Vienna's October cluster, and a conference diary that admits its gaps

A conference diary is the dullest thing a philosophy paper runs, and often the least reliable. Dates slip. Edition numbers get muddled in transit. A meeting quietly moved in April is still circulating in September, three listing sites deep, because nobody who copied it wrote to the organisers. Assembling this one turned up enough error in the material reaching us that the error has become part of the story.

Two things between now and the end of November deserve more than a line each. One is a cluster. Between 8 and 23 October, four meetings will be held at or beside the University of Vienna: on myth and more-than-human community, on ancient philosophy, on the historiography of the Vienna Circle, and on whether the philosophy of religion can be conducted experimentally. Nothing binds the subjects together. The address binds them, and the address is not incidental.

The other is a small case of listings gone wrong: the Philosophy of Language Association's annual conference, which reached us twice, with different dates and a different ordinal. It is settled below from the host department's own page, partly to show what the checking consists of. Everything covered in our pieces on the autumn metaphysics season, the Barcelona congress on Homo pictor and the Foucault and Sartre meetings is left out here.

Vienna is not a neutral address for a congress on logical empiricism#

The largest of the four is the plainest in title: The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism. Research and Historiography, 19 to 21 October, in the Aula on the university's Campus, Court 1, with the poster session in the Old Chapel across the courtyard. The hosts are the Institute Vienna Circle and the Vienna Circle Society; the programme committee is Esther Heinrich-Ramharter, Martin Kusch, Elisabeth Nemeth, Georg Schiemer and Friedrich Stadler, the last two as co-chairs. There is no registration fee.

Two anniversaries sit behind it, and only one is the sort an announcement usually mentions. The Institute was founded in October 1991 by Stadler and became a department of the university in 2011; this is its thirty-fifth year. The other is ninety years since Moritz Schlick was shot on the main staircase of the university building, at twenty past nine on the morning of 22 June 1936, by a former doctoral student named Johann Nelböck. Nelböck was sentenced to ten years in May 1937 and released on probation on 11 October 1938, seven months after the Anschluss, having argued that in killing a professor he took to be Jewish he had served National Socialism. Schlick was a Protestant, born in Berlin. That last detail is worth keeping in view, because the whole sequence is a compressed account of how the Circle ended: not by refutation but by emigration, murder and dispersal.

The programme is built around three named lectures. Jan von Plato, from Helsinki, gives the 34th Vienna Circle Lecture, on the transfiguration of logic. Juliet Floyd, from Boston, gives the ninth Arthur Pap Lecture, on Susanne K. Langer, necessity and Pap himself — two figures who have spent decades at the margin of the standard account. Alan Richardson, from Vancouver, gives the first Michael Friedman Memorial Lecture, on structural objectivity; Friedman, whose Reconsidering Logical Positivism did as much as any book to turn the Circle from a period exhibit into a live research subject, died in 2025. All three lectures will be streamed.

A congress on historiography invites the obvious complaint: a discipline turning to admire its own footnotes. The complaint has some force. But the call is specific about what it is after — archival material, the research projects on Carnap, Gödel, Neurath and Schlick, work on gender and migration — and those are the areas where the received picture has moved. The version taught for decades had logical empiricism as a phase analytic philosophy passed through and grew out of, dismantled by Quine, by Kuhn, and by the verification principle's failure to verify itself. The archives show something untidier: Neurath's politics, Carnap's tolerance about frameworks, the women written out of the story, and the plain fact that what crossed the Atlantic in the 1930s was a group of people under duress rather than a doctrine in good order.

The other Vienna meetings are smaller and unrelated to the first, which is rather the point. On 8 and 9 October, at the Institute of Philosophy on Universitätsstraße, a workshop asks whether more-than-human community can be thought outside a mythic frame; the organisers are Lukas Geiszler, Georg Harfensteller, Matthäus Leidenfrost and Michael Staudigl, the keynotes Vanessa Lemm and Laurens ten Kate, and the reading list runs from Nancy and Derrida to Latour and Haraway. On 21 to 23 October the Vienna Doctoral School of Theology and Research on Religion hosts Experimenting Philosophy of Religion: Altering Politics, Ecology and Aesthetics in Transition, organised by Christian Faber and Marco Fiorletta: panels on politics, ecology and the arts, plus sessions given over to collective writing and to methods that are, in the organisers' own phrasing, allowed to fail. Overlapping the first of those, on 8 to 10 October, is the fifth Central European Graduate Conference in Ancient Philosophy, with Katerina Ierodiakonou of Geneva and Robert Roreitner of Prague as keynotes. That one carries a caveat: the call comes from its organisers at Vienna and at ELTE Budapest, but the department's public calendar was not yet displaying October when we checked, so the venue rests on the call alone.

