Call for Papers

Causa sive ratio: causality and reason in modernity between metaphysics, epistemology and science

Date and Location: 14-16 November 2017, Università degli Studi di Milano

Website: https://easychair.org /cfp/causa00


The very advent of modernity in philosophy could be interpreted through the lens of the fundamental redefinition of causality in the ontological, epistemological and logical separation of cause from reason. From the rejection of formal and final causes in the generation of Descartes and Gassendi, the debates on these questions in the period of Hobbes, Spinoza and Leibniz, to the phenomenalization of causation in Hume and its subsequent idealization in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, we can see the definitive conceptual separation between logical implication, epistemic explanation and physical causation. It is this historical conceptual transformation and its present consequences that is the object of this conference.

What does this separation between cause and reason mean for the role of rationality, the property of intelligibility and the ontology of grounding in the development of metaphysics and the foundations of science in the 17th and 18th century? How do the emergent concepts of the general laws of nature and universally conserved physical magnitudes harmonize the rationality of nature and the uniqueness of causes in a new cosmology? What becomes the status of the self-caused? How does the early modern rejection of formal and final causes return, in other guises, and transform the semantic content of physical theories? How does the identity or distinction of reason and cause continue to inform contemporary philosophy?

The aim of this conference is to explore the distinction (and relation) of cause and reason from a historical examination of early modern philosophy and science while engaging with the contemporary debates surrounding grounding, causation and scientific explanation. Aside from paper presentations by invited and selected speakers, short reading groups of primary source texts (relevant to the presentations) will be led by conference organizers and invited speakers.

Confirmed Invited speakers: Mcdonough, Jeffrey (Harvard U.), Brading, Katherine (Duke U.), Breitenbach, Angela (Cambridge U.), Ott, Walter (U. of Virginia), Lyssy Ansgar (LMU München), Kochiras, Hylarie (IAS Bologna), Sangiacomo, Andrea (U. Groningen), and others.

Organizers: Tzuchien Tho, Stefano Di Bella

We invite papers addressing these problems of reason and cause based on historical studies and contemporary problems. We are particularly interested in papers that are able to connect 17th and 18th century thinkers with contemporary issues in metaphysics and philosophy of science. However, papers focusing on these issues contextually based in the 17th and 18th century are also enthusiastically welcomed.

Presentations are planned to be 45 minutes, leaving 15-20 minutes for discussion.

Please submit an abstract of 500 words, including the title of the presentation, to https://easychair.org/confe rences/?conf=causa00. The abstract should be prepared for blind review. We welcome Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholars as well as more established colleagues.

The papers of the conference will be selectively edited for a volume on the theme. Deadline: 15 June 2017 (Decisions by 30 June 2017)

Please direct any futher questions to Tzuchien Tho at tzuchien@gmail.com