Estão abertas as inscrições para a primeira edição do Braga Colloquium in the History of Moral and Political Philosophy organizado pelo Grupo de Teoria Política da Universidade do Minho. Ao lado dos já tradicionais encontros de Ética e Filosofia Política e as Escolas de Verão (ver aqui e aqui), o Colóquio expande o calendário de encontros do instituto dando espaço também para trabalhos de história da filosofia política e história das ideias. O tema desta edição é representação política e a palestrante convidada será a cientista política Nadia Urbinati (Columbia). O prazo final para envio de resumos é dia 31 de agosto. Além de um dos centros de teoria política mais importantes da Europa, a cidade de Braga em Portugal é um incentivo a parte!
Mais informações podem ser encontradas na chamada abaixo:
BRAGA COLLOQUIUM
IN THE HISTORY OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
“Representation, the People, and Political Leadership”
University of Minho
Braga – Portugal/14-15 January 2016
Keynote speaker Nadia Urbinati (Columbia University)
Call for papers
The Political Theory Group of the University of Minho is delighted to announce the inaugural event of the Braga Colloquium in the History of Moral and Political Philosophy: an international annual conference to be held every year in January at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal. The purpose of this new conference series is to promote the study of the tradition of political and moral philosophy and its legacy in shaping our institutions, culture and beliefs. In this important respect, the conference series will focus on how this tradition can contribute to tackling the challenges our societies are facing today. Every year the conference will focus on a specific theme, which will be chosen by taking in consideration the current political situation in Europe (and beyond).
In line with the spirit behind this new series of conferences, the first edition of the Braga Colloquium in the History of Moral and Political Philosophy will be dedicated to explore the ideas of “representation”, “the people”, and “political leadership”. Since Thomas Hobbes, we have come to understand that the idea of the ‘sovereign people’, and its expression by the state through the idea of representation, is a fiction that makes possible the collective exercise of power on the large scale of modern states. Modern thinkers such as Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, the Federalists, Burke, and Weber or, more recently, Pitkin, Habermas, Rawls, Arendt, or Pettit, have offered a rich panoply of ways of constructing such a fiction. But also in the ancient tradition of, say, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, or Marsilius of Padua, when the question of ‘representation’ was still not explicitly thematized, we can find suggestive insights to think about this topic. Importantly, these different fictional accounts of ‘the sovereign people’ yield different political outcomes, different forms of state, different forms of political participation, different relationships between the people and their political representatives, and so on. At the same time, each of these fictions are based on some critical assumptions regarding, for instance, the capacities needed to engage in politics and how they are distributed among the people, the source of political authority, the level of (in)commensurability between different worldviews, what it means to represent in political terms, and so on.
The deep crisis of representative institutions in Europe’s and the concomitant rise of new (or supposedly new) forms of populism have made it absolutely urgent to reassess how we articulate the relationship between our ideas of ‘representation’, ‘the people’, and ‘political leadership’, in particular taking into consideration which political outcomes our conceptions engender and on which political assumptions they are based. We invite scholars interested in these topics to propose papers that interrogate the history of moral and political thought - ancient, modern, and contemporary - in order to illuminate our current predicament.
Submission guidelines
Abstracts, of no more than 500 words, should be sent to:
Deadline 31st August 2015
In addition to the abstract, please include in your proposal your academic title, name, affiliation, and the title of your contribution.
The official language of the conference will be English.
Organization Political Theory Group, CEHUM-University of Minho
