Playing by the Rules (I)

Adrian Piper (Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) Foundation)

The Annual Lecture is free of charge and participants to the conference will be welcome to attend it.
 
The Keele Forum for Philosophical Research is part of the Research Centre for SPIRE in the Research Institute for Social Sciences. The Forum was officially launched in November 2008. Previous Annual Lectures were given by: Giuseppina D'Oro, Miranda Fricker, Stephen Engstrom, John Horton and Alan Montefiore.

Apart from the 'J.-J. Rousseau' Annual Lecture and Conference, the Forum organises the following events:

- The Royal Institute of Philosophy Invited Lecture Series
- The Philosophy Summer Seminar Series
- The Forum's Special Lectures
- Reading Groups, workshops and other events.

The Annual Lecture and Conference are organised by the Keele Forum for Philosophical Research with the support of the Research Centre for SPIRE, the School of Politics, Philosophy International Relations and the Environment (SPIRE), the Research Institute for Social Justice at Keele, and the ECPR Kantian Standing Group.

Why the Jean-Jacques Rousseau lecture?  We mark in this way the true, but very little known, fact that Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived for a time in Staffordshire. From 22 March 1766 to 1 May 1767 Rousseau lived in the little Staffordshire village of Wootton. Rousseau had been invited to England by David Hume with whom he soon afterwards quarrelled. He then spent the next year in seclusion in Staffordshire writing the first drafts of his Confessions. When he was not writing it is said that he roamed the Staffordshire countryside in his Armenian costume studying wild flowers. He must have made a striking figure. Many years after his departure the locals remembered ‘Owd Ross Hall’, not just for his eccentricities but also for his gifts to local charities. They believed he was a king in exile! (Stephen Leach - Honorary Research Fellow, Keele)