The conference, titled "The Future of Realism in the American Tradition of Pragmatic Naturalism," will take place in the Center for Inquiry, 1310 Sweet Home Road, Amherst. It will feature presentations by scholars from the school of pragmatic naturalism, to which Hare has dedicated much of his career.

A member of the UB faculty since 1962, Hare is the author of several books in the field of philosophical pragmatism and has, for more than 25 years, edited The Transactions of the C.S. Peirce Society, an important journal in American philosophy.

Among the notable guests at the conference will be Murray Murphey of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the foremost living scholars on the history of pragmatism; Sami Pihlstrom of the University of Helsinki, and UB alumnus Chin-Chun Chiu, professor of philosophy at Taiwan's National Tsing Huo University.

The conference will be sponsored by the Marvin Farber Memorial Fund, the Charles S. Peirce Professorship in American Philosophy, the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Philosophy, and the UB Department of Philosophy.

For further information, go to the colloquium Web site at http://www.pragmatism.org/conferences/future_of_pragma-tism_program.htm.

The conference will engage the question of reality as it has evolved within the American philosophical school known as pragmatic naturalism, an amalgam of the two separate, but eventually related, philosophies of naturalism and pragmatism.

Naturalism developed in the late 19th century out of the principles and methods of natural science, especially the Darwinian view that nature is in principle completely knowable, regular, united and whole. Naturalism asserts that there is nothing "real" beyond nature and accepts no evidence of "supernatural" effect that cannot be confirmed by scientific methodology.

Pragmatism, on the other hand, holds that the merit of an idea, policy, value or proposal must be determined by its usefulness or workability-that is, its consequences in the real world-and not by the scientific infallibility of its claims.

Pragmatic naturalism developed out of the work of late 19th and early 20th century American naturalistic humanists like Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. In different ways they each posed a marriage of naturalism's dedication to scientific method and pragmatism's rational approach to the problems we face as individuals and social beings.

During the first half of the 20th century, pragmatic naturalism was at the center of important controversies across the disciplines of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, ethical theory and aesthetics.

John Shook of the University of Oklahoma Department of Philosophy, one of the conveners of the UB conference, says pragmatic naturalism is enjoying a resurgence of popularity and controversy today because it offers many resources for the resolution of both perennial and novel intellectual problems.

"It works with the natural and social sciences toward a view of the general nature of things and an understanding of the operations of human knowledge-by taking a naturalistic stance on the world, (it) finds that the sciences and their methodologies are superior to other modes of inquiry into the human environment," he says.

While acknowledging that pragmatic naturalism is formulated to advance inquiry into all areas of human concern, Shook says the UB conference specifically aims to illuminate one topic that presently animates all of mainstream philosophy: the future of realism.