Wittgenstein in Vilnius, Leibniz in Riverside: October's philosophy diary
Seven mid-sized meetings between 2 and 25 October, in Lithuania, Spain, Japan, Illinois, California, Utah and on Zoom. Three of them sit on the border between philosophy and something else. One has become a memorial. An eighth, in Brazil, could not be confirmed at all.
Vilnius University, Great Courtyard · Wikimedia Commons
Between 2 and 25 October, philosophers will be arguing in a lecture room on Universiteto street in Vilnius, in the Edificio FES on the Miguel de Unamuno campus at Salamanca, in the Clark Memorial Student Center at Hokkaido University, on a wooded seminary campus about forty miles north of Chicago, and in the philosophy department at the University of California, Riverside. A sixth meeting exists only on Zoom. A seventh is a single Saturday in Salt Lake City that will be finished before dinner.
None of these is a flagship. They are the second rank of the autumn calendar, too small for a plenary hall and too particular for a general audience, and they are where a good deal of the discipline's argument actually gets made. Philosophers News has already reported the season's larger clusters, in Vienna and in metaphysics, along with the autumn's regional graduate meetings. What follows is the remainder, checked one by one against what the organisers themselves have published rather than against the listings that copy them.
The checking turned up one correction that is not housekeeping. The Salamanca conference on 14 and 15 October is devoted to the work of Susan Haack. Haack died in Miami on 10 March 2026, aged eighty. The meeting was announced while she was alive and the call for papers still reads as an invitation to argue with her; it will now be something else.
Vilnius reopens a quarrel about what ordinary language philosophy was for#
The 14th conference of the Nordic Wittgenstein Society runs on 2 and 3 October at the Faculty of Philosophy, Vilnius University, under the title Inheriting Ordinary Language Philosophy. It is organised by Mindaugas Gilaitis of Vilnius and Martin Gustafsson of Åbo Akademi, and the keynote list is a fair map of where the argument currently sits: Avner Baz (Tufts), Benjamin De Mesel (KU Leuven), Hans-Johann Glock (Zürich), Nicole Rathgeb (Bern), and Gustafsson himself.
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
The word doing the work in that title is inheriting. Ordinary language philosophy is usually narrated as a movement that was defeated — by Grice on implicature, by Kripke on reference, by the general professionalisation of analytic philosophy after 1970. The Vilnius organisers are not disputing the history so much as asking what was actually thrown out with it, and whether the discarded method has been quietly readopted under other names in contemporary work on concepts, on testimony, on the semantics of ordinary talk. Glock and Baz disagree sharply about how much of Austin and the later Wittgenstein survives translation into current idiom, which should make for a livelier two days than the title suggests.
One correction to the record. The event has been described in circulation as free. It is not: registration costs 50 euros for students and 100 euros for everyone else, though the fee includes the conference dinner and the organisers say waivers may be available. Audience registration closes on 25 September. The conference is in person only.
Salamanca will honour a philosopher who did not live to attend#
Science, Language and Reality: Themes from the Philosophy of Susan Haack is organised by Violeta Conde, Benedicto Acosta, Llanos Navarro and Andrei Moldovan at the University of Salamanca, on 14 and 15 October. The invited speakers are Timothy Williamson (Oxford), María José Frápolli (Granada) and María Caamaño (Valladolid). Registration closed on 1 September; selected papers are to be considered for Teorema.
Haack was born in Buckinghamshire in 1945, taught at Warwick, and moved to Miami in 1990, where she also took a chair in law in 2000. Her best-known contribution is foundherentism, the attempt to get between foundationalism and coherentism in the theory of justification, which she explained through the analogy of a crossword puzzle: entries support one another laterally, but the clues do the work of anchoring the whole thing to something outside it. She was also, in Defending Science — Within Reason (2003), one of the few philosophers willing to take fire from both directions at once, against the science-studies constructivists on one flank and the triumphalist scientism she disliked just as much on the other.
Conferences on a living philosopher's work are a distinct and slightly awkward genre — the honorand sits in the front row and the papers are written with one eye on her. This one will not be that. Whether the organisers restructure it as a memorial is not something they have announced; what is on the call for papers is still foundherentism and Haack's "critical, commonsense" realism, discussed as live positions. Daily Nous recorded a former student calling her "unquestionably the best lecturer I've encountered". She gave more than thirty named or endowed lectures over her career, and had held visiting appointments in Brazil, Spain, Denmark and Australia — which is to say that Salamanca is not an arbitrary place for this to be happening.
