Advanced Study
Annual Conferences
Conferences at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study
Annual conferences at the NDIAS are collegial, engaging, and involve presenters as active discussants and contributors. Each session includes a 35-minute presentation, followed by 25 minutes of discussion. Past presenters have discovered that this interdisciplinary approach, a departure from conferences in some disciplines, provides a unique opportunity to engage other leading scholars in ways that transcend disciplinary boundaries and nurture new perspectives and ideas as well as innovative approaches to one's research.
The date and theme of the next conference will be announced soon.
Travel and hotel information can be found here.
Previous Conferences
Conceptions of Truth (2012)
This international conference, hosted by the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, focused on the nature of truth. It was held April 12-14, 2012, on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. Leading experts addressed challenging questions related to the subject of "truth" from the perspective of their disciplines. The conference included interdisciplinary discussion of ideas presented as well as less formal opportunities for scholarly discourse and interaction. Truth is one of the three major values—beauty, goodness, and truth—that inspire the Institute.
Speakers and titles of presentations can be found here.
Brief bios of the speakers can be found here.
Dimensions of Goodness (2011)
The “Dimensions of Goodness” conference was held April 4-6, 2011. Here is the list of questions addressed at the conference:
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FRANZ VON KUTSCHERA (Universität Regensburg) Moral Realism Professor Franz von Kutschera was unable to attend this year's conference. His paper was read.
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JONATHAN ISRAEL (School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study) What are the major changes in the history of our moral principles?
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JENNIFER HERDT (Yale University) What is Christianity's contribution to ethics?
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VITTORIO HÖSLE (University of Notre Dame) Is there any logic in the history of ethics?
- CAMILLO PADOA-SCHIOPPA (Washington University in St. Louis) What happens in our brain when we make a choice?
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CLIVE SELIGMAN (University of Western Ontario) Why and when are values important for moral decisions?
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RICHARD ERNST (ETH Zürich) Why is there a moral imperative to engage in science?
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PETER KILPATRICK (University of Notre Dame) How can engineering contribute to a better world?
- GEORGES ENDERLE (University of Notre Dame) Defining Goodness in Business and Economics
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ROBIN ATTFIELD (Cardiff University ) What moral consequences does the environmental crisis have?
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LUIS ERNESTO DERBEZ BAUTISTA (Universidad de las Américas Puebla) What are the right politics for a developing country?
- MARY ELLEN O'CONNELL (University of Notre Dame) How can international law limit the use of violence?
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MARKUS GABRIEL (University of Bonn) Is the world as such good? The problem of theodicy.
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JANE MAIENSCHEIN (Arizona State University) Finding Goodness among the “Ought” and “Is” Debates about Stem Cell Research
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ANITA L. ALLEN (University of Pennsylvania) What are the main challenges of modern medicine in the 21st century?
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STEVEN D. SMITH (University of San Diego) The Constitution and the Goods of Religion
- WANG HUI (Tsinghua University) How will interculturality challenge our moral ideas? Professor Wang Hui was unable to attend this year's conference. He provided his presentation for inclusion in the volume of conference proceedings.
Facets of Beauty (2010)
A conference on the topic of beauty was held January 21-23, 2010, on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. The conference, hosted by the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, focused on the nature of beauty and various disciplinary and interdisciplinary questions raised about this elusive topic. The conference included mathematicians, physicists, anthropologists, economists, lawyers, philosophers, theologians, artists, musicologists, literary critics and film scholars from some of the most renowned universities of the world as presenters and participants. Beauty is one of the three major values — beauty, goodness, and truth — that inspire the Institute.
These were the featured topics and speakers:
- DUDLEY ANDREW (Yale University) What constitutes beauty in film?
- HOLGER BONUS (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany) What is the function of art in the economy of cultures?
- PRADEEP DHILLON (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Does beauty lie in the eye of the beholder? A Kantian Response
- BJARNE FUNCH (Roskilde University, Denmark) Which features of human nature are responsible for the genesis of art as a universal phenomenon of human culture?
- VITTORIO HÖSLE (University of Notre Dame) What are the driving principles behind the historical evolution of aesthetic theories from ancient civilizations to the present?
- CHRISTIAN ILLIES (Universität Bamberg, Germany) Can beauty in organisms be reduced to the mechanism of sexual selection and the latter to natural selection, or is this reversed? Does sexual selection point to the recognition of beauty by organisms?
- MAXIM KANTOR (Moscow, Russia) What constitutes beauty in the visual arts?
- MARY KINZIE (Northwestern University) What constitutes beauty in literature?
- PETER LANDAU (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany) Why has art so frequently been a focus in the legal system?
- ROBERT P. LANGLANDS (School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study) Theorems and Theories
- MARIO LIVIO (Space Telescope Science Institute) Symmetry: From the Selection of Mates to the Laws of Nature
- CLAUS-STEFFEN MAHNKOPF (University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig, Germany) Beauty in Music
- CYRIL I. O’REGAN (University of Notre Dame) Why are beauty and art theologically relevant?
- FRANCESCO PELLIZZI (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University) “Beauty and the Beast”: Notes on cross-cultural aesthetics
- MARK ROCHE (University of Notre Dame) Within modern art, the concept opposite to the beautiful, the ugly, has gained a strange prestige — what is its function in enhancing the expressivity of art?
- ELAINE SCARRY (Harvard University) Are there any common aesthetic principles acknowledged by most aesthetic theories?
- DIETER WANDSCHNEIDER (RWTH Aachen University, Germany) In which sense can we speak of beauty in nature, both in its laws and its entities?
