Academia

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

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.

Miranda Fricker

The proof no one has read: OpenAI, Navier–Stokes and the limits of verification

OpenAI says an internal system proved that a three-dimensional fluid can blow up in finite time, and Lean agrees. The theorem is narrower than the headlines, the credit is contested, and the deeper question is what mathematics loses when a result is certified but unread.

John Searle

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

Miranda Fricker opens Columbia's John Dewey Lectures on 30 September with three afternoons on blame, apology and the pressures people exert on one another. Three further meetings check out: a critical workshop on AI safety in Copenhagen, the ninth Formal Philosophy conference in Moscow, and the nineteenth Gelven graduate conference in DeKalb.

Miranda Fricker

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.

Timothy Williamson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Seventy dollars and one email address: the conferences nobody budgets for

Six meetings between late October and early December that the season's big congresses have crowded out: Portland, Amherst, Syracuse, El Paso, Prishtina and Sydney. They are cheap, they are where most philosophy is actually argued, and several of them are almost impossible to verify.

Cornel West, Robert George and the uses of fruitful disagreement

Twice this autumn Cornel West shares a stage with the conservative Catholic jurist Robert P. George. The double act is charming and much praised. It is also worth interrogating: what does it show about West's philosophy of truth, and what does it quietly assume about who gets to argue well?

Cornel West, Elizabeth Anderson, Alasdair MacIntyre

Hired by the labs, closed by the universities: what philosophy is being paid for

Anthropic and DeepMind employ philosophers to draft the documents that govern their models. Hertfordshire is withdrawing philosophy from its curriculum altogether. The New York Fed's February 2026 table is quoted as vindication, but the columns nobody quotes tell a colder story about who now sets the discipline's agenda.

Luciano Floridi

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

Four meetings in sixteen days at the University of Vienna, including a congress on how the story of the Vienna Circle has been told. Plus the UCLA date muddle settled from the department's own page, three further meetings that survived checking, and five that did not.

Immanuel Wallerstein and the system that makes the parts

He is filed under world-systems theory, which flattens him. Wallerstein's real move was to reject the national economy as the unit of analysis, and with it a century of comparative social science. Six years after his death, the framework is being spoken by people who have never read him.

Immanuel Wallerstein