Annual Lectures, Symposiums, and Events

In this Annual London Lecture, Professor Quassim Cassam explores novel forms of extremism whose purpose is not to advance a political cause and examines the implications of this for the legal definition of terrorism.

Can there be moral progress? Some optimists would argue that there can, because there already has been, with fewer people living in poverty, and corporal punishment now a rarity. But do optimists confuse material progress with moral progress? Is their story too Eurocentric? If there is less poverty but more inequality or less community, how do we take the overall balance? And if moral standards th...

Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence have generated a lot of public anxiety, especially regarding ethical issues: data bias, privacy, the opacity of automated decisions, the effects of algorithmic bubbles on democratic debate, not to mention the harms caused by deep fakes – the list goes on. In response, the emerging field of AI ethics aspires to address these issues. The expert panel of...

We make art out of life, but life in turn is remade by art. We are by nature tied to art, and this means, finally, that we can’t really speak of our “nature” at all. We are art’s product. Art is not a late accomplishment of our history, a mere cultural add on. We are entangled with art, and the whole phenomenon of the aesthetic, from the very beginning. If there is to be a science of the human (ne...

Where should we draw the line between hate speech and simply saying things other people don’t want to hear? When some social groups can access media much more easily than others, has the idea of free speech as a free contest of ideas had its day? Should governments intervene to restrict the right to express opinions – for example, on climate change, or vaccination, which are obviously untrue? Obvi...

Jo Wolff is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. He was named the new President of The Royal Institute of Philosophy in October 2023, and in May 2024 he gave his inaugural Presidential Address. A political philosopher, he has worked on questions of inequality, disadvantage,social j...

Stephen Hawking's proclamation that philosophy is dead was clearly hyperbole. But when it comes to understanding the fundamental nature of reality, has philosophy really got anything left to contribute? Does the rise of physics demand the end of metaphysics? Debating these questions are Carlo Rovelli (Centre de Physique Théorique of the Aix-Marseille University), Eleanor Knox (King’s College...

Over the past two decades, our view of the ideals for science in society has changed. Discussions of the roles for values in science and changes in the views on the responsibilities in science have shifted the understanding of science from ideally value-free to properly value-laden. This shift, however, seems to remove a key difference between science and politics, as now both science and politics...

Axel Honneth’s 2021 Royal Institute of Philosophy Dublin Lecture seeks briefly to reconstruct the history of conceptual disputes about the meaning of work from the beginning of capitalist industrialisation. Initially, the only kind of activity that counted as work in the proper sense was the industrialised manufacture of goods. Subsequently, this extremely narrow view of work was challenged by a s...

Certain philosophies describe us as prone to forms of attachment that are illusory, and promise to indemnify us against the hazards of life by exposing such illusions. One such hazard is that of transience and temporal life itself, and it is sometimes urged that since the present is the only genuine reality, attachments to the past or the future are forms of illusion we can and should be free of....

The terms 'systemic injustice' and 'structural injustice' are often used interchangeably and are often equated with 'institutional injustice.' But in order to understand these different forms of injustice, we should have a clear idea of what they are and how to distinguish them. Using racism as a paradigm case, Sally Haslanger sketches an account of society as a compl...