Academia

Metaphysics returns to the timetable: philosophy's autumn conference season

Between the end of September and the middle of December, philosophers meet in Los Angeles, Columbus, Nijmegen, Evanston, Oxford, Durham and Athens. Read together rather than as a list, the programme says something specific: the question of what there is has stopped belonging to one tradition.

David Chalmers

Azra Erhat and the argument that translation can build a past

Expelled from her university in 1948, the Turkish classicist Azra Erhat did her most consequential work afterwards: a Homer that took root in a language, and a contested claim that the ancient cultures of Anatolia belong to the people living there now.

When a theory emigrates: what became of Alexy in Brazil

Brazil's Supreme Federal Court issued a note of condolence on Alexy's death — an unusual gesture towards a German academic. The interesting part of the story lies elsewhere: Brazilian lawyers have spent years debating something they call 'balancing, Brazilian style', and they do not mean it as praise.

'We are doing philosophy — just not their way': a call for experimental philosophy to stop apologising

Ethan Landes argues that experimental philosophers should stop justifying their surveys by their relevance to analytic debates and declare themselves an independent tradition. The comment thread that followed shows the discipline is not close to agreeing what makes something philosophy.

The 2026 Sanders Prize in Metaphysics goes to a return to logical atomism

The Sanders Prize in Metaphysics, awarded every other year, has gone for 2026 to a joint paper by two young researchers at Berkeley: 'Logical Atomism'. The winning essay puts back on the table a programme Russell and Wittgenstein founded a century ago.

Forty years on reference: Devitt draws up the account in Reference and Beyond

Michael Devitt's collection from Oxford University Press takes stock of one of the longest-running arguments in the philosophy of language: what does a name refer to? The review in NDPR calls it the most consistent defence yet written from within the causal tradition.

The competition that made Rousseau famous is now worth fifty thousand dollars

The Berggruen Institute's essay competition takes its inspiration from the Dijon Academy contest that Rousseau won in 1750. It does not want a peer-reviewed paper; it wants an essay in the tradition of Montaigne and Emerson. One of the 2025 winners was Anil Seth, a name this column has been citing all week.

A proposal from Boston: philosophers should collaborate with the people who disagree with them

Seven researchers from Boston University's Mind and Morality Lab argue that philosophy should import a method from the sciences: adversarial collaboration, in which opponents design the work together. Their diagnosis is blunt — philosophers argue in soldier mindset, and rarely change their minds.

A philosophy department is saved — and philosophy argues about how to defend itself

The philosophy programme at the University of Dundee, marked for closure, has been partly reprieved. In the same weeks a survey measured how much the public actually wants universities to keep philosophy departments. And an old quarrel flared up inside the field: is experimental philosophy really philosophy?