Events in 2025-26

The Department of Philosophy runs an active program of events.

Conferences and workshops 2025–26

Departmental research seminar 2025–26

The department research seminar is our central weekly event covering topics across the discipline.

  • Sandrine Bergès (University of Bilkent/University of York) – Who Is a Slave and Who Should Be Freed? Astell, Marriage and Chattel Slavery
  • Megan Blomfield (University of Sheffield) – Diagnosing Testimonial Injustice in Institutions
  • Joanna Burch-Brown (UoB) – Crime, Neighbourhood Renewal and Persistent Exclusion: Social Philosophy for Community Development
  • Anthony Everett (UoB) – Free Logic and Presupposition Failure
  • Alex Gregory (University of Southampton) – Fitting Happiness, Apt Comparisons
  • Ian Kidd (University of Nottingham) – A Defence of Misanthropy
  • Maria Lasonen (University of Helsinki) – Feasibilist Inquiry and the Puzzle of Ex Ante Dogmatism
  • Corinna Meith (RUB and Benjamin Meaker Fellow at the University of Bristol) – A Kantian Perspective on Uber Drivers’ Fight for Decent Work
  • Richard Moore (University of Warwick) – An Antidote to Hasty Adaptationism?
  • Ryan Nefdt (University of Cape Town) – Linguistic Relativity, LLMs, and the Hog Thesis
  • Ross Pain (UoB) – On the Cultural Evolution of Scientific Knowledge
  • Carlotta Pavese (Oxford) – Essentially Intentional Actions and Action Theoretic Foundationalism
  • Kelli Rudolph (Department of Classics, University of Kent) – Political Love in Stoic Theory
  • Henry Somers-Hall (Royal Holloway, University of London) – ‘I Think Therefore I Was’: Sartre, Kant and the Self
  • Jer Steeger (University of Bristol) – Everettian Chance in No Uncertain Terms
  • Noah Stemeroff (University of Bristol) – The Philosophy within Physics
  • Pekka Vayrynen (University of Leeds) – Monism and Pluralism in Axiology and the Semantics of Evaluative Language
  • Lena Zuchowski (UoB) – Paradigms of Evil

Further research seminars 2025–26

The department organises various research seminars on specialised topics. These are open to everyone, but can be more focused than our general departmental research seminar.

  • Philosophy of physics seminars
    • Rami Jreige (Bristol) – Why Is Physics Unrigorous?
    • Jer Steeger (Bristol), with James Read – Everettian Chance in No Uncertain Terms
    • Noah Stemeroff (Bristol) – Scientific Creativity and Imagination (from the Perspective of a Few Mid-20th-Century Theoretical Physicists)
    • Sebastian de Haro Ollé (Amsterdam) – Dualities and the Geometric View of Theories
    • Kartik Tiwari (Bonn) – On Infinities of Cosmological Spacetimes
  • Philosophy of science seminars
    • Catherine Herfeld (Hannover) – Model Transfer as Model Construction: A Taxonomy
  • Foundational Studies Bristol
    • Gil Sagi – Formalisation and Linguistic Freedom
  • Formal epistemology
    • Xin Hui Yong (MIT)
  • EPIC seminar series
    • EPIC Roundtable: Learning from epistemic injustice in global health
    • Havi Carel – Is Illness Ineffable?
    • Jada Wiggleton-Little – Pain, Motivation, and the Limits of Epistemic Injustice
    • Anke Büter and Thor Hennelund Nielsen – Mind-Body Dualism as Epistemic Injustice
    • Aidan McGlynn – ‘Medical Gaslighting’ Beyond First-Person Authority
    • Fred Cooper – All the Way Back and All the Way Down: Epistemic Injustice and the History of Loneliness
    • Martino Belvederi Murri – Insight, Patient Perspective and Coercive Practices in Psychosis
    • Dan Degerman – Silence in Mood Disorders: A Philosophical Investigation
    • Eleonora Volta – Extracted Speech and the Shifting Boundaries of Wrongdoing in Domestic Abuse
    • Michael Bresalier – Selective Vaccination and Its Uncertainties: Risk, Race and Epistemic Injustice in Neonatal BCG Vaccination in Britain, 1965–2005
  • Other events
    • Creative uses of AI: University of Bristol School of Arts roundtable session – chaired by Tuomas Tahko, with contributions from Francesco Bentivenga, Piers Leigh, Fiona Jordan, Mark Whitlam, Lena Zuchowski and Laurence Kent
    • Ken Aizawa (Rutgers) – Compositional Abduction and Inference to the Best Explanation
    • Roundtable on On the Politics of the Living: Foucault and Canguilhem on Life and Norms (Bloomsbury, 2025) – Federico Testa in conversation with Francesco Tava, TzuChien Tho and Paul Earlie
    • Seiriol Morgan (University of Bristol) – On Augustine on Understanding Evil, presented as part of the Department of Religion and Theology Research Seminar Series

Work in progress sessions 2025–26

Work in progress sessions provide a platform for sharing ongoing research and receiving feedback.

Departmental work in progress seminar 2025–26

  • Assadian - Easy ontology, fiction, and abstraction
  • Carel - 'Is Illness Ineffable?'
  • Cretu - The neglect of micro-observers
  • Degerman - Emotion extraction
  • Jones et al. - "Counting (on) large language models"
  • Ladyman - 'Scientific Philosophy or Philosophy in Science'
  • Okasha - Randomization in science, society, philosophy and nature
  • Thebault & Okasha - Confirmation and Experimental Artefacts: A Bayseian Analysis
  • Thebault & Roberts - Semantic Completion: A View From The Boundary
  • Walker - Forget Fictionalism: Psychiatric Disorders are Quasi-Real

Postgraduate work in progress seminar 2025–26

  • Calum Sims
  • George Hobart
  • Josh Law
  • Matthew Rutherford
  • XMAS WIP

Reading groups 2025–26

Reading groups offer an informal setting for participants to discuss literature and research papers in a specific area of interest.

  • Aim and Structure of Cosmological Theory Reading Group
  • EPIC reading group
  • Imagination Reading Group
  • Merleau-Ponty Reading Group
  • Representing evolution reading group
  • Robotics and Philosophy Reading Group
  • The Brain Abstracted Reading Group

Other Events 2025–26

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion events, often with the speaker for the departmental seminar.