The Theatre of Reasons

Welcome

The Early Modern Philosophy research group InterLegere at the University of Pisa is pleased to announce the conference “The Theatre of Reasons: Conjecture, Critique, and Morality in the Age of Enlightenment”, to be held in Pisa on 29–30 April 2026.

This initiative is organized within the framework of the Department of Civilizations and Forms of Knowledge's Project of Excellence 2023–2027, “A Sense within Disorder: Practicing Complexity” (Un senso nel disordine: Praticare la complessità).

Conference Scope

The conference seeks to bring into dialogue research perspectives on eighteenth-century philosophies, taking as a starting point—without thereby delimiting the range of proposals—David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). By virtue of their literary form, the Dialogues display a plurality of reasons, argumentative styles, and points of view, offering a framework in which the multifaceted nature of eighteenth-century thought becomes visible. Reproducing the theatrical play of light and shadow, they stage diverse modes of rational argumentation: conjecture, but also experimental reasoning, analogy, fiction, and thought experiments.

These strategies may be read as catalysts for the century’s epistemological tensions: their widespread use in philosophical and empirical-scientific literature invites reflection on the status of conjecture—and with it, of experimental, analogical, and fictional strategies— as regulated exercises of the imagination, capable of redefining the relationship between knowledge and certainty.

The Enlightenment as a Stage

More broadly, eighteenth-century philosophy itself emerges as a theatre of reasons—a stage on which irreducible styles of thought and argumentative strategies confront one another, reshaping traditional epistemic paradigms and interrogating the very possibilities of human knowledge. As heir to the religious and political fractures of the previous century, the Enlightenment explores new forms of philosophical writing—dialogue, novel, fragment, essay—in order to stage the critique of prejudice and the search for new foundations of morality and knowledge. 

In this context, these forms are not merely rhetorical strategies, but expressions of a knowledge that is constitutively uncertain and tentative—essential conditions through which knowing became possible in the eighteenth century.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

We are honored to announce the participation of the following distinguished scholars:

• Elio Franzini (University of Milan)

• Peter Kail (University of Oxford)

• Christophe Martin (Sorbonne University)

• Laura Nicolì (University of Cagliari)

• Franck Salaün (Université de Montpellier) 

Call for Papers: Thematic Axes

We invite contributors to engage with the following four themes around authors and texts of the XVIII century. Proposals must be submitted by the 22nd of February 2026 via the dedicated section ("Call for Papers) of this website. Abstracts should not exceed 500 words.

1. Literary Forms of Philosophical Argumentation

Which cognitive and argumentative operations are enabled specifically by non-systematic forms such as the dialogue, the fragment, or the novel? How does the plurality of literary and argumentative genres stage the conflict among different styles of rationality (deduction, analogy, skepticism), thereby assuming a privileged role in exploring the nature and limits of philosophical reasoning under conditions of uncertainty?

2. Conjecture between Philosophy and Science

What is the epistemological function of conjecture across the disciplines of the eighteenth century—from philosophy to natural history, from medicine to the history of the Earth? How does the hypothesis evolve from a form of uncertain argumentation into a key instrument of scientific method?

3. Morality in an Uncertain World

What forms of morality are possible in a universe whose knowledge is governed not by certainty but by conjecture? How does an epistemology grounded in probability compel a reconsideration of the foundations of morality, rendering it intrinsically provisional, experimental? We especially welcome contributions examining how this culture of uncertainty makes philosophically conceivable the figure of the virtuous atheist and how it participates in the broader project of a “science of human nature.”

4. The Role of Theatre in the Philosophical Horizon of the Eighteenth Century

What is the relationship between narrative, fiction, and philosophical argumentation? The theatrical logic offers a space in which different models of thought display their argumentative strategies and their ways of constructing a reason increasingly understood in the plural. How are the roles of observer and observed conceived within a dynamic in which these positions are perpetually redefined? And in what ways does the theatrical form function as an open space capable of interrogating the languages, arguments, and philosophical narratives of the period, situated at the threshold between fiction and reality?