Associate Prof. Sandrine Berges of the Department of Philosophy has been awarded a Newton Mobility Grant by the British Academy (UK). This will enable her to arrange two workshops with her co-awardee (Alan Coffee of King’s College London), one at King’s College London and one at Bilkent.
The British Academy offers Newton International Exchanges as mobility grants to provide international researchers with funding for either a short visit to explore opportunities for building lasting networks or for bilateral visits to strengthen emerging collaborations.
The workshop to be held at Bilkent, on “The Contribution of Mary Wollstonecraft to Contemporary Issues in Philosophy,” will take place on June 1-2. Keynote speakers will be Sarah Hutton (University of York) and Hatice Nur Erkizan (Muğla University).
Mary Wollstonecraft worked primarily on social and political philosophy, with an emphasis on republicanism, education and women’s rights. But she also touched on other topics: slavery, aesthetics, marriage, work, family, masculinity, virtue, reason, passions, theology and epistemology.
The driving motivation for this workshop is not primarily to develop Wollstonecraft scholarship, but to show how the issues she discussed are still philosophically relevant and that her arguments can sometimes cast light on contemporary problems. A second aim is to show that the study of women philosophers of the past is a highly productive part of academic philosophy, and to model how it may be done.