2019 Conference on Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism

The 2019 Conference on Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism (3rd Meeting of the Canadian Metaphysics Collaborative, http://www.metaphysics.ca) will take place September 26-29, 2019, at the Banff Centre (https://www.banffcentre.ca/), in Banff, Alberta, Canada. 

Essences have traditionally been assigned important but controversial explanatory roles in philosophical, scientific and social theorizing.  Anti-essentialists and conventionalists of various  stripes, however, often regard essentialism as a vestige of ancient and medieval thought, or  worse, as politically and socially repressive and dangerous.  This conference aims to encourage  dialogue between essentialists and anti-essentialists across different sub-disciplines within  philosophy, including (but not limited to) feminist philosophy, history of philosophy, metaphysics,  philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, and social ontology.  

Speakers:    

Nancy Bauer (Tufts)
Kristina Gehrman (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
Christian Kanzian (Innsbruck)
Ka Ho Lam (University of Alberta)
Theodore Locke (University of North Florida)
Anna Marmodoro (Oxford)
Christof Rapp (LMU Munich)
Mark Richard (Harvard)
Katherine Ritchie (CUNY Graduate Center and City College of New York)
C. Kenneth Waters (University of Calgary)

Other Confirmed Participants:

Thomas Adajian (James Madison University)
Roberta Ballarin (University of British Columbia)
Ingo Brigandt (University of Alberta)
Jeffrey Brower (Purdue University)
Danielle Brown (University of Alberta)
Margaret Cameron (University of Melbourne)
Phil Corkum (University of Alberta)
Michael De (University of Bern, Switzerland)
Ataollah Hashemi (Saint Louis University)
Allen Hazen (University of Alberta)
Martin Glazier (University of Hamburg)
Dana Goswick (University of Melbourne)
David Liebesman (University of Calgary)
Bernard Linsky (University of Alberta)
Kirk Ludwig (Indiana)
Rebecca Mason (University of San Francisco)
Hillary Nye (University of Alberta, Faculty of Law)
Marilù Papandreou (LMU Munich)
Jonathan Payton (University of Calgary)
Jeff Pelletier (University of Alberta)
Michael Raven (University of Victoria)
Esther Rosario (University of Alberta)
Amy Schmitter (University of Alberta)
Christopher Shields (Notre Dame)
Tuomas Tahko (Bristol)
Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth)
Martin Tweedale (University of Alberta)
Stella Zhu (University of Notre Dame)
Jack Zupko (University of Alberta)

Conference Organizer: Kathrin Koslicki (University of Alberta)

Conference inquiries may be directed to [email protected].  For more information, please see http://kathrin-koslicki-ytpt.squarespace.com/events/.