Following our Call for Abstracts last November, I am now happy to report that the Society for Early Modern Philosophy (ESEMP) runs its seventh conference at Hagen University, the place where the society was actually founded in 2004. In the meantime, we’ve finalised the downloadable conference programme (more details will be added on the conference website in the coming days). In case you want to register as a guest, there is an extra page for this.

At this point, I take the liberty to thank my wonderful team at Hagen for working ceaselessly to make (not only) this conference happen as well as the Hagen Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for generous financial support.

The aim of this conference is to bring together leading experts and young talented scholars from all over the world to explore ways of approaching early modern philosophy and reflect anew on the aims of doing so. Following recent discussions in the field, we will wonder, for instance, whether we should favour historical over so-called rational reconstructions of texts or what precise aims are served by extending the canon. Likewise, we will ask how advances in the digital humanities shape our field. Even if one works in more traditional ways, one has to inquire whether common assumptions about how to place and study texts, figures or debates still stand. A second focus of our conference concerns (practical) issues concerning especially early career researchers. In this spirit, the conference includes a mentoring programme intended to connect mentees with experienced researchers who will provide advice on papers.