Enfilade

From the conference website:

Eutopia Seated in the Brain: The 300th Anniversary of
Bernard de Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees
Coimbra University, Portugal, 27-29 November 2013

Proposals due by 5 September 2013

Dutch physician with a literary, humanist formation, Bernard de Mandeville (1670-1733) is known as a portraitist of manners, a satirist and a fine observer of socio-economic behavior. From the perspective of the literary genre, B. Mandeville was a cultivator of the satirical fable, continuing La Fontaine and P. Scarron. His moral and political thought falls into several lines of the development of the European Enlightenment. His originality was only fully recognized many centuries later. One of his criticisms is related to Shaftesbury’s appreciation of virtue and moral sense in the Characteristics. The possibility of the contribution of pleasure and virtue for the formation of the human society, emphasized again in F. Hutcheson’s Remarks upon the Fable of the Bees, was the controversial point in Mandeville’s point of view. From his peculiar idea about the combination of virtue and the pure self-interest in social behavior evolved his idea of society. The modern sense of ‘interest’ had in B. de Mandeville a former inventor. Additionally, B. Mandeville has questioned the meaning of the connection between conscious actions with defined purposes and the objective results in the market of the autonomous individual drives. His depiction of the creation of social wealth reveals the relative independence of the objective results of individual actions regarding the initial purposes of the conscious agents. Luxury was one of the subjects that B. Mandeville addressed clearly. He tried to explain the imaginary mechanisms allied to the formation of luxury in the nations that explain why luxury cannot result from actions motivated solely by virtue or vice.

The Department of Philosophy, Communication and Information of the University of Coimbra (FLUC) and the R&D unit Language, Interpretation and Philosophy will be hosting scholars specializing in the British Enlightenment and particularly those studying B. de Mandeville’s opus on the occasion of the International Conference entitled Eutopia seated in the Brain, to be held in the University of Coimbra in November 27-29, 2013.

Here, we mention some topics to serve as guidelines to those interested in participating with original presentations and to those planning to follow only the discussions of the speakers.

– B. de Mandeville and the philosophical theories of the moral sense

– Self-interest, self-preservation and the discussion of the foundations of virtue

– Satirical verse tradition as observation of manners

– Socio-economic behavior and individual purposes

– Contemporary French skeptical notions about the individual human being and Mandeville’s anthropological standpoint

– The Scottish Enlightenment and Mandeville’s concept of society

– Mandeville’s philosophy of history

– The history of modern economics and Mandeville’s account of socio-economic behavior

– The debate about luxury and Mandeville’s perspective on this theme

Authors are invited to send written proposals to the organizers, by e-mail. The text shall be written according to a Word document file format with no more than 2500 characters, including the name of the author and a title. Proposals must be received by 5th September 2013, to the email cultura@fl.uc.pt (Edmundo Balsemão Pires and Joaquim Braga).