[SydPhil] Register now - USyd Conference on Women Philosophers - 25th–27th of November

[Campbell Rider]

You are warmly invited to attend a conference on women in the history of philosophy, hosted at the University of Sydney this November.

"The Natural and the Beautiful: Women Philosophers on Nature, Beauty and Art"
An International Conference at the University of Sydney
A collaboration between "Extending New Narratives" SSHRC (Canada) major award and “Women Philosophers on the Natural and the Human" ARC Future Fellowship (Dalia Nassar)

Organisers: Dalia Nassar and Campbell Rider
25th–27th of November, 2026
In-person only at the University of Sydney
You can register here: https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/KdK8CL7EwMfX71M1EsBfD1tyboxX?domain=events.humanitix.com

Please see below for more information and the conference program.

Overview:

This conference proposes that women philosophers made important and distinctive contributions to thinking about both the natural and the beautiful – and their relation – and aims to uncover these contributions and their continuing significance.

Women were often identified with ‘nature’ and the ’natural’, and they had to negotiate their status as both natural and human. How did they do this? And in what ways and to what extent did their status as both ’natural’ and ‘human’ influence their thinking about nature and the place of the human within it?

In turn, when women turned to writing philosophy, they often berated their male colleagues for failing to grapple with and locate philosophical questions in lived experience. In contrast, they sought to give philosophy a more concrete, more ‘lived’ character. They often did this through aesthetics, understood both in the general sense, as the study of perception, and in a more limited sense, as the study of the experiences of beauty. How did their interest in aesthetics support their aims of grounding philosophy in lived experience? And in what ways were their philosophies of art and beauty connected to their philosophies of the natural and the human? This conference invites speakers to consider some or any of these questions.

Schedule:

Wednesday - 25th of November (Quadrangle Building (A14), Kevin Lee Room H6.04)
9:30–10:00 Dalia Nassar: Welcome
10:00–11:30 Emily Hulme: Greek Philosophy on Beauty: The Case of Diotima
11:30–1:00 Catherine Wesselinoff: A “Kallistic” Reading of Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias
2:00–3:30 Sam Kaldas: Cockburn’s Naturalistic Ethics and Platonic Morality
4:00–5:30 Francesca Iannelli: Reclaiming Beauty, Rediscovering Nature, Rethinking Philosophy:
Contested Botanical Imaginaries and the Genres of Philosophy

Thursday - 26th of November (RD Watt Building (A04), Room 203)
9:30–11:00 Campbell Rider: Animal and Plant Worlds in Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ Naturphilosophie
11:30–12:30 Fedra Cabrera Solano: Nature as a Pathway for the Erotic in the Literary Phenomenology of Clarice Lispector
1:30–3:00 Dalia Nassar: The Beautiful and the Good
3:15–4:45 Andrew Poe: Without Domination: Weil’s Politics of Décréation

Friday - 27th of November (RD Watt Building (A04), Room 203)
10:00–11:30 Rodney Parker: Both Natural and Spiritual: Social Organisms, Higher Order Persons, and the Phenomenology of Social Communities in Gerda Walther
11:30–1:00 Scott Stephens: ‘To Repent of Egoism’: Art and Asceticism in the Moral Philosophy of Iris Murdoch
2:00–3:30 Rebecca Rozelle: Attending to the Dirt: The Beauty of Décréation
3:30–4:30 Roundtable Discussion

Register here: https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/KdK8CL7EwMfX71M1EsBfD1tyboxX?domain=events.humanitix.com
Or contact campbell.rider at sydney.edu.au for more information