Metaphysics returns to the timetable: philosophy's autumn conference season

A conference calendar is normally read the way a train timetable is read: for the one line that concerns you. A place, two dates, a deadline that has almost certainly passed.

Read whole, the philosophy meetings scheduled between the end of September and the middle of December 2026 do something more interesting. They point, repeatedly and from incompatible directions, at the same question.

Seven meetings are fixed for the season. Four are, in substance, about metaphysics — and no two would recognise each other's methods.

The oldest question, asked in four vocabularies#

At Ohio State in October, physicists and philosophers will spend a day and a half on the metaphysical assumptions buried inside interpretations of quantum theory. At Radboud University in Nijmegen, three days later, a conference will ask what contemporary continental philosophy has been doing with the concepts of substance, process and agency. In Evanston the following weekend, the Hegel Society of America takes up time. In Athens in December, the ninth Panhellenic congress on philosophy of science lists metaphysics first among the neighbouring fields whose papers it will accept.

Metaphysics never went away, of course. What is new is the company it keeps. For most of the twentieth century, the word meant one thing in a seminar room at Michigan and something close to its opposite in Paris, and the two parties conducted their business without acknowledgement. This autumn they are running in parallel, six days apart, using the same term without embarrassment. That is not a rapprochement. But it is a coincidence worth noticing.

Los Angeles opens with the field that once promised to replace metaphysics#

The 5th Annual Philosophy of Language Association Conference meets at UCLA on 26 and 27 September, in Dodd Hall 321. Its stated aim is modest to the point of self-effacement: to give philosophers of language a venue in which to discuss new work in all areas of the field. There is no registration.

The bill is a cross-section of ranks rather than a parade of seniority: Robin Jeshion of the University of Southern California, Adam Sennet of UC Davis, Annina Loets of Humboldt University in Berlin, Christopher Hom of Texas Tech, Milan Mossé of Stanford, Aidan Gray of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Helena Fang of MIT and Chenhao Lu of the University of Maryland; the organising committee is spread across eight institutions on two continents.

Philosophy of language was the field that once undertook to dissolve metaphysical disputes into semantic ones — to show that the question of what there is was a question about how we talk. It has instead become one of the main suppliers of metaphysical questions: about kinds, about groups, about what a word does when it classifies people. Our earlier report on Michael Devitt's return to reference traced part of the same arc.

October opens with physicists in the room#

The Philosophy of Physics Conference at Ohio State runs on 9 and 10 October, in the Ohio Union's Great Hall Meeting Room 1, from half past eight on the Friday to one o'clock on the Saturday. It is billed as the university's first meeting to put physicists and philosophers of physics on one programme, and it is hosted by the Society of Physics Students rather than by a philosophy department — a detail that says more about the intended audience than the theme does.

The theme is the metaphysical assumptions underlying interpretations of quantum theory. Three OSU physicists are speaking — Samir Mathur, Brian Skinner and Gregory Lafyatis — alongside five philosophers: Laura Ruetsche of Michigan, Nick Huggett of Illinois at Chicago, Wayne Myrvold of Western Ontario, Jacob Barandes of Harvard and Bixin Gao of Macalester College.

The organisers have chosen the one topic on which the two professions cannot avoid each other. Choosing between interpretations of quantum mechanics is not, at present, an empirical matter; the theories agree on what the instruments will read. What separates them is a set of commitments about what exists and what a measurement is. The territory is that of our piece on Bas van Fraassen's Rolf Schock Prize. Attendance is free but capped, and registration closed on 15 September.

Nijmegen puts process ontology and non-Western philosophy on one bill#

COMET 2026 — three days on metaphysics in contemporary continental philosophy — runs at Radboud University from 13 to 15 October, in the Maria Montessori building for the first two days and the Erasmus Building for the third. It is directed by Arjen Kleinherenbrink and Tim Miechels through Radboud's Center for Contemporary European Philosophy.

The first day is given to ontologies of process and action, with Mercedes Valmisa, Rein Raud and Tina Röck. The remaining two days were filled by open call: among the accepted speakers are Mohana Mukhopadhyay, Bado Ndoye, Rin Takahashi and Floriana Ferro. The call closed on 2 July.

