The 2017 IASEMS Graduate Conference at The British Institute of Florence is a one-day interdisciplinary forum open to PhD students and researchers who have obtained their doctorates within the past 5 years. 

Dissimulation is but a faint kind of policy, or wisdom; for it asketh a strong wit, and a strong heart, to know when to tell truth, and to do it. Therefore it is the weaker sort of politics, that are the great dissemblers! (Francis Bacon, “Of Dissimulation”) 

Throughout history the question of what a lie is and whether it is wrong to lie has been the subject of a lively debate among Western philosophers and theologians. In antiquity, lying has been often stigmatized and condemned on religious, moral and legal bases: it is a sin, a transgression, a criminal offense and therefore intrinsically wrong and morally reprehensible. Contrary to this absolutist position, held by philosophers such as Augustine and Kant, the utilitarian perspective, put forth by Bentham and Mill in the nineteenth century and expanded by J.L. Austin in the twentieth century, proposes that the concept of lying and its moral implications are context dependent and defined by social conventions. 

The aim of the conference is to explore lying and related concepts such as falsehood, deceit, disguise, dissimulation, counterfeiting, the role they have and the values they entail in early modern culture. Discussions on lying also imply a range of other issues and questions concerning truth, its attainability and the meaning of its attainment; and notions of trust, faith, belief. During the conference we want to reflect on these topics and also explore creative ways of eluding the prohibition of lying through linguistic and rhetorical strategies such as, for instance, equivocation and amphibology.