Cultivating
Virtues: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Oriel College, Oxford,
January 7–9, 2016
The annual conference of the
Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, University of
Birmingham
Open Call for Papers
Please submit an abstract of around 500 words to jubileecentrepapers@contacts.bham.ac.uk (marked ORIEL PROPOSAL in the subject line) before July 1, 2015.
After a successful annual conference of
the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues in January 2015 on ‘Varieties of
Virtue Ethics’, we return to Oriel College, Oxford, for the Centre’s fourth
annual conference in January 2016 on the theme:
Cultivating Virtues: Interdisciplinary
Approaches
In virtue ethics, in particular of the
Aristotelian kind, virtue cultivation is not an extraneous addition to an
understanding of morality or the study of moral philosophy; it is, rather, what
such understanding and study are all about. We progress towards moral
excellence only if we are educated from an early age – indeed from birth – to
do so. A study of morality would thus, by Aristotle’s lights, be an entirely
fruitless enterprise if it did not gauge the educational implications of its
findings.
Contemporary moral philosophy is commonly
lambasted – by moral psychologists for example – for its lack of attention to
developmental issues and its almost complete neglect of childhood. Aristotle’s
stance is so radically different here that he could almost be accused of the
opposite error: of reducing moral philosophy to character education. For him,
it is more precious to know how virtue arises than to know what it is. More
specifically, regarding moral inquiry as such, its purpose ‘is not to know what
virtue is, but to become good, since otherwise the inquiry would be of no
benefit to us’ (NE, 1103b27–29]). It is difficult to think of a more suitable
platform from which to launch programmes of virtue-and-character
education.
Yet various thorny problems remain about the
nature and execution of education in virtue. As Aristotle offers no detailed
account of the nuts and bolts of such education, virtue ethicists and character
educationists need to engage in some serious reconstructive work – if not
simply leaving Aristotle behind and making a fresh start.
The aim of the 2016 Jubilee Centre conference is
to bring together experts from a range of disciplines to explore the nuances of
virtue cultivation, both within and across disciplinary boundaries. Can
theorists from philosophy, education and developmental psychology here learn
from each other’s work?
We hereby send out an open call for
presentations falling under the broad theme of ‘cultivating virtues’. Although
the remit of this conference is more distinctly educational than in our two
last conferences, we will also look favourably upon proposals that explore
virtue concepts or individual virtues from a philosophical/theoretical perspective,
as long as those proposals also pay some attention to developmental
issues.
We ask interested parties to send us an abstract
of around 500 words to jubileecentrepapers@contacts.bham.ac.uk (marked ORIEL
PROPOSAL in the subject line) before July 1, 2015.
We will send out notifications of acceptance before the end of July.