Seoul, Qufu, Nizhny Novgorod, Saitama, Naples, Paris: a diary of philosophy's other October
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.
The two October diaries already on this site cover the fixtures a reader would expect: the Vilnius-to-Riverside circuit of mid-sized Western meetings, and the fortnight that leaned east to Hildesheim and Hangzhou. This third diary is deliberately the odd one. Of its six entries, one was organised not by a university but by the graduates of a department that no longer exists; one is a Chinese state forum at the birthplace of Confucius; one is a Russian congress whose title is a question about academic freedom; one is a lecture in German in a Saitama classroom; one is a free seminar programme in a Neapolitan palazzo; and one, the only item still ahead, is a French attempt to take stock of a sub-discipline in three days.
Each has been checked against the organiser's own announcement or, for meetings already past, against its reports and the local press. Claims that did not survive the check are noted where they fall.
On the afternoon of 2 October, in the international conference hall of the Korean Buddhist History and Culture Memorial Hall in central Seoul, the alumni association of Dongguk University's department of Indian philosophy held its autumn symposium under the title "Indian Philosophy and Indology in Korea: Asking About Their Present and Future". The organiser is the clue. Dongguk is the Jogye Order's university; its Indian philosophy department opened in 1964 and was merged in 1996 with Seon and Buddhist studies in a restructuring that speakers attributed bluntly to economic logic. The graduates want it back, or a broader Indology department in its place.
The keynote came from Shim Jae-kwan of Sangji University, president of the Korean Society of Indian Philosophy and himself a Dongguk graduate of 1986, on the shrinking of classical Indology at the university over three decades. Kang Sung-yong, who directs the South Asia Centre at Seoul National University, spoke on the state of South Asian regional studies there; Lee Chun-ho of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies on the decline of classical Indian and literary studies in Korea generally. Lee Tae-seung, formerly of Uiduk University, chaired the general discussion. At the press conference of 29 September, the association's president, the Venerable Seonil, gave the detail that will travel furthest: a Sanskrit course cancelled last year because it enrolled nine students, one short of the threshold. Foundational fields, he argued, should not be judged by enrolment or profit.
The international philosophy calendar this fortnight leans east. The University of Hildesheim gives four consecutive days to Korean philosophy, from a North American association's conference to a workshop on thinkers of the colonial period; at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, the historiography of science in China is argued as a philosophical problem.
The 29th Philosophicum Lech opens in Vorarlberg under the title 'Betreutes Denken', a pun on assisted living that puts Kant's word for immaturity next to artificial intelligence. Vancouver's World Congress on Logic and Religion and Penn's Foucault centenary follow within days, and four meetings in Ghent, Lublin, Bucharest and Berlin have just closed.
Readers who followed this site's coverage of departmental closures in Britain will recognise the arithmetic. What is unusual in Seoul is that the pressure for reversal comes from the religious order and the alumni rather than the faculty, and is framed as a question of Buddhism's intellectual roots: Indian philosophy, one senior monk told the meeting, was once dismissed as heterodox and later recognised as the doctrine's foundation.
The twelfth Nishan Forum on World Civilizations opened on 28 September at Nishan in Qufu, Shandong, the birthplace of Confucius, and ran for two days alongside the Confucius Cultural Festival. The theme was "Civilization, Order and Justice", and the organisers, according to Xinhua, were the Shandong provincial government, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the State Council's Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the International Confucian Association. Reports put attendance at more than 340 participants from 49 countries and regions.
Four sub-forums were announced: the contemporary value of Confucianism, civilisational resilience and global governance, dialogue of ideas, and "artificial intelligence and world datong", the last word being the classical term for the "great unity" of the Book of Rites rather than the "harmony" that circulated in some English summaries. The speakers reported by the state media were political rather than philosophical: Jin Minqing of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences rejecting theories of civilisational superiority and clash; Yusuf Raza Gilani, chairman of Pakistan's Senate, quoting Confucius on "harmony without uniformity"; Thomas Bach of the International Olympic Committee finding Confucian thought and the Olympic ideal compatible. A closing "Nishan Consensus" called for plural civilisations without hierarchy and for multilateral rule-making.
Accounts naming individual AI sub-forum speakers and their proposals for embedding ren and yi in algorithm design circulated in the Chinese business press but could not be matched to the organisers' reporting, and are left out. The forum's real interest for philosophers is the one this site raised in discussing Confucius on the good person and the good society: whether a relational ethics of roles and obligations can supply what a rights-based AI ethics lacks, and what "harmony" means when a state is using it. Qufu did not answer that; it showed how seriously Beijing now stages the question.
450 scholars in Nizhny Novgorod ask what a university is for#
From 2 to 4 October the Russian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science held its fifth international congress at Lobachevsky State University in Nizhny Novgorod, with the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the city's House of Scientists as co-organisers. The title is a thesis as much as a theme: "The Mission of the University in the Knowledge Society: Between Utilitarianism and Academic Freedom". The organising committee was co-chaired by Ilya Kasavin, the Academy's social epistemologist, and Lada Shipovalova of the European University at St Petersburg, the society's president; Irina Griftsova of Moscow State Pedagogical University chaired the programme committee.
