Fricker gives the Dewey Lectures, and three other meetings worth the fare

On the afternoon of 30 September, in Deutsches Haus on Columbia's Morningside campus, Miranda Fricker will begin the first of three John Dewey Lectures. The department has advertised them under one title, "Ethical Pressures: Shaping Wills and Bending Time in Moral Address", on consecutive afternoons from 4.10 to 6 p.m., finishing on 2 October. Fricker holds the Julius Silver Professorship at New York University, so she will be speaking a few miles from her own office.

Three other meetings this autumn are worth reporting, and they are of a different order altogether: a workshop on AI safety in Copenhagen on 1 and 2 October, the ninth Formal Philosophy conference in Moscow from 27 to 30 October, and the nineteenth Gelven graduate conference at Northern Illinois University on 6 and 7 November. Each has been checked against the organisers' own pages and each stands up. One further item that circulated alongside them — an international colloquium on phenomenology and critique said to be meeting at Santa Maria in Brazil over the same three days as the Dewey Lectures — could not be confirmed when this paper went looking on 14 September, and still cannot. It is left out for that reason.

The four fall into two kinds, and the division is not merely a matter of scale. A named lecture series is where a philosopher who has been turning something over for a decade finally says what it comes to, in public, in a form that usually becomes a book. A graduate conference is the other end of the same pipeline: half-hour papers by people who have not yet finished a thesis, delivered to a room that may hold the only dozen specialists who will ever read them. Both are worth the attention, for opposite reasons.

The Dewey Lectures are the nearest thing American philosophy has to a state occasion#

Columbia has housed the Journal of Philosophy since 1904, the year Dewey himself arrived from Chicago, and the journal still publishes the department's endowed series — the Dewey, the Woodbridge and the Nagel Lectures. That arrangement is what gives the Dewey Lectures their weight: what gets said over three afternoons in the autumn tends to appear in print at length, and then to be argued about for a generation.

The record supports the claim. John Rawls gave the Dewey Lectures in 1980 as "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory"; they ran to fifty-seven pages in volume 77 of the Journal of Philosophy and supplied much of the scaffolding for Political Liberalism thirteen years later. Hilary Putnam gave them in 1994 as "Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses", printed that September and reworked into The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World in 1999. Elizabeth Anderson gave them in April 2022 at the Italian Academy, on what moral psychology from Rousseau onwards says about the obstacles to an egalitarian society. It is a short list.

Fricker is giving these lectures for the second time this year, and that is the point#

In June she delivered the Annual Uehiro Lectures at Oxford as "Moral Pressures: Bending Time, Shaping Wills", in three sessions at Keble College's H B Allen Centre on 1, 3 and 8 June; this paper reported them at the time. Columbia's title takes the same two clauses, reverses them and adds "in Moral Address". A book is already promised out of the Oxford series, in the Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics with Oxford University Press.

Delivering a set of lectures twice is not recycling; it is how the form works. The first outing tests the argument on a live audience, the second repairs what broke, and the manuscript that reaches the press has been through two rooms of people looking for the weak joint. Anyone who heard the Oxford lectures will be able to tell which joints Fricker decided needed work over the summer.

The Columbia listing sets out the argument without hedging. Moral responses to wrongdoing — blaming, pressing for an apology — "inevitably and quite properly involve the exertion of interpersonal pressures", and those pressures "involve the pressing of both moral reasons and plainly non-moral (carrot and stick) reasons". The wronged party, on this account, is one of the "active protagonists in a moral drama" rather than a passive recipient of whatever contrition happens to arrive.

The target is philosophical purism: the assumption that a genuinely moral response must run on moral reasons and nothing else. Fricker is not the first to shoot at it, and the purist has a reply worth stating properly. Once carrots and sticks are admitted into moral address, the purist will say, you have quietly changed the subject from ethics to negotiation, and the distinction between persuading someone and leaning on them is exactly what moral philosophy exists to keep in view. Whether the lectures answer that objection or absorb it is the thing to listen for on the second afternoon.

Copenhagen has decided that AI safety is itself the object of study#

The first Workshop on Critical AI Safety meets on 1 and 2 October in the Panum Building on Blegdamsvej, hosted by the Center for Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence in the University of Copenhagen's Department of Communication and funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. The organising committee is Bokar N'Diaye of the University of Amsterdam with Ninell Oldenburg, Nina Rajcic, Filippos Stamatiou and Anders Søgaard of Copenhagen. No registration is required, which for a philosophy workshop is rarer than it should be.

