselac (University of Oklahoma), Christia Mercer (Columbia University)

 

Neo-confucian and Buddhist Early Modern

North American Korean Philosophy Association
Topic: Korean Neo-Confucianism

Sunday, December 28, 11:15 A.M.-1:15 P.M.
Chair: Bongrae Seok (Alvernia University)
Speakers:
Young Chan Ro (George Mason University), “A Non-Dualistic Approach to Yi Yulgok’s Neo-Confucian Philosophy”
Hongkyung Kim (State University of New York at Stony Brook), “Pursuit of Universality: Dasan’s Reinterpretation of the Confucian Classics”
Weon-Jae Jeong (Seoul National University, South Korea), “Korean Confucianism in the Chosun Dynasty and Cheng-Zhu School of Neo-Confucianism”
Bongrae Seok (Alvernia University)
“Moral Psychology of Emotion and Toegye’s (Yi Hwang’s) Neo-Confucianism”

International Society for Chinese Philosophy (ISCP)
Topic: Chinese Ethics, Neo-Confucianism, and the Impacts to Modern China

Sunday, December 28, 7:30–10:30 P.M.
Talks include:
Speaker: Yong Huang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), “Empathy for the ‘Devil’: Wang Yangming’s Contribution to Contemporary Ethics”

North American Korean Philosophy Association
Topic: Korean Transformation of Asian Philosophy and Religion: Ki (Qi) Philosophy and Buddhism

Monday, December 29, 11:15 A.M.–1:15 P.M.
Talks include:
Chair: Suk Choi (Towson University)
Speakers:
Suk Choi (Towson University), “Ch’oe Han-gi on Ki(Qi) and Mind”
So Jeong Park (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
, “‘Jigi’ of Donghak as Experienced Ultimate Energy”
Pascal Kim (Academy of Korean Studies, South Korea), “Consciousness Intertwined: Wŏnch’ŭk and Wŏnhyo on Amalavijñāna”

Society for the Study of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy

Monday, December 29, 11:15 A.M.–1:15 P.M.
Talks include:
Speaker: Douglas Duckworth (Temple University), “In/Between Epistemology and Madhyamaka: Two Approaches to Truth in Śākya Chokden and Tsongkhapa”

Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy
Topic: Comparative Perspectives in East Asian Philosophy

Monday, December 29, 1:30–4:30 P.M.
Talks include:
Speakers:
Brad Cokelet (University of Miami)
, “Spontaneous Agency and Neo-Kantian Constitutivism”
Hwa Yeong Wang (Binghamton University), 
“A Feminist Reconstruction of Emotions in Korean Neo-Confucianism”

Association of Chinese Philosophers in America
Topic: Self-Awareness and Self-Cultivation: Confucianism and Buddhism

Tuesday, December 30, 9:00–11:00 A.M.
Talks include:
Speaker: Hanna Kim (Seoul National University), “From Natural (自然) to Necessity (必然), Ethical Transition in Dai-zhen’s Thought”
Commentator: Suk Choi (Towson University)
Speaker: Xingyi Wang (Harvard Divinity School)
, “Dedicated to Confession and Repentance: The Writing of Ouyi Zhixu on Buddhist Vinaya”
Commentator: Chung-ying Cheng (University of Hawai’i at Mānoa)

 

Hobbes

International Hobbes Association

Sunday, December 28, 2:00–5:00 P.M.
Chair: Michael P. Krom (Saint Vincent College)
Speakers:
Emre Keskin (William Paterson University), “Hobbes’s Optics”
Steve Viner (Middlebury College), 
“‘Obligation’ in Leviathan: Can Sovereigns Be Fools?”
Joseph Anderson (University of South Florida), “Liberty, Definitions, and Piety: Leibniz’s Critique of Hobbes on Necessity”
Shane D. Courtland (University of Minnesota Duluth), 
“Hobbesian Absolutism, Thinly Interpreted, Fits the U.S.”
Carlo Burelli (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy), “Subjectivity Is Objective: Thomas Hobbes on Normative Truth”
Justin R. Hawkins (Yale Divinity School), 
“The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes: A Theological Critique of A. P. Martinich’s The Two Gods of Leviathan”

