Education

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.

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

Plato against the vote: the Republic's case for rule by those who know

The founding text of Western political philosophy argues that most people cannot be trusted to govern themselves. The ship of state, the guardians' curriculum, the quarrel with the sophists and the noble lie belong to one argument — and the modern replies to it, from Karl Popper to David Estlund, are less conclusive than they look.

Elizabeth Anderson, Plato

This Day in Philosophy — 9 September: Benhabib, Lacan, and what makes a person

Seyla Benhabib was born on 9 September 1950 and this year takes both the Johan Skytte Prize and the Karl Jaspers Prize. Jacques Lacan died on the date in 1981, John Passmore was born on it in 1914 and Paul Goodman in 1911 — four thinkers on what a person is made into.

Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Jürgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva, Catherine Malabou, Alenka Zupančič, Seyla Benhabib

This Day in Philosophy — 7 September: I. A. Richards and the problem of what a word does

I. A. Richards died on 7 September 1979. With C. K. Ogden he wrote the book that pulled the theory of meaning out of philosophy and into the reading of actual sentences — and then proved, with a famous experiment on his own students, how badly trained readers understand what they read.

Artificial intelligence has entered the classroom: what is philosophy teaching losing?

At the end of August the American Philosophical Association gathered philosophy teachers for a two-day forum called 'The Examined Algorithm'. The question beneath the discussion is not cheating: in philosophy, is writing the record of thought, or is it thought itself?

Philosophy at Dundee is saved — in part, and for now

The Scottish department marked for closure this summer has forced a retreat after a campaign. But the victory is conditional: the programme survives only in reduced form. This is the first time the wave of closures has been turned back, and it shows which argument can defend a philosophy department.