2012 Margaret Wilson Conference

I'm not sure I can really express how much I like this conference.

Four years ago, Gideon Yaffe e-mailed me the submission information for the Margaret Wilson conference, saying "You might think about submitting a paper for this.  You'd meet a lot of good people."

I wound up submitting my paper "The Structure and Content of Belief in Hume's Treatise", and it was accepted.  That wound up being my first conference presentation in philosophy.  The 2008 Margaret Wilson conference was held at Cornell, in Ithaca, and Gideon was right that I'd meet a lot of good people.  I also got a lot of good/helpful feedback on my paper.

Which was really useful, because around a year later, the work in that paper had evolved to become the core of my dissertation proposal.

Two years later, at the 2010 Margaret Wilson conference at UC Boulder, I wound up presenting work from one of the later chapters of the dissertation, again meeting a number of awesome folks, and again getting a lot of good feedback on my work.

The conference is held in memory of Margaret Dauler Wilson, an extremely influential figure in scholarship of early modern philosophy.  Here is a brief description from the Princeton Philosophy department website.

I am very excited to participate again this year, at the 2012 conference in Dartmouth.  I'll be presenting some work on the relationship between Malebranche's and Hume's views on belief (and in particular, their commitments regarding doxastic voluntarism).

If you are a graduate student working in early modern, you should definitely consider submitting to this conference.