The International Society for the Philosophy of chemistry (ISPC) organises a conference on 16-18 July on philosophy of chemistry.

The ISPC is devoted to the international exchange of ideas concerning the philosophical foundations of the chemical sciences and related areas. This exchange fosters discourse between chemists, biochemists, philosophers, historians, sociologists and educators. See: https://sites.google.com/site/socphilchem/  Philosophy of chemistry concerns both internal questions arising from the methods, concepts, and ontology unique to chemistry and chemical research, as well as traditional questions in the philosophy of science, addressed from a chemical perspective. The 2018 conference will be open to the full range of topics and views within the overall subject. For information about previous contributions, please see the volumes of Foundations of Chemistry which include papers from previous conferences. See:

http://www.springer.com/philosophy/epistemology+and+philosophy+of+science/journal/10698

There will also be the special topic of the concept of chemical “element”. Discussion of this topic potentially brings in a number of issues in the philosophy of chemistry, as well as examples from the full range of the history of chemistry, including the ideas on this topic, for example, of Aristotle, some alchemists, chemists in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Lavoisier, Mendeleev, IUPAC and Paneth. The conference will offer the opportunity for contributors to the forthcoming edited book of studies on this topic to present preliminary versions of their papers, if they wish to do so, and/or to become acquainted with the material included in the papers by other contributors, as well as the opportunity for other participants to become acquainted in detail with this very interesting topic.  

The conference is organised by Dr Geoffrey Blumenthal, and will be co-hosted by Vanessa Seifert, University of Bristol. The scientific committee comprises the following:

Marina Banchetti-Robino, Florida Atlantic University, USA.
José Antonio Chamizo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico.
Hasok Chang, University of Cambridge, UK.
Grant Fisher, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Korea.
Michele Friend, Georgetown University, USA.
Elena Ghibaudi, University of Torino, Italy.
Clevis Headley, Florida Atlantic University, USA.
Robin Hendry, University of Durham, UK.
Jean-Pierre Llored, Linacre College, Oxford and Laboratoire Sphère, Université Paris 7.
Olimpia Lombardi, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Hirofumi Ochiai, Nagoya Bunri University, Japan.
Guillermo Restrepo, Universidad de Pamplona, Colombia.
Klaus Ruthenberg, Hochschule Coburg, Germany.
Eric Scerri, University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
Joachim Schummer, Editor of HYLE, Germany.
Tami Spector, University of San Francisco, USA.
Brigitte van Tiggelen, Chemical Heritage Foundation, USA, and Mémosciences, Belgium.

All proposals for papers should include a title and an abstract of up to 500 words. Please submit your abstracts to gb0859@bristol.ac.uk; the deadline is 10 January 2018. Receipt of abstracts will be acknowledged. Acceptance will be automatic for abstracts which have already been accepted for the volume on the concept of “element”. In other cases, the Committee’s decisions will be notified in mid March 2018.