The Significance of Enlightenment Philosophy in European Culture

The conference is planned as an in-person event; however, online participation will also be possible (primarily for participants presenting papers from abroad). Conference languages: Polish and English.

This is the latest edition in a series of conferences initiated in Lublin in 2014. Subsequent editions have been held in Toruń, Kraków, Lublin, Poznań, and again in Lublin and Toruń.

We invite philosophers interested in the Enlightenment, as well as scholars from other disciplines whose research focuses either directly on this period or on its consequences, continuations, and critiques.

The conference will focus on Enlightenment philosophy, its sources and continuations, as well as its influence on culture in the broadest sense, both positive and negative. The organizers propose human action – in its various conditions, dimensions, meanings, and evaluations as the guiding theme of this year’s conference.

Suggested topics include:

• Reason, passions, emotions, and interest as motives of human action – debates concerning the rationality of action and the sources and determinants of human decisions.

• Freedom, determinism, and responsibility – the problem of free will, the causal determinants of action, and the foundations of moral and legal responsibility.

• Individual autonomy and the emancipation of human action – the ideal of the self-determining subject and the liberation of human activity and agency from the authority of tradition, established authorities, and inherited hierarchies.

• Morality, religion, and the secular foundations of human action – the autonomization of ethics, natural law, moral sentiments, utility, and happiness, as well as debates concerning religious and non-religious justifications of morality.

• Happiness, virtue, duty, and utility as goals and criteria of action – transformations in conceptions of the good life and the moral evaluation of actions in Enlightenment philosophy, its sources, and its continuations.

• The individual, society, and the common good – relations between self-interest and the common good, cooperation and conflict, property, exchange, and the social determinants of action.

• Political action, freedom, and individual rights – citizenship, the social contract, authority and obedience, toleration, human rights, and the right to rebellion and to transform the existing order.

• Knowledge, education, and human perfectibility as foundations of rational action – the significance of knowledge, science, and education for the formation of the individual and the reform of society.

• Action, progress, and transformations of the social world – the possibility of consciously reforming law, institutions, and customs; individual and collective action; and the intended and unintended consequences of human activity.

• Sources, continuations, and critiques of Enlightenment conceptions of action – ancient and early modern antecedents of Enlightenment practical philosophy, as well as later reinterpretations and critiques of the ideals of autonomy, rationality, and progress.

Other topics are also welcome. We are interested both in papers presenting research on Enlightenment theories and in studies of earlier theories that constituted their sources or other points of reference.

The deadline for paper proposals is 20 November 2026. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 25 November 2026.

Please submit the title of your paper together with an abstract of 400–500 words to: [email protected]. All submitted abstracts will be subject to review.

For in-person participants, the conference fee is PLN 500 and covers two lunches and the conference dinner. Online participation is free of charge. Payment details will be provided at a later date.