CFP: 2019 Conference on Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism

We are pleased to issue a Call for Papers for the 2019 Conference on Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism (3rd Meeting of the Canadian Metaphysics Collaborative, http://www.metaphysics.ca), which 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.  

Submission Deadline: February 28, 2019

Confirmed Participants:    

Nancy Bauer (Tufts)
Danielle Brown (University of Alberta)
Margaret Cameron (University of Victoria)                                                                       
Ataollah Hashemi (Saint Louis University)
Christian Kanzian (Innsbruck)
Ka Ho Lam (University of Alberta)
David Liebesman (University of Calgary)
Bernard Linsky (University of Alberta)
Anna Marmodoro (Oxford)
Jeff Pelletier (University of Alberta)
Michael Raven (University of Victoria)
Christof Rapp (LMU Munich)
Mark Richard (Harvard)
Esther Rosario (University of Alberta)
Amy Schmitter (University of Alberta)
Tuomas Tahko (Bristol)
Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth)
C. Kenneth Waters (University of Calgary)

Conference Organizer: Kathrin Koslicki (University of Alberta)

Submission Instructions: Authors are requested to submit their papers according to the following guidelines.  Papers must be (1) less than 7,000 words (including notes and references) and prepared for anonymous refereeing; (2) in PDF file format; sent as an email attachment to [email protected]; (3) the subject-line of the submission email should read “2019 Essentialism Conference Submission”; (4) the body of the submission email should constitute a cover page for the submission by including a return email address, the author’s name and affiliation, the title of the paper, and a short abstract.  (5) We encourage authors to submit work that is not already committed for publication elsewhere, since all conference participants will have the chance to submit a paper to us after the conference to be considered for publication in the third issue (“Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism”) of our open-access, peer-reviewed, online journal, Metaphysics (http://www.metaphysicsjournal.com).  All submissions will receive email confirmation of receipt and will undergo blind refereeing.  We aim to notify authors by or before April 30, 2019. 

Session Chairs and Commentators: We are also looking for session chairs and commentators.  If you would like to participate in the conference in one of these roles, please send your CV to [email protected] and indicate how your own research would benefit from attending this conference and whether you would like to serve as a session chair or a commentator. 

Funding may be available to those participating in the program. 

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