The project’s main conference took place in Mainz from the 31st of August to the 3rd of September 2023.

The conference poster can be found here: Poster for Mainz Locke Conference.

Participants included:

Felix Waldmann

Felix Waldmann’s research focuses on early-modern political thought and intellectual history. He has published articles on Locke in The Journal of Modern History, Historical Journal, and Modern Intellectual History. He is editing the Clarendon Edition of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government for Oxford University Press and he is the book-review editor for Locke Studies. In addition to his work on Locke, he works on David Hume and early modern Naples. He is editing the Clarendon Edition of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Occasional Writings and he was the editor of Further Letters of David Hume (2014).

Michael Walschots

Michael Walschots is currently a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, where he’s working on a book project entitled: Kant and the British Moralists. Most generally speaking, Michael’s research focuses on issues in meta-ethics and moral psychology in eighteenth-century German and British philosophy, and his publications have exploredthese issues in the writings of Christian Wolff, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Alexander Baumgarten, and Immanuel Kant. Michael is the editor and translator of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason: Background Source Materials (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press) as well as the co-editor of Christian Wolff’s ‘German Ethics’ (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). Michael will be joining the ‘Rethinking Enlightenment’ project in August of 2023, where he will be exploring the reception of Locke’s Two Treatises in eighteenth-century Germany, as well as the interpretation of Locke’s philosophy by ‘popular philosophers’ such as J.G.H. Feder, and G.A. Tittel.

Katharina Kraus

Katharina Kraus is Miller Associate Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University (USA). Before moving to Hopkins in 2023, she taught at the University of Notre Dame (USA) and the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg (Germany) and was a post-doctorial fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel). She received a Diplom in physics from the Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg in 2008, a Master in History and Philosophy of Science in 2010 and a PhD in philosophy in 2014, both from the University of Cambridge.

Kraus is the author of Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation (Cambridge, 2020). Her current project, The Life of the Mind, examines theories of the mental development of persons in the tradition of transcendental philosophy, which model the mind on a conception of life and consider both inner-psychological and interpersonal processes. In this context, she is also interested in Locke’s theory of personal identity, consciousness, and mind.

Corey W. Dyck

Corey W. Dyck is Professor of Philosophy at Western University in London, Canada. He is the author of Kant and Rational Psychology (OUP 2014), and his most recent books include the edited collection Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany (OUP 2021) and the translation volume Early Modern German Philosophy, 1690-1750 (OUP, 2019). His recently completed monograph, The First Fifty Years of German Metaphysics, is due to appear with OUP in 2024. His research interests span throughout 18th-century German philosophy, including the reception of Locke and British philosophy more generally by the thinkers of the early German Enlightenment.

Paola Rumore

Paola Rumore is Professor for the History of Modern Philosophy at the University of Turin. She works primarily in the history of 18th-century German philosophy, with a special focus on the debate on metaphysics, psychology, and materialism. She is currently working on a project on the reception of British philosophy in the German enlightenment, with special attention to the influence of British theological naturalism and deism on 18th-century German debate on natural religion and rational theology. She is the author of ‘Locke in Halle: A Chapter of the 18th-Century German Reception of John Locke’, Studi lockiani. Ricerche sull’età moderna 1 (2020), 163-194.

Jürgen Overhoff

Jürgen Overhoff is Professor of History of Education at the Universität Münster. He was President of the German Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (2018-2022) and Member of the Executive Committee of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2018-2022). His most recent writings on Locke include an essay on his trip to Germany in 1665 John Locke: Weihnachten in Deutschland (Sinn und Form 2021/6) and a commented new German edition of his 1693 treatise on education John Locke: Einige Gedanken über Erziehung (Klett-Cotta 2022). His research focuses on British and German philosophy, German-American Educational History and more generally theories and practices of the Enlightenment.

Udo Thiel

Udo Thiel is Professor i. R. at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Graz, Austria. He held positions at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University in Canberra and is an elected member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Since November 2022 he has been Visitor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bonn.  His research focuses on early modern epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Locke Studies. Publications in English relating to Locke include The Early Modern Subject. Self-consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume, Oxford University Press 2014. – (Ed.), Locke: Epistemology and Metaphysics, Aldershot 2002. – ‘Locke in Göttingen’, in Studi Lockiani. Ricerche sull’età moderna 3 (2022). – ‘Unities of the Self. From Kant to Locke’, in Kant-Yearbook 7 (2015). – ‘Self and Sensibility: From Locke to Condillac and Rousseau’, in Intellectual History Review 25 (2015). – ‘The Trinity and Human Personal Identity’, in M. A. Stewart (ed.), English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, Oxford University Press 2000. – ‘Locke and Eighteenth-Century Materialist Conceptions of Personal Identity’, in The Locke Newsletter 29 (1998).

Dirk Schuck

Dirk Schuck is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Collaborative Research Centre “Structural Change of Property” at the University of Erfurt. In 2019, he published a book called Die Verinnerlichung der sozialen Natur: zum Verhältnis von Freiheit und Einfühlung in der Sozialpsychologie des frühen Liberalismus bei Locke, Shaftesbury, Hume und Smith. In 2020, he edited a new German edition of John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education for the Philosophische Bibliothek of Felix Meiner. In 2021, he gave a lecture on John Locke in the lecture series Geschichte und Gegenwart der Erziehungsphilosophie at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. He is also a book review editor for Locke Studies.

Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet

Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet is Researcher at the Institute for Philosophy of the Romanian Academy and at the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest. She specialises in Kant and the German Enlightenment, as well as in the French Enlightenment and the reception of Kant’s philosophy in the twentieth century. Her recent edited works include The Experiential Turn in Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy (with K. de Boer, 2021) and The Berlin Academy in the Reign of Frederick the Great: Philosophy and Science (with P. R. Anstey, 2022). She is currently PI of a team project on thinking for oneself in the German and British Enlightenment and working on the reception of Locke’s views in 18th-century German treatises on logic.