Four meetings in one day, and a discipline growing only at its edges

On Wednesday 16 September four philosophy meetings were in session at once, on three continents if a Zoom room counts as a place. In Freiburg it was the middle day of a three-day congress on critical political epistemology. In Malta it was the closing day of Embodied Lives, three days on the body hosted by the University of Malta. At two in the afternoon, in the University of Bristol's School of Education building at 35 Berkeley Square, a Taiwanese professor gave a one-hour seminar on martial arts and the doctrine of non-self. And the thirteenth International Philosophy of Medicine Roundtable, run out of Pittsburgh, free, and conducted entirely on Zoom, was in the middle of a five-day run.

What links them is easy to state and worth stating plainly: not one of the four could have been staffed from a single philosophy department. Freiburg's programme wants media studies and political science; Malta's wants clinicians, anthropologists and theologians; Bristol's wants somebody who reads classical Chinese; Pittsburgh's gave both of its keynote slots to practising physicians. This is where the growth in the subject is, and it has been for a decade. It is also, on any honest accounting, where the risk is.

Political epistemology has outgrown epistemology#

The Freiburg congress ran from 15 to 17 September at Kollegiengebäude I, organised by the Professorship for Epistemology and Theory of Science at University College Freiburg together with the Critical Political Epistemology Network and the Centre for De/Coloniality Now, with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Philosophie among the bodies named on the conference page. Registration had closed on 1 September. The call asked for work approaching political epistemology from an "empirically grounded inter- and transdisciplinary perspective", and set out to bring feminist epistemology, critical theory and decolonial scholarship back into a debate the organisers evidently think has drifted towards the analytic seminar room. Four keynotes: Amandine Catala (UQAM), Nadja El Kassar (Lucerne), Deborah Mühlebach (Freie Universität Berlin) and Just Serrano-Zamora (Barcelona).

The editor's note that reached this desk gave the congress a single date, 16 September, and named two papers. Both papers are real and both were given that day. Serrano-Zamora read Disembodied Embodiment: Expression and Knowledge in Far-Right Extremism; Pierce Robertson-Voth of Warwick read Mediated Ignorance: Propaganda, Institutional Entfremdung, and the Political Ontology of Knowledge. The congress, though, was three days, not one.

Robertson-Voth's title is a fair specimen of the field's grammar. Entfremdung comes from Marx by way of the Frankfurt School. "Mediated" comes from media and communication studies. "Political ontology" comes from a strand of anthropology and political theory that would not describe itself as epistemology at all. The load-bearing concept, epistemic injustice, dates from Miranda Fricker's 2007 book and has since been picked up by medicine, law, education and social work; our earlier piece on the moral structure of knowing traced some of that travel. A paper of this kind is intelligible to four fields and fully at home in none.

The gain is obvious. Propaganda, disinformation and organised ignorance are not going to be understood by an epistemology that studies only lone believers forming beliefs about barns. The cost is less often admitted. When a subfield borrows its key terms faster than it can test them, it acquires a vocabulary that sounds explanatory while doing little work, and the discipline best placed to notice that — analytic epistemology — is the one being told it has missed the point. Freiburg's programme committee seems aware of the danger; that is presumably why the call insisted on empirical grounding rather than more theory.

An hour in Bristol that imports a whole tradition#

The Bristol seminar has a title the editor's draft flagged as garbled. It is not garbled. Tiān-hé (天合): Martistry in the Making as Nonself-cultivation is a coinage doing deliberate work: "martistry" fuses martial art with artistry, and the two characters in the title join the graph for heaven to the graph for union. The speaker was Ruyu Hung, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy of Education at National Chiayi University in Taiwan, and she has the standing to coin terms. Hung edited Cultivation of Self in East Asian Philosophy of Education for Routledge and wrote Education between Speech and Writing: Crossing the Boundaries of Dao and Deconstruction (Routledge, 2018), a book that puts Zhuangzi and Derrida in the same argument without treating either as decoration.

An hour on a Wednesday afternoon is a small thing. What matters is that a British school of education gave the slot to a paper whose central concept, non-self, has no equivalent in the Anglophone philosophy of education that ran from R. S. Peters to the present. The listing, billed jointly by two of the School's seminar series, gave the Berkeley Square address and told ticket-holders that details of how to attend would follow by email; whether a video link was offered it does not say. The draft that reached us called the seminar hybrid. We could not confirm that.

