CFP: The Good Society

Humanity’s social nature presents us with a problem.  While people need society to achieve full human flourishing, society is often a place in which people find their freedom constricted.  It is not always clear how to reconcile our need for community with our need for individual freedom.  Thus, we are faced with the problem of creating a good society that promotes the flourishing and freedom of everyone. In this conference, we hope to explore different aspects of this problem, as well as related issues.

This conference welcomes papers from a wide variety of philosophical traditions, and we also encourage papers from disciplines other than philosophy that speak to the issue of the Good Society. In addition, we welcome high quality papers from both graduate and upper level undergraduate students.  Some possible conference paper topics include the following:

·       Ancient and Medieval conceptions of the Good Society (i.e. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, etc.)

·       Social contract theory and the good society (i.e.  Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, John Rawls)

·       Communitarianism and the Good Society (i.e. Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, etc.)

·       German philosophers and the Good Society (i.e. Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche etc.)

·       Critical Society Theory and the Good Society (i.e. Freud, Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, Hannah Arendt, Marcuse, Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Honneth, Paolo Freire, etc.)

·       Conservative and liberal political perspective and the Good Society

·       Social Structures/Institutions and the Good Society (i.e. religion, medicine, law, public welfare, police, prisons, schools, media and the Good Society.)

·       Applied Issues and the Good Society (e.g. finance, the environment, immigration, public health, terrorism)

·       Race, gender, and LGBTQ issues and the Good Society

Abstracts should be prepared for blind review. Include name, contact information, title of paper and institutional affiliation in the body of the submission email for reference.

·       Abstract submissions for presentations should be between 300-500 words.

·       Conference presenters will have approximately 20-30 minutes to present.

·       Abstracts should be submitted in .doc/docx or .pdf format.

·       Submissions should be directed to Shelly Johnson at [email protected]

Deadline for abstracts/papers to be considered for the conference: January 4, 2015. 

Chosen presenters will be notified of their acceptance to the conference in late January or very early in February.