CFP: Early Modern Laws of Nature: Secular and Divine

This one-day workshop will examine the theological debates that influenced the birth and development of the notion of laws of nature from the sixteenth century until the critical Kant. It is widely accepted that the laws of nature were born as a theological justification of the order found in nature by sixteenth and seventeenth centuries natural philosophers and theologians. It is also widely recognised, however, that by the mid-eighteenth century the laws of nature were assumed to guide and explain the workings of the natural world without any reference to the divine. The laws of nature, therefore, moved from being essentially tied in their beginnings to the nature of God, to becoming a secular concept by the midst of the so called scientific revolution. The goal of this event will be to uncover the philosophical and theological concepts at stake both at the birth and later development of the laws of nature, seeking a greater understanding of the transition from being a theological notion to becoming a non-theological notion. 

Please send your paper proposal (of not more than 500 words) to [email protected] with the subject: “Workshop: Early Modern Laws of Nature: Secular and Divine”, not later than: 30 April 2016

The organisers expect to receive papers ranging from issues surrounding the theological underpinnings of the laws of nature in the philosophies of nature of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Cartesian and Scholastic understandings of the laws of nature, and to secular discourses on the laws of nature by the mid-eighteenth century.