History of Ethics

Monday, December 29, 1:30–4:30 P.M.
Talks include:
Torsten Menge (Georgetown University), 
“Hobbes and the Fiction of Sovereign Power”

International Hobbes Association

Monday, December 29, 7:00–10:00 P.M.
Chair: Aloysius Martinich (University of Texas at Austin)
Speakers:
Stephen Bero (University of Southern California), “Against the Universality of Hobbes’s Laws of Nature”
Michael Byron (Kent State University), “Submission and Subjection in Leviathan”
Kody W. Cooper (Princeton University)
, “The Essence of Leviathan: The Person of the Commonwealth and the Common Good”
Luciano Venezia (Universidad Nacional de Quilmes), “What Difference Does the Sovereign Make?”
Signy Gutnick Allen (Queen Mary, University of London)
, “‘Author of His Own Punishment’: The Hobbesian Citizenship of Punished Individuals”
Jauffrey Berthier (Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France), 
“Hobbes and Penal Governance: Punishment as Civil and Political Hostility”

 

Berkeley and John Gay

International Berkeley Society

Sunday, December 28, 9:00 A.M.-NOON
Chair: Nancy Kendrick (Wheaton College, Massachusetts)
Speaker: Stephen H. Daniel (Texas A&M University), “Berkeley and Descartes on How Perception Is Active”
Commentator: Thomas Lennon (University of Western Ontario)
Speaker: Geoffrey Gorham (Macalester College), “Locke and Berkeley on Time and Succession”
Commentator:  Martha Brandt Bolton (Rutgers University)

National Philosophical Counseling Association

Monday, December 29, 11:15 A.M.–1:15 P.M.
Talks include:
Speaker: Samuel Zinaich (Purdue University–Calumet), “John Gay (1699–1745), Psychological Egoism, and Logic-Based Therapy”

 

Hume

Hume Society
Topic: Hume on Religion

Sunday, December 28, 5:15–7:15 P.M.
Chair: Lewis Powell (State University of New York at Buffalo)
Speakers:
Deborah Boyle (College of Charleston), “Hume on Natural Beliefs and Belief in God”
Emily Kelahan (Illinois Wesleyan University)
, “The Design Argument in Hume’s Natural History of Religion”

History of Ethics

Monday, December 29, 1:30–4:30 P.M.
Talks include:
Speaker: Ryan Pollock (The Pennsylvania State University), “The Generosity and Capacity of Our Nature: Hume’s Reply to Hutcheson in the Treatise”

 

Kant, Hegel and German Idealism

Hegel’s Ethical Theory

Saturday, December 27, 6:30-9:30 P.M.
Chair: Mark Alznauer (Northwestern University)
Speakers: Robert Pippin (University of Chicago), Fred Neuhouser (Columbia University)
Commentator: Dean Moyar (Johns Hopkins University)

American Association for the Philosophic Study of Society
Topic: Moral Reasoning

Saturday, December 27, 6:30-9:30 P.M.
Talks include:
Speaker: Mark D. White (City University of New York–College of Staten Island), 
“Moral Judgment: Combining Kant and Dworkin”

International Association for Environmental Philosophy

Saturday, December 27, 6:30-9:30 P.M.
Talks include:
Speakers:
David Alexander Craig (University of Oregon) and Anna-Lisa Baumeister (University of Oregon), “On the Androcentrism of the Anthropocene: Human History, Kant, and Feminist Critiques of Enlightenment”
Kevin Brennan (Emory University), “The Production of Second Nature in Kant, Fichte, and Schelling”

North American Kant Society
Topic: Author Meets Critics, Jennifer Mensch,
Kant’s Organicism: Epigeneis and the Development of Critical Philosophy

Sunday, December 28, 7:30–10:30 P.M.
Chair: Pablo Muchnik (Emerson College)
Speakers:
Guenter Zoeller (University of Munich, Germany), “Metaphor or Method? Jennifer Mensch’s Organic Kant Interpretation”
John Zammito (Rice University), 
“Bringing Biology Back In”
Jennifer Mensch (University of Waterloo, Canada), “Genealogy and Critique in Kant’s Organic History of Reason”

Society for the History of Political Philosophy
Topic: Eros and Law: Ancients and Moderns

Sunday, December 28, 7:30–10:30 P.M.
Talks include:
Speaker: Paul Wilford (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) “Autonomy As the Telos of Kant’s Rational Religion”

