2019 CONFERENCE ON ESSENTIALISM & ANTI-ESSENTIALISM

Banff Centre, Sept. 26-29, 2019, organized by Kathrin Koslicki (Université de Neuchâtel)

Essences have traditionally been assigned important but controversial explanatory roles in philosophical, scientific and social theorizing.  Anti-essentialists and conventionalists of various  stripes, however, often regard essentialism as a vestige of ancient and medieval thought, or  worse, as politically and socially repressive and dangerous.  This conference aims to encourage  dialogue between essentialists and anti-essentialists across different sub-disciplines within  philosophy, including (but not limited to) feminist philosophy, history of philosophy, metaphysics,  philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, and social ontology.   This event coincides with the third annual meeting of the Canadian Metaphysics Collaborative.

The 2019 Conference on Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism Program is available here.

Speakers, Commentators and Chairs

Speaker: Nancy Bauer (Tufts)
Commentator: Rebecca Mason (University of San Francisco)
Chair: Danielle Brown (University of Alberta)

Speaker: Christian Kanzian (Innsbruck)
Commentator: Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth)
Chair: Allen Hazen (University of Alberta)

Speaker: Anna Marmodoro (Oxford)
Commentator: Marilù Papandreou (LMU Munich)
Chair: Amy Schmitter (University of Alberta)

Speaker: Christof Rapp (LMU Munich)
Commentator: Chris Shields (Notre Dame)
Chair: Margaret Cameron (The University of Melbourne)

Speaker: Mark Richard (Harvard)
Commentator: Kirk Ludwig (Indiana)
Chair: Roberta Ballarin (University of British Columbia)

Speaker: C. Kenneth Waters (University of Calgary)
Commentator: Ingo Brigandt (University of Alberta)
Chair: Michael Raven (University of Victoria)

Speaker: Ka Ho Lam (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), “The Realism of Taxonomic Pluralism”
Commentator: Tuomas Tahko (Bristol)
Chair: Ataollah Hashemi (Saint Louis University)

Speaker: Katherine Ritchie (CUNY Graduate Center and City College of New York), “Essentializing Language and the Limitations of Ameliorative Projects”
Commentator: Esther Rosario (University of Alberta)
Chair: Hillary Nye (University of Alberta)

Speaker: Kristina Gehrman (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), “Generics and Characteristic-Based Evaluation”
Commentator: David Liebesman (University of Calgary)
Chair: Jeff Pelletier (University of Alberta)

Speaker: Theodore Locke (Concordia University, Montreal), “Metaphysical Explanations for Modal Normativists”
Commentator: Michael De (University of Bern, Switzerland)
Chair: Bernard Linsky (University of Alberta)

Other Participants

Thomas Adajian (James Madison University)
Jeffrey Brower (Purdue University)
Phil Corkum (University of Alberta)
Martin Glazier (University of Hamburg)
Dana Goswick (University of Melbourne)
Jonathan Payton (University of Calgary)
Martin Tweedale (University of Alberta)
Stella Zhu (University of Notre Dame)
Jack Zupko (University of Alberta)

Event Sponsors