Conference: Historical Perspectives on God's Order, Man's Order and the Order of Nature

My colleague Eric Watkins has organized an exciting conference taking place here this weekend. A program and other details can be found here. Below is a list of the participants, including Eric himself and Donald Rutherford, Chair of the UCSD Philosophy department.

Historical Perspectives on God's Order, Man's Order and the Order of Nature

March 4th to March 6th at UC San Diego

Organized by Eric Watkins

• Marilyn McCord Adams, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Powers versus Laws: God and the Order of Nature in Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham”

• Robert Merrihew Adams, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Power, Cause, and Law in Malebranche’s Occasionalism”

• Karl Ameriks, University of Notre Dame, “Kant and the End of Theodicy”

• Martha Bolton, Rutgers University, “Leibniz on Monadic Change”

• Andrew Chignell, Cornell University, “Kant and Leibniz on Miracles”

• Daniel Garber, Princeton University, “Divine Laws and Divine Decrees: Laws of Nature in Descartes and Leibniz”

• Desmond Hogan, Princeton University, “Kant's Theory of Divine and Secondary Causation”

• Steve Nadler, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “The Order of Nature and Moral Luck: Maimonides on Divine Providence”

• Donald Rutherford, University of California, San Diego, “Laws and Powers in Leibniz”

• Eric Watkins, University of California, San Diego, “Kant on Man, God, and the Order of Nature”

Featured Publication: Eric Watkins' Sourcebook for Kant's First Critique

In the upcoming months, I will be featuring works published by philosophers while they were or are professors at UCSD, beginning with a major new scholarly resource produced by Eric Watkins: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Material (Cambridge, 2009). The front matter and some other material is available at the official page at Cambridge University Press. The work has also been recently reviewed at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Below is the blurb and a short bio from the CUP page.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials

This volume offers English translations of texts that form the essential background to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Presenting the projects ofKant’s predecessors and contemporaries in eighteenth-century Germany, it enables readers to understand the positions that Kant might have identified with “pure reason,” the criticisms of pure reason that had been developed prior to Kant’s, and alternative attempts at synthesizing empiricist elements within a rationalist framework. The volume contains chapters on Christian Wolff, Martin Knutzen, Alexander Baumgarten, Christian Crusius, Leonhard Euler, Johann Lambert, Marcus Herz, Johann Eberhard, and Johann Tetens. Each chapter includes a brief introduction that provides succinct biographical and bibliographical information on these authors, a concise account of their projects, and information on the importance of these projects to Kant’s first Critique. Extensive references to the firstCritique, brought together in a concordance, highlight the potential relevance of each text.

Eric Watkins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. The recipient of grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he is the author of Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality, which won the Book Prize in 2005 from the Journal of the History of Philosophy.