The call frames the modern university as caught between a "management of knowledge" that demands measurable efficiency and immediate application, and the classical mission of producing and freely transmitting knowledge, inseparable from academic freedom. Should the university become an "innovation enterprise" judged by patents and external funding, or remain an autonomous intellectual centre whose first value is critical reflection? Regional press reports put attendance at more than 450 researchers from thirty Russian regions and four other countries, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Germany, across thirteen sections and twelve round tables. The round tables included one on "science and pseudoscientific knowledge in the age of AI technologies", on the use of AI to lend pseudoscience a scholarly surface, and another on universities under surveillance capitalism. Kasavin's plenary on 3 October carried the title "How to be a reasonable relativist".
Two cautions. A session marking fifty years of the Strong Programme, claimed by the aggregators, does not appear in the organisers' programme and is dropped here. And the irony of a congress on academic freedom convened in Russia in 2026 is not one the programme addresses; the opening address came from a deputy chair of the regional government, who told delegates that a real university cannot be reduced to a "competence factory". Readers may weigh that for themselves. The questions on the table, about metrics, patents and what a philosophy department is for, are the ones being asked in Seoul and in Britain.
On Friday 9 October, from 17:20 in room W-315 of Dokkyo University in Soka, Saitama Prefecture, Friederike Kuster of the University of Wuppertal gave a public lecture in German under the title "Eloquent Silence: The Category of Sex in the History of Philosophy", with a Japanese translation distributed and interpretation for the discussion. Philosophers from the Greeks to the twentieth century wrote a great deal about sex and the sexes; academic philosophy, until recently, barely received any of it as philosophy. What does that silence say, and what do we learn by breaking it?
The lecture opened a weekend workshop, "Facetten der Geschichtsphilosophie (I)", conducted in German on 10 and 11 October and organised by Ryo Okazaki of Dokkyo's German department, a reminder of how deep classical German philosophy runs in Japanese universities. Saturday's papers ran from Mai Oki-Suga of Kokushikan on myth, poetry and the polis in Plato, through Soichiro Sumida on Marx and the world history of capitalism, to Shunsuke Kutomi of Doshisha on Kant's history "without an intelligible collective subject", before Kuster returned with Rousseau, Condorcet and Kant as varieties of Enlightenment historical thinking. Sunday brought Bruno Bauer and Marx, Schiller, Hegel and Marx on history as dialectical process, and Taiju Okochi of Kyoto on Islam in Hegel's conception of history. The university's release lists the second day as a Saturday; 11 October 2026 is a Sunday.
The Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, housed in the Palazzo Serra di Cassano on Via Monte di Dio, has published its October calendar, and it is, as usual, free, daily and demanding. A three-day meeting on art, politics and "anthropological crisis" said to have run from 7 to 9 October appears in secondary listings but not on the institute's own calendar, and is not vouched for here. What the institute does list is substantial enough. Eugenio Canone gives three lessons on Giordano Bruno from the Spaccio and the Furori on 13 and 14 October; "Quodlibeta cartesiana", on Descartes and Cartesianism, runs from 14 to 16 October; a four-afternoon seminar on Heidegger's Being and Time from 19 to 22 October. On 21 October Antonio Branca presents Contrazioni, on the aesthetic problem in Kant, Warburg and Lyotard; on 26 October Massimo Cacciari and Roberto Esposito present their joint book Kaos in person. The month closes with "Four Paths to the Monadology", a Leibniz seminar from 27 to 29 October, and a laboratory on Walter Benjamin and the Baroque on 28 October. Readers who met Leibniz beyond the monads on this site will find the Neapolitan reading of him closer to Vico than to Russell.
From 13 to 15 October, in room 6 of the Centre Panthéon of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the colloquium "Penser au bord du monde" sets itself a task that sounds administrative and is not: an "état des lieux", a stocktaking, of francophone environmental philosophy, with its perspectives. Attendance is free with registration for each day; papers are in French. The organising committee spans the field's generations and centres: Andrea Angelini of Paris 8, Paul Guillibert of the CNRS at Paris 1, Émilie Hache of Paris Nanterre, Virginie Maris of the CNRS at Montpellier and Ferhat Taylan of Bordeaux Montaigne.
The call for papers opens with a paradox the organisers refuse to soften. The biophysical state of the Earth deteriorates, the scientific tools for understanding the deterioration improve, and the power structures that appropriate and exploit nature grow stronger. Environmental philosophy, they argue, has fragmented in the gap between those three facts. They trace it to two sources in the 1970s: an Anglophone environmental ethics of ecocentrism, deep ecology and ecofeminism, and a European critique of industrial society and productivist rationality. The programme's seven sessions and three round tables follow the call's four questions: what is specific to environmental philosophy, including "field philosophy" and its dialogue with science fiction and nature writing; how science and politics relate when scientists set normative thresholds such as planetary boundaries; what "nature", "milieu", "biosphere" and "the living" now mean; and whether environmental policy deepens or relieves oppression. The session titles are more vivid than the questions: "Loosening the grip of dualism", "Perceiving, feeling, acting", "Emancipation", and a closing hour headed simply "quelles suites?", what next.
It is the one meeting in this diary still ahead, and the one with the most to prove. A stocktaking can be a eulogy or a programme; three days in the Panthéon will show which.
On 16 September a congress in Freiburg, a three-day conference in Malta, an hour-long seminar in Bristol and a five-day roundtable on Zoom were all in session. None of the four could have been staffed from a single philosophy department, and that is the story.
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