The St Andrews Kant Reading Party 2025: Kant and Bernard Williams

It is our pleasure to invite you to the 16th St Andrews Kant Reading Party. The event will take place from 1 to 4 August 2025 at The Burn in Angus, to be followed by a one-day ‘Kant in Progress’ workshop at the University of St Andrews on 5 August 2025.

The Kant Reading Party is an annual academic retreat in the Scottish Highlands bringing together graduate students and scholars from around the world to discuss the works of Immanuel Kant and another prominent philosopher. In 2025, we will discuss Kant and Bernard Williams.

The Reading Party involves a combination of discussion sessions, which are based on pre-circulated readings, and papers given by graduate students and early-career scholars. Participants will also have the opportunity to attend to their own work and engage in leisure activities in The Burn’s many indoor and outdoor facilities. In addition, there will be one or more hiking parties in the surrounding area.

Theme: Kant and Bernard Williams

Bernard Williams’ critiques of basic aspects of Kant’s moral theory are extremely powerful and influential. We hope to better understand the issues at stake through a comparison of their views on ethics, moral theory, and philosophy. We especially encourage the following topics for papers and critical discussion: 

1. Kant’s ethics and the Morality System; the moral and the ethical
2. Personal projects, authenticity, alienation, meaning in life
3. Philosophy; philosophical reflection and pre-theoretical thought
4. The voluntary, moral luck, and moral responsibility
5. Internal motivation; emotions in ethics

Registration Process

We invite registration for participation from all interested parties. Since the number of places is limited, the registration process is divided into two steps:

1. Informal registration: please register your intent to participate by sending an email including your name and institutional affiliation, and a brief expression of interest (2-3 lines) to Amy Duong ([email protected]) by 26 May.
2. Payment: selected participants will be given instructions on how to make the online fee payment. This counts as a formal registration. 

Acknowledgments

The 2025 St Andrews Kant Reading Party is brought to you with generous financial support from the Department of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews and the Scots Philosophical Association.