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

Shelly Johnson at [email protected]