The stated aim is to "characterise, map, and critique the field of AI Safety and AI Existential Risk research" — the field, note, rather than the risk. The call asks whether AI safety amounts to an ideology, what its formal methods quietly assume, how it is funded, how it recruits, and how its policy advocacy stands to its published research.

The three keynote speakers make the intention plain. Shazeda Ahmed of UCLA was lead author of "Field-building and the epistemic culture of AI safety", an interview-based study in First Monday in 2024 that treats the safety community as an ethnographic subject. Adam Becker's More Everything Forever (2025) attacks Silicon Valley's futurist eschatology. Mollie Gleiberman's 2023 discussion paper for the Institute of Development Policy at Antwerp separated effective altruism's public-facing pitch from what its core adherents believe.

None of the three works inside AI safety, and a critic could fairly say the programme has been assembled to arrive somewhere it already stands. The organisers would answer that the field has had a decade of energetic self-description and very little scrutiny from outside it. Both points are reasonable.

Moscow: the ninth Formal Philosophy, hybrid, with the door left open#

Formal Philosophy 2026 runs from 27 to 30 October, the ninth in an annual series, organised by the International Laboratory for Logic, Linguistics and Formal Philosophy at HSE University, at Staraya Basmannaya 21/4, room A-307. The laboratory lists philosophical logic, formal epistemology, epistemic logic, formal ontology, analytical metaphysics, philosophy of logic, mathematical logic and philosophy of mathematics; the working languages are Russian and English. The format is hybrid, described on the conference page as one in which "both face-to-face and remote participation is possible", with Zoom for those not in the room.

Four invited speakers are named: Ben Martin of the University of Padua, Marco Ruffino of the University of Campinas, Aleksandr Khlebalin of Novosibirsk State University and Valentin Shehtman of HSE and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Abstracts go to EasyChair by 5 October, up to 8,000 characters, anonymised for blind review, for oral or poster presentation; registration for listeners closes on 25 October. Readers will have their own views about what taking part in a Moscow meeting involves at present, and this paper does not propose to supply them. The facts are as set out, including the fact that one can take part without leaving home.

DeKalb offers two hundred dollars and asks you to turn up anyway#

The nineteenth Dr C. Michael Gelven NIU Graduate Philosophy Conference meets on 6 and 7 November at Northern Illinois University, with Karen Bennett of Rutgers giving the opening keynote on the Friday. Bennett's Making Things Up (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines building relations — composition, constitution, grounding, realisation — and asks whether they are one phenomenon with several names. It is the kind of book a graduate student can argue with to some purpose.

The terms are typical of the genre and rarely written down in public. Papers of roughly 3,000 words, thirty-minute slots, one submission per person, deadline 31 July, decisions by 22 September, delivery in person with no remote option. Each speaker receives a stipend of 200 dollars "to mitigate the costs of travel", which will not get anyone from either American coast to DeKalb and back — and the organisers are honest enough to say mitigate rather than cover.

There is a small irony in the name. C. Michael Gelven taught at NIU for forty-six years and died in 2018, best remembered for A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, published in 1970 and still in use. The conference bearing his name asks for papers in analytic philosophy and has invited a Rutgers metaphysician to open it. Departments change; memorial titles outlive the interests they honour.

What the two kinds of meeting are actually for#

The two forms are complementary but not symmetrical. Fricker's lectures will be reported, published, reviewed, taught and cited. Most of the graduate papers heard in DeKalb will vanish without trace; two or three will grow into the articles people argue about in 2035, and nobody in the room on the day will know which. That is the trade the graduate conference makes, and it is a good one, as the thirtieth Oxford graduate conference and this autumn's regional meetings both show.

Copenhagen sits awkwardly between the two, too small to be an occasion and too senior to be a nursery, betting that a field can be described from outside before it has finished settling. The Dewey Lectures, if they follow Rawls and Putnam, will be in print within two years and still on reading lists in 2050 — which is either the best argument for the named lecture series or evidence that American philosophy defers to it more than is healthy, depending on where you stand.