Two of the seven are about the border, not the interior#
The 5th Philosophy and AI workshop, PhAI5, meets on 16 and 17 October at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, hosted by the Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience with co-hosts at the University of Hong Kong and Peking University. Katsunori Miyahara and Hayate Shimizu convene from Hokkaido, with Sebastian Sunday Grève and Yiwen Zhan from Peking. Jun Otsuka of Zen University gives the keynote; Herman Cappelen and Rachel Sterken are both on the programme, as are Rafal Rzepka of Hokkaido and Davide Zappeli of Fudan. Registration closes on 30 September and the workshop is in person, in English. The editor's list also gave Alexandre Erler as a participant; he does not appear on the published programme, and we have left him out.
The North American Association for Philosophy and Education holds its annual conference from 16 to 18 October at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois. Johannes Drerup (TU Dortmund), Shaun Nichols (Cornell) and Emma Prendergast (Utah Tech) are the keynotes. Papers were due on 1 July and the early registration rate closed on 19 September; there is a pre-conference workshop for graduate and early-career scholars on 17 October, at twenty dollars including lunch. NAAPE accepts submissions in English, Spanish or French, of up to fourteen thousand words, and then instructs presenters to deliver rather than read them — a rule more societies could usefully copy.
Put those two beside the Salamanca meeting and a pattern appears. Three of the seven are not about a region of philosophy but about its frontier with something else: with machine learning, with schooling, with the empirical sciences. That is not new — philosophy of science has been a border discipline since Vienna — but the proportion is worth noticing. The traffic is also two-way in a way it was not twenty years ago. Nichols is an experimental philosopher speaking to educationalists; Otsuka works on the statistical foundations of machine learning. Neither is visiting from a safe distance.
The eighth item, and why it matters that it is the Brazilian one#
Two further meetings are straightforwardly domestic affairs, and none the worse for it. The Leibniz Society of North America holds its twentieth annual conference at UC Riverside from 23 to 25 October, organised by Adam Harmer, with Jeff McDonough of Harvard giving the keynote on atomism in Du Châtelet, Wolff and Leibniz. It runs in hybrid form, with a Zoom link for those who cannot travel, and does not require registration. The editor's list described it as giving particular attention to early modern women philosophers; on the published programme that comes to McDonough's keynote and no more, so the claim has been trimmed. The University of Utah's graduate conference occupies Saturday 24 October in the Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building in Salt Lake City, with Eliya Cohen giving the keynote to her own department's visitors.
The cheapest item on the list is also the most interdisciplinary. Loneliness, now in its eighth edition, runs online on 8 and 9 October under InMind Support, with Wojciech Owczarski of the University of Gdańsk and Marzia Dessi of the European Graduate School leading it. Presenters pay 35 euros and the audience 25. Proposals are due on 18 September — not 16 September, as circulated — and the range runs from war and migration to AI companionship and the representation of solitude in fiction. Philosophers are a minority there, among psychologists, sociologists and film scholars. That is the point of it.
The eighth meeting on our desk was an international colloquium on phenomenology and critique at the Federal University of Santa Maria in Rio Grande do Sul, said to run from 30 September to 2 October with Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Nythamar de Oliveira and Sara Heinämaa. We could not find it. It is not on PhilEvents, not on the university's events calendar, and not on the philosophy graduate programme's own page; Portuguese-language searches turned up nothing either. It may well be happening. We are simply unable to say so, and would rather report the hole than paper over it.
The shape of that failure is instructive. Six of the seven confirmed meetings publish in English on platforms indexed from North America and northern Europe, and the seventh is run out of Gdańsk in English. A diary assembled this way will reliably over-report Vilnius and Riverside and under-report Santa Maria, Bogotá, Yaoundé and Hyderabad, and the under-reporting will look like absence rather than like a limit of the instrument. The list above is genuinely international in the sense that it crosses four time zones and five countries. It is not international in the sense of representing the discipline as it is actually practised, and no compilation built from public English-language announcements ever will be.
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.
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