Events in 2025-26

Conferences and workshops 2025–26

• Ageing, Epistemic Injustice, and the Transformation of Experience Workshop
• Artificial Intelligence and the Turing Test Workshop
• Centre for Health, Humanities and Science and Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare Workshop: Trust and Affective Dimensions of Healthcare
• Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare Workshop with Anthony Fernandez: Phenomenology, Speech and Belonging
• Epistemic Utility for Imprecise Probability Final Conference
• Epistemic Utility for Imprecise Probability Summer School
• Fifth Bristol Workshop on the History of Modern Philosophy
• Fourth Bristol Workshop on the History of Modern Philosophy: Natural Philosophy Revisited
• Kant on Goodness Conference
• Kant on Hope and Politics Workshop
• Philosophy and Slavery Workshop
• Philosophy in Biology and Medicine Network Workshop
• Randomization in Science, Society and Nature Workshop
• School of Arts Graduation Festival
• The Future of Philosophy Conferences
• Value Theory Workshop 2025
• Imagining Well Workshop
• Mathematical Rigour and Physics Workshop

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

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

Postgraduate work in progress seminar 2025–26

Our dedicated weekly postgraduate work in progress seminars offers a friendly and supportive environment and builds the PGR community. 

• Fred Mathews
• Byron Hyde
• Lei Hopf
• Oliver Hurcum
• Li Zhenhua
• Amanda Houston
• Tom Lee
• Calum Sims
• Lem Tsikas
• Christopher Wiles
• Alejandra Casas Munoz
• Eoin Perry
• Sami Tayub
• Jonathan Faye
• Cathy Shail
• George Hobart
• Matthew Rutherford
• Thomas Scrivens
• Josh Law
• Luke Perry
• Kathryn Body
• George Alexandrou
• Dave Barker
• Alex Hepburn
• 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

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Career Development sessions 2025–26

We ran a regular programme of EDI and career development sessions our regular departmental research seminar. Guest speakers at the research seminar will be invited to participate in the EDI session while they are visiting UoB. The seminar is primarily aimed at early career researchers and PhD students but is open to all. It will provide space for reflection on career development, the barriers you may have encountered (or observed), and strategies for overcoming them. It will last about an hour, as conversation over tea and biscuits.