Conferences

“Being and Nothingness in Antiquity“

This conference will take place at Milton Park Country House Hotel & Spa in Bowral, in the Southern Highlands of NSW, on the broad theme of Being and Nothingness in Antiquity. The theme of this first conference from the project is the very earliest history of the problem of being (“the darkest in all philosophy,” according to William James) from the earliest Near-Eastern context to the neo-Platonists.

The idea is to gather a select group of philosophers, theologians, and historians together in a nice location to explore how these notions were understood in a variety of earlier contexts, focusing in particular on the flow of ideas between cultures and on the expressive powers of the language and conceptual schemes, including the logic and mathematics of the period. Possible questions include: How (if at all possible) was the problem of why there was something rather than nothing posed across a range of contexts in antiquity (including Near-East, Asian, Greek, and more). If it was not a posable question, what structure was absent? Did the then-current theories about Being render such questions about non-Being irrelevant?

The programme is as follows:

Tuesday, April 19th

8:30-9:30 Breakfast

9:30-10:00 Introductions

10:00-11:30 Dean Rickles, “Wandering Mazes Lost: Exploring the History of the Problem of Being and Nothingness.”

Rickles Download

11:30-12:00 Morning tea

12:00-1:30 Anna-Latifa Mourad, “Innovation and the Transmission of Ideas across Ancient Egypt and the Near East”

Mourad Download

1:30-2:30 Lunch

2:30-4:00 Alison Betts, “Zoroastrian Creation Beliefs and the Nature of Pre-Sasanian Kingship.”

betts Download