Thinking Out Loud With the Intellectually Curious

A three-day conference for the thinking person gets under way May 20 at the Moonrise Hotel in St. Louis.

The St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality or SLACRR is sponsored by the University of Missouri–St. Louis and in St. Louis. It runs through May 22. 

The conference provides a forum for new work on practical and theoretical reason.

The keynote speaker is Jonathan Dancy. He is a philosophy professor at the University of Texas at Austin. But non-philosophy folks may know him as the father of actor Hugh Dancy and father-in-law to actress Claire Danes. He’s even made a guest appearance on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

Dancy’s main area of expertise is moral philosophy. His keynote address is titled “More Right than Wrong.”

“Jonathan is one of the pioneers of contemporary work on reasons,” said Eric Wiland, associate professor in philosophy at UMSL. “He works on both reasons for action and reasons for belief.”

Wiland said the purpose of the conference is to bring together people who focus on different aspects of philosophy and see what similarities and differences there are in the way they think about reasons and rationality.

The conference is free and open to the public. However, attendees must register by sending an email to SLACRR@gmail.com stating that you plan on attending.

The conference is sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at UMSL, the College of Arts and Sciences at UMSL, Office of Research Administration at UMSL and the Department of Philosophy at Washington University.