Symposium: Nineteenth-Century Ethics

Monday, December 29, 9:00–11:00 A.M.
Chair: Yvonne Tam (University of California, Riverside)
Speaker: Michelle Kosch (Cornell University), 
“Fichtean Kantianism in Nineteenth-Century Ethics”
Commentators: Reed Winegar (Fordham University), Paul Katsafanas (Boston University)

Patrick Romanell Lecture

Monday, December 29, 9:00–11:00 A.M.
Chair: Paul Guyer (Brown University)
Speaker: Patricia Kitcher (Columbia University), “Kant, Norms, and Nature”

North American Kant Society
Topic: Kant on Education

Monday, December 29, 7:00–10:00 P.M.
Chair: Lara Ostaric (Temple University)
Speakers:
Chris Surprenant (University of New Orleans), “Kant’s Moral Education and the Cultivation of Virtue”
Alix Cohen (University of Edinburgh, Scotland), “The Role of Feelings in Moral Education”
Robert Louden (University of Southern Maine), “‘Total Transformation’: Educational Reform in Basedow and Kant”

Kant

Tuesday, December 30, 11:15 A.M.–1:15 P.M.
Chair: Georges Dicker (State University of New York at Brockport)
Speaker: Michael Bennett McNulty (University of California, Irvine), 
“Chemistry in Kant’s Opus postumum”
Commentator: Katherine Dunlop (University of Texas)
Speaker: Justin Shaddock (Williams College)
, “Kant’s Neglected Alternative and the Unavoidable Need for the Transcendental Deduction”
Commentator: Krasimira Filcheva (University of North Carolina– Chapel Hill)

 

Mill, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer

Aristotle #1

Saturday, December 27, 6:30-9:30 P.M.
Talks include:
Speaker: Karl Aho (Baylor University), 
“Kierkegaard’s Revision of the Aristotelian Virtue of Courage”
Commentator: Dan Larkin (University of Memphis)

Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children
Topic: Philosophy of Childhood

Sunday, December 28, 11:15 A.M.– 2:15 P.M.
Talks include:
Speaker: Joshua Hall (Muskingum University)
, “Tyrannical Non-Childhood of the Liberator- Philosopher: The Case of J. S. Mill”

Society for the Study of Women Philosophers

Monday, December 29, 11:15 A.M.–1:15 P.M.
Talks include:
Speaker: Carol Bensick (University of California, Los Angeles, Center for the Study of Women)
, “‘Schopenhauer and Pessimism’: An Unknown Paper from the Concord School of Philosophy”

Soren Kierkegaard Society
Topic: Kierkegaard and Narrative

Tuesday, December 30, 1:30–4:30 P.M.
Chair: Frances Maughan-Brown (Boston College)
Speakers:
John Davenport (Fordham University), “Psychological Narrativity and the Limits of Ethical Self-Authorship”
Jeffrey Hanson (Australian Catholic University), “Aesthetic Ideals and the Task of Repetition”
Frances Maughan-Brown (Boston College), “Kierkegaard and Allegorical Narrative”
Commentator: TBA

 

Nietzsche

North American Nietzsche Society
Topic: Author Meets Critics: Paul Katsafanas,
Agency and the Foundations of Ethics

Sunday, December 28, 2:00–5:00 P.M.
Chair: R. Lanier Anderson (Stanford University)
Critics:
Bernard Reginster (Brown University)
Jorah Dannenberg (Stanford University)
Author: Paul Katsafanas (Boston University)

Philosophy of the City Research Group

Sunday, December 28, 5:15–7:15 P.M.
Talks include:
Speaker: Roger Paden (George Mason University), 
“Historical Preservation: Nietzsche, Vienna, and Historical Eclecticism”

The Heidegger Circle

Tuesday, December 30, 11:15 A.M.–1:15 P.M.
Talks include:
Robert Scharff (University of New Hampshire), “What Dilthey ‘Says’ and Nietzsche ‘Understands’ about Historical Life: Heidegger’s Early Retrieval”

 

For the full program, see here.

 

Image: George Heap, ‘An East Perspective View of the City of Philadelphia, in the Province of Pensylvania, in North America, taken from the Jersey Shore’ (ca. 1754)