Agenda
Anne Carson's Nobel is a prize for a classicist who thinks in fragments
Culture Desk · 9 October 2026 · Plato
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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Culture Desk · 9 October 2026 · Plato
Newsroom · 3 October 2026 · David Harvey, Karl Marx, Shoshana Zuboff
World Desk · 30 September 2026 · David Harvey, Karl Marx, Shoshana Zuboff
World Desk · 23 September 2026 · Norbert Wiener
Culture Desk · 23 September 2026
A Duke philosopher of memory takes a MacArthur Fellowship, a Virginia philosopher of AI a three-year Schmidt Sciences award, a Pittsburgh historian of physics the Lakatos Award for two books on induction, and French sixth-formers choose a book against the culture of the clash. What the four have in common, and what we could not confirm.
Culture Desk · 11 October 2026
Richard Rorty asked philosophy to stop pretending it could underwrite science, morals and politics, and to settle instead for making cruelty harder to ignore. Thirty years on, with the strongman passage from Achieving Our Country quoted in every election, the question is whether his liberal ironist can still hold the line.
Richard Rorty
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Samuel Clarke, Newton's advocate against Leibniz, was born on 11 October 1675; Hans Kelsen, author of the Pure Theory of Law, on 11 October 1881. Tschirnhaus died on the date in 1708, Zwingli in battle in 1531, and in 1939 Alexander Sachs carried Einstein's letter into the Oval Office. The thread is where reason's reach ends and responsibility begins.
Charles Taylor, Scott J. Shapiro, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Robert Alexy
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born in Berlin on 10 October 1873. He made the history of ideas a discipline, traced one idea from Plato to the Romantics in The Great Chain of Being, and helped write the rules of academic freedom he later qualified. The same date, in four Catholic countries, did not exist in 1582.
Arthur O. Lovejoy
Six meetings from the first half of October, five of them outside the Anglophone circuit: a Korean alumni body fighting to revive a closed Indian philosophy department, Confucians on artificial intelligence at Qufu, 450 Russian scholars on the university's mission, a German philosopher on sex and silence near Tokyo, Naples's free autumn seminars and a French stocktaking of environmental philosophy.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Confucius
Language models now score well on truthfulness tests and badly on honesty tests, a gap the MASK benchmark was built to measure. Two older accounts of truth, Heidegger's unconcealment and Foucault's parrhesia, suggest why: telling the truth has always been something a speaker risks, and a model has nothing to lose.
Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault
Alasdair MacIntyre died in May 2025 insisting that modern moral argument is interminable because the words outlived the world that made sense of them. His diagnosis in After Virtue, the disquieting suggestion, emotivism, Nietzsche or Aristotle, the wait for another Benedict, reads differently in a year of shouting. Here is what holds and what does not.
Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Friedrich Nietzsche
Leibniz and early modern metaphysics
Three days of Leibniz scholarship at UC Riverside, with Jeffrey McDonough of Harvard giving the keynote on atomism in Du Châtelet, Wolff and Leibniz. Remote attendance by Zoom; no registration required.
Historiography and philosophy of science in China
A workshop at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou gathering contributors to a special issue of Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science, on how Chinese intellectuals have written the history of their encounter with modern science.
Philosophical logic, formal epistemology, formal ontology and philosophy of mathematics
The ninth annual Formal Philosophy conference, run by HSE University's International Laboratory for Logic, Linguistics and Formal Philosophy, covering philosophical logic, formal epistemology, formal ontology, analytical metaphysics and philosophy of mathematics. Hybrid, with remote participation by Zoom.
Cass Sunstein argues that extending legal protection to animals is not a radical proposal but a consistent application of moral convictions most people already hold. Using behavioural economics and social psychology, he explains how indifference to animal suffering persists, why support for animal law may cross a threshold soon, and how mistreated animals might be given political representation and a bill of rights against cruelty.
Princeton University Press · 2027 · English
Publisher page →Cecilia Sebastian rewrites the reception history of the Frankfurt School by reading it through the activists who used it rather than the academics who inherited it. Angela Davis and Hans-Juergen Krahl take the place usually given to Habermas. Drawing on new archival material, she argues that this generation of student organisers, not the second-generation theorists, kept critical theory a living practice of social critique.
Verso · 2027 · English
Publisher page →Elad Magomedov treats imposture not as the negation of truth but as the simulation of phantasm, and builds an immanent ontology of the fake that distinguishes reality from its counterfeits without appeal to metaphysical absolutes. Reading Plato, Sartre, Baudrillard and Deleuze together, he applies the framework to authoritarian propaganda systems, fabricated histories and biographical fraud.
Routledge · 2027 · English
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