Virtue and the Enlightenment/La vertu et les Lumières

Description

Reid Hall, Paris (France)

Organised by James Fowler (Kent) and Marine Ganofsky (St Andrews)

Keynote lecture: Prof. Daniel Brewer (Minnesota): Virtue and the Ethics of the Virtual

Well over two centuries after Kant offered his own answer to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’, research into the question is flourishing. Within this broad field, recent research includes a renewed focus on virtue ethics, moral philosophy and religious belief. Such work allows for the detailed, contextualized and interdisciplinary study of all aspects of the problem of virtue, from Aristotle to Wesley and beyond. However, no study has yet fully probed the French Enlightenment’s role in crafting modern definitions of the complex notion of ‘virtue’, from Diderot to Sade, from Rousseau to Greuze.
Our conference Virtue and the Enlightenment hopes to contribute to this field by offering a double focus on the Age of Enlightenment and its discourses on virtue. We aim to reveal the extent to which the notion of virtue preoccupied thinkers, writers and artists in the long eighteenth century. What is exceptional about the eighteenth century’s treatment of virtue? What did the Enlightenment bring to the established reflections on virtue?

Period	23 May 2014 → 24 May 2014
Event type	Other
Sponsor