International Online Conference The will and its acts in Late medieval Ethics and Theology, 17-18 June 2021.

Late medieval ethical and theological concepts have already been recognized as highly original and thought-provoking. Among the issues debated in the High Middle Ages, the nature of the will itself triggered continuous and passionate disputes during the fourteenth century. They resulted in developing most original and sophisticated concepts of the will that focused on the complexity of the will and its inner structure. Late medieval masters pointed out a multi-layered and multi-dimensional structure of the will providing definitions and explanations of first and second order acts of the will, the relation between levels of moral acts and their role in moral decision making—the issues that in the history of ethics appeared much later, and came under scrutiny in twentieth-century works.

The conference will be dedicated to the concepts of the will in late medieval ethics and theology, to point out the novelty of arguments and ideas that were formulated and debated at that time and gave path to a new approach in voluntaristic debates. It will especially concentrate on interdisciplinary perspective that combined arguments and methodology from ethics, theology, logic and mathematical physics. It will focus on the pioneering theories of the complexity of the will developed in late medieval works that are original not only against the background of medieval concepts of the will, but they also are pioneering when compared to contemporary ethical theories. 

The conference will be organized entirely on-line, the talks will be available on the conference website (https://willanditsacts.com/home) in a pre-recorded format starting from 10th June.

During the conference days, live Q&A sessions (discussion sessions) will take place via zoom and will be devoted to the speakers' talks. We will not play the recorded talks then.  

For Q&A sessions, please contact Monika Michałowska ([email protected]).

The program is available here (https://willanditsacts.com/program). The registration is free and now open. You can register here (https://willanditsacts.com/register).