Scanlon Conference - Manchester

Justice, Rights and Institutions: Themes from the Political Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon
Friday 22 - Saturday 23 May 2009
Time: 9am - 6pm each day
Venue: The Boardroom, Arthur Lewis Building, University of Manchester

Speakers:
T. M. Scanlon (Harvard University)
Waheed Hussain (University of Pennsylvania)
Rahul Kumar (Queen's University, Canada)
A. J. Julius (University of California at Los Angeles)
Véronique Munoz-Dardé (University College London)
Serena Olsaretti (University of Cambridge)
Martin O'Neill (University of Manchester)
Michael Otsuka (University College London)
Mathias Risse (Harvard University)
Zofia Stemplowska (University of Manchester)
Leif Wenar (Kings College, London)
Andrew Williams (University of Warwick)
Jonathan Wolff (University College London)

The event is co-sponsored by MANCEPT (the Manchester Centre for Political Theory) and by the Philosophy Discipline Area of the School of Social Sciences at Manchester, and is financially supported by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. The conference website (with links to the registration and accommodation form) is available here. The conference fee for participants is £60 per person (this price includes tea/coffee, refreshments and lunch on both days).

Further details: This conference will take advantage of Tim Scanlon's presence in the UK to give the 2009 Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford, in order to bring him to Manchester for an intensive two-day exploration of themes from his political philosophy. Although Scanlon's contractualist moral philosophy has received a significant degree of critical attention, there has perhaps not been the same degree of attention given to the distinctively political aspects or implications of Scanlon's project. The conference will aim to remedy this gap through a detailed exploration both of Scanlon's work in political philosophy, and of the implications for political philosophy of other aspects of Scanlon's work on topics in moral philosophy. Papers at the conference will thus be of two broad types:
(a) papers relating to Scanlon's treatment of issues such as freedom of expression, human rights, equality, punishment, contract, and the idea of tolerance, as collected in his book The Difficulty of Tolerance (Cambridge: CUP, 2003); and
(b) papers that address the connections between issues in political philosophy and Scanlon's treatment of topics such as choice, responsibility, blame, intention, value, promising, and well-being in his books What We Oweto Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: HUP, 1998) and Moral Dimensions (Cambridge,Mass.: HUP, 2008).

Full details