Metaphysics

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.

This Day in Philosophy — 5 September: Comte and Boltzmann, the founder and the casualty of the faith in science

Auguste Comte died on 5 September 1857; Ludwig Boltzmann took his own life on 5 September 1906. One announced that humanity had entered the age of positive science; the other was worn down defending the reality of atoms against physicists who called them a convenient fiction. The same date holds the promise of positivism and its price.

The Rescher Prize goes to Kit Fine: why has metaphysics come back?

The American Philosophical Association has chosen Kit Fine to deliver the 2027 Nicholas Rescher Prize Lecture. The decision points not to one man but to the fortunes of a field: metaphysics, declared meaningless for much of the twentieth century, is back at the centre of analytic philosophy.

Badiou's Nietzsche seminar reaches print as 'Anti-Philosophy 1'

Columbia University Press published the first volume of Alain Badiou's seminars on anti-philosophy in June. For Badiou, Nietzsche is not a philosopher at all but an 'anti-philosopher' — a thinker who attacks philosophy from the outside.

Alain Badiou, Friedrich Nietzsche