Malta's three days, and the awkward question of what philosophy brings#

Embodied Lives: Interdisciplinary Dialogues on the Body ran from 14 to 16 September at the University of Malta, gathering philosophers with anthropologists, clinicians, theologians and social scientists around illness, disability, movement, vulnerability and identity. Among the speakers was Massimiliano Nisati of the Istituto Universitario IPU in Italy, who spoke on the law at the end of life in Italy — a question on which philosophers are more often cited than consulted.

Here is the awkward question such meetings raise, and the good ones raise it themselves. Put a clinician, a medical anthropologist and a moral theologian in one room and they will produce three descriptions of the same patient and no agreed method for adjudicating between them. Phenomenology is usually nominated for that job. It is not obvious that phenomenology can do it. What philosophy can reliably supply is narrower and still valuable: it can show when an argument has smuggled a normative claim into a clinical description.

The philosophers of medicine handed the microphone to two doctors#

The clearest evidence of the trend came from the meeting nobody had listed. The thirteenth International Philosophy of Medicine Roundtable ran from 14 to 18 September, hosted by Pittsburgh's Department of History and Philosophy of Science with the Center for Philosophy of Science and the Institute for Bioethics, opening with a full-day Workshop on the Philosophy of Diagnosis and going on to more than fifteen sessions on uncertainty, measurement, extrapolation, testimony, artificial intelligence and policy. Attendance was free, which is perhaps why no conference diary bothered with it.

Both keynotes were physicians. Gurpreet Dhaliwal of the UCSF School of Medicine spoke on Why Every Diagnosis Needs a Critic: Argument, Objection, and Clinical Reasoning; Lisa Sanders of Yale spoke under the title of her 2009 book, Every Patient Tells a Story. A subfield of philosophy gave both of its platform slots to people who diagnose patients for a living. Read generously, that is a discipline confident enough to learn in public. Read sceptically, it is a discipline that no longer trusts its own practitioners to say anything a clinician would find useful. Both readings have evidence behind them.

The centre is thinner than it was, but it is not empty#

Set these four against the month's other meetings and a pattern emerges: the conference calendar is thick at the borders and thin in the middle. Our survey of the autumn season in metaphysics found the traditional core subjects holding their meetings, drawing their regulars and generating less news. That is not decline; it is what a mature field looks like. But a discipline whose energy runs entirely to its frontiers loses something it cannot easily rebuild, which is the population of people who can tell a good argument from a fashionable one, and who are trained to do so on problems where fashion has no purchase.

The corrective, if there is one, may be geographical rather than thematic. On 20 September the first Andean Congress for Epistemology and Logic closes its call for papers. CÆLO 1 meets in Lima from 22 to 28 February 2027 under the auspices of Peru's Society for Epistemology and Logic, and its confirmed speakers are as central as it gets: Hannes Leitgeb, Edward Zalta, Otávio Bueno, Itala Maria Loffredo D'Ottaviano, María José Frápolli, Luis Estrada-González, Tomasz Jarmużek and the historian of Chinese mathematics Karine Chemla. Abstracts of 300 to 500 words go to the society in English or Spanish; notifications follow on 15 October. The centre of the subject has not been abandoned. It has moved to places where a first congress is still an event.

Deadlines and dates worth marking#

Three further items, all confirmed on the organisers' own pages. The ninth Chapel Hill Normativity Workshop closes for abstracts on 7 October and meets at the University of North Carolina on 26 and 27 March 2027; accepted papers are eligible for a special issue of Philosophical Studies, which is a better incentive than most conferences can offer. The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain takes submissions until midnight on 11 December for its sixty-second annual conference at New College, Oxford, from 2 to 4 April 2027, with Jonathan Wolff, Alis Oancea and Shannon Vallor as keynotes. And on 12 and 13 November the Institute of Philosophy at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest hosts a conference on non-intentional modes of consciousness — affectivity, imagination, the unconscious, embodiment — with Dan Zahavi, Dermot Moran, Thomas Fuchs, Sara Heinämaa, Natalie Depraz, Thiemo Breyer, Dieter Lohmar and Nicolas de Warren among the speakers, and no registration fee.

The near-term picture is in our October diary.