Four meetings in sixteen days is not a festival, and nobody in Vienna is claiming a theme. What it shows is a faculty deep enough to carry a phenomenology workshop, a graduate conference in ancient philosophy, a theology school's methodological experiment and a historiographical congress inside a fortnight, in the city whose philosophical reputation rests largely on a group it expelled.

What the UCLA department page actually says#

Two versions of the Philosophy of Language Association's meeting have been in circulation. One gives 26 to 27 September and calls it the fifth annual conference. The other gives 19 to 21 September and a different ordinal. Both name UCLA.

The department's own events page settles it. It lists the Fifth Annual Philosophy of Language Association Conference on 26 and 27 September, in Dodd Hall 321, and says in as many words that the fifth annual conference of the association will take place at the University of California, Los Angeles, on 26–27 September 2026. The keynotes are Robin Jeshion of the University of Southern California on the Saturday and Adam Sennet of UC Davis on the Sunday. The organising committee runs to eight: Samuel Cumming at UCLA, with Guillermo Del Pinal, Eliot Michaelson, Alex Radulescu, Katherine Ritchie, Una Stojnić, Emanuel Viebahn and Julia Zakkou.

The ordinal fits the association's short history: the third conference met at UMass Amherst on 20–21 September 2024, the fourth at Edinburgh on 7–8 July 2025.

Where the 19–21 September version came from we cannot say, and offering a guess as a finding is how these errors propagate in the first place. One possibility, marked as conjecture: the same UCLA page lists SLIME 5 — Studies in Language, Information, Meaning and Expression — in Royce Hall 314 on 18 and 19 September, a second philosophy-of-language meeting at the same department eight days earlier. Two such events in one month at one address is the sort of thing an aggregator merges badly. The listing we were working from erred in the other direction, concluding that no official 2026 announcement existed and dropping the meeting altogether. That was the cautious call, and it was also wrong.

Three more that stood up, and five that did not#

The 13th International Philosophy of Medicine Roundtable runs from 14 to 18 September, entirely on Zoom, hosted by the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh and organised by Jonathan Fuller. A full-day workshop on the philosophy of diagnosis opens it on the 14th, with keynotes from Gurpreet Dhaliwal of UCSF and Lisa Sanders of Yale. More than fifteen sessions follow, on uncertainty, measurement, extrapolation, testimony and the effect of machine systems on clinical reasoning. Attendance is free. On 25 September the same centre holds its Grünbaum Memorial Lecture, given by Stephan Hartmann on the open systems view of quantum theory; Adolf Grünbaum founded it in 1960.

The University of Pennsylvania Metaphysics Workshop meets on 7 and 8 November in the Blank Forum, Room 250 of the PCPSE building, organised by Samuel Elgin. The speakers are Kit Fine, Maegan Fairchild, David Builes, Alexander Skiles, Carla Merino-Rajme, Bar Luzon, Michael Bevan and Elgin himself. It is the first of its kind at Penn, attendance is open, and registration closes on 24 October. Fine's work on essence and ground set much of the agenda the younger speakers are working within. The workshop is supported in part by the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, which is either a generous reading of what metaphysics contributes to civic life or a sign that internal grant codes are more elastic than they look.

Five entries did not survive. The Portuguese Philosophical Society's congress at Évora is real, but it met in September 2023; no 2026 edition exists that we could find. The British Society for the Philosophy of Science did meet at Leeds this year, on 21 to 23 July — outside this window and already past. For Madrid we found nothing on any institutional page, only aggregator listings citing one another. Portland appears to be a misfiling of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, whose 64th meeting is at the Hyatt Centric Chicago Magnificent Mile on 19 to 21 November, and which we have already covered. A World Philosophy Day conference at Pristina on 19–20 November may well be taking place, but no organiser's page confirms it, and UNESCO's designated date is not evidence that a particular conference exists.

One practical note, since it is the commonest source of wasted travel: on several of these meetings the submission deadline and the meeting date are months apart, and some of the pages above were last edited in the spring. Write to the organisers before booking.