ISME 2025
INTELLECTUAL TRADITIONS IN DIALOGUE AND CONFLICT
BRIDGING, RECONCILING, TRANSLATING
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July 10-12, 2025
18th Annual Conference of the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry
Location: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Hosted by the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture
Co-sponsored by University of Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture & the Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy at Villanova University
We hope that you will join us for the 18th Annual Conference of the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry (ISME), to be held from July 10-12, 2025, at the University of Pennsylvania. This conference, themed "Intellectual Traditions in Dialogue and Conflict," marks the first post-Covid ISME meeting in North America since 2019.
The conference aims to explore Alasdair MacIntyre’s rich conceptualization of tradition and tradition-constituted enquiry, inviting discussions on the diverse interactions, conflicts, and potential reconciliations between various intellectual paradigms.
Keynotes
Samuel Moyn
Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, where he also serves as head of Grace Hopper College.
Trained in modern European intellectual history, he works on political and legal thought in modern times and on constitutional and international law in historical and current perspective. His most recent book is Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), based on the Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford.
He spent a decade writing some books about the history of international law and human rights, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press, 2010); Christian Human Rights (Penn Press, 2015), based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014; and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard, 2018); and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), and is out in a paperback edition in 2022 with Picador in the United States and Verso in the United Kingdom.
Currently he is working on (different) projects on aging and politics constitutionalism and democracy, and the Vietnam war.
Moyn is a fellow of the new Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Over the years he has written in venues such as the Atlantic, Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Dissent, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
May Sim
May Sim is a Philosophy Professor at the College of the Holy Cross, where she also serves as Director of the Asian Studies program.
She received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. Her dissertation, Aristotle’s Understanding of Form and Universals, was directed by Alasdair C. MacIntyre.
She is the contributing editor of The Crossroads of Norm and Nature: Essays on Aristotle's Ethics and Metaphysics (1995) and From Puzzles to Principles?: Essays on Aristotle’s Dialectic (1999). Her book, Remastering Morals with Aristotle and Confucius (2007), is a comparison of the ethical life in Aristotle and Confucius. She is currently working on a booklength account of human rights from the Confucian perspective, and a book on Metaphysics and Ethics: East & West.
She was the President of the Southwestern Philosophical Society (2006), the current director of the Asian Studies Program at Holy Cross, and the current director of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy (BACAP 46th Annual Program 2024-25).
She was also the 62nd President of the Metaphysical Society of America and the President of the 49th Annual Conference of the Northern New England Philosophical Association. Sim is a fellow of the Center for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP).
Conference Organizers:
Dr. Daniel Cheely, Director of the Collegium Institute, Executive Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society and Perry Family Scholar of History, Religion, and Culture
Dr. Nicholas Ogle, John and Daria Barry Foundation Fellow for the Penn Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society
Questions? Please contact Conference Manager Quinn Moore (qmoore@collegiuminstitute.org).