The topic list is the giveaway: speculative realism, new materialism, new realism, process ontologies, agency, and non-Western philosophies. That last item is not decoration. A conference on continental metaphysics whose opening panel reaches outside the European canon is claiming something about where the tradition's live questions come from — as our report on Meillassoux's early text did from the other end. Ten speakers have an hour each, presentation and discussion together; fifteen further places are held for researchers who want to attend without presenting. There is no fee. English is the working language, though papers in Dutch, French and German are accepted with translation provided.

Hegel's turn, and the hardest case to make for him#

The Hegel Society of America holds its 28th biennial meeting at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, on the theme 'Hegel and Time'. The society's own site and Northwestern's events calendar both give 16 to 18 October, opening at half past one on the Friday and closing at half past twelve on the Sunday; earlier listings, including the Philosophy Documentation Center's index, still show the following weekend, so intending participants should confirm before booking. Online registration closes on 6 October and includes the conference banquet.

The call for papers, which shut on 14 January, put the difficulty plainly:

Questions about time, temporality, and history are pervasive in Hegel's thought.

Pervasive, but seldom addressed head-on, which is why the theme is a test rather than an occasion. The society asked for finished essays of up to six thousand words, blind-reviewed, and opened the call beyond philosophy to theology, history, legal and political theory, sociology, environmental studies, gender studies and literary studies. Accepted papers may appear in the proceedings or in The Owl of Minerva. We have written before on Hegel on recognition, freedom and time.

November belongs to the graduate students#

The 30th Oxford Graduate Philosophy Conference meets on 13 and 14 November at Blackfriars Hall and Regent's Park College. The keynote speakers are David Chalmers of New York University, Monima Chadha of Oxford and Rob Simpson of University College London; Adrian Moore is running a workshop on publishing in philosophy. Submissions are closed and the programme is not yet published.

Thirty years is a long run for an event organised each year by people who will have left the university within three. What has kept it going, as our earlier report set out, is the format: every graduate paper draws a reply from a member of the faculty. Chalmers's presence on the bill will surprise nobody who followed the arguments we covered in thirty years of the hard problem.

Then Durham asks what welfare is for a creature that is not us#

On 20 and 21 November, Duke University hosts a conference on the philosophy of animal welfare, run jointly by Duke's Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy and NYU's Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy. The programme committee is Matthew Adler, Heather Browning, Bob Fischer and Jeff Sebo; abstracts closed on 1 June.

The questions are about the nature, measurement and moral significance of animal well-being: which animals are welfare subjects, what theory of well-being applies to them, whether one theory can cover humans and non-humans alike. It is the natural sequel to the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, which asked which creatures might be conscious. This meeting asks what is good for them once you have decided they are.

Athens closes the year by refusing the division of labour#

The 9th Panhellenic Conference on Philosophy of Science runs from 3 to 5 December at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science on the University of Athens campus at Ano Ilisia. María Jiménez-Buedo of the UNED in Madrid gives the keynote. Papers may be delivered in Greek or in English; the call for abstracts closed on 28 July, with decisions due in mid-September. There is no registration fee.

What distinguishes the Athens call is its refusal to police its own borders. It admits work in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, the history of philosophy and political philosophy, so long as the work bears on science. Set beside the architecture of a congress like Kobe in 2027, that is a deliberately loose door.

The season costs almost nothing, which is the point#

Four of these seven meetings charge no fee at all, and a fifth requires no registration. The small conference — fifty people, no parallel sessions, an hour a paper — is doing a disproportionate share of the discipline's actual work, and doing it on departmental goodwill and a room booking.

Every call for papers in this list has closed. What has not closed is the door. Nijmegen is holding fifteen places for people who simply want to be in the room — an unusually honest piece of conference design, treating the audience as participants rather than attendance figures.

Whether the recurrence of metaphysics across the season amounts to a turn or a coincidence will not be settled by the programmes. It will be settled by what happens in Columbus when a philosopher tells three working physicists that their interpretation carries an ontology, and by whether anyone in Nijmegen and anyone in Evanston discovers, six days apart, that they were asking the same thing.