Royal Institute of Philosophy Stapledon Colloquium 2025-26

The Stapledon Colloquium Series features academics from the UK and beyond presenting current philosophical research. The seminars are free and open to members of the public. The seminar takes place on Thursdays, 3-5pm at the School of the Arts Library, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L7 7BD.

We will be presenting a mixture of online and in-person seminars.

Read about Olaf Stapledon here.

For any organisational queries, contact Dr Vid Simoniti

Semester 1

02/10/2025	Simon Kirchin (Leeds) Comic Personae and Comic Licence We often extend comic licence to performers (and everyday joke-tellers) when they tell jokes or offer material that is controversial (dark, difficult, challenging, edgy, offensive).  I am about to start writing a short book called Comedy and Free Speech, where I think about controversial joking, especially by professional comedians, in modern liberal democracies and defend a fairly liberal view of such practices.  In today's talk I won't think about free speech so much or defend my liberal view.  Instead, I focus on the idea of comic licence and link that with a very important part of comedic performance, namely the idea of a comic persona.  We might take the straightforward view that when and where comedic licence is extended, this is only because someone is telling a joke, is performing, is a comedian, is on a stage or a screen, etc.  (The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for everyday joke-tellers.)  I don't think that the straightforward view is obviously wrong.  But I am interested in whether and how the invocation of comic personae gives us a richer understanding of what is happening.  I offer a few reasons to think that it does, as well as a few reasons to think it is unnecessary.
16/10/2025	Jon Williamson (Manchester) Causal inference is not statistical inference I introduce two views about the connection between causal inference and statistical inference: a weak and a strong view. According to the weak view, statistical techniques are useful for causal enquiry. According to the strong view, causal enquiry is a purely statistical problem. I argue that there has been a trend from the weak view, which was advocated by R.A. Fisher and Austin Bradford Hill for example, to the strong view. Indeed, methods for causal enquiry are now usually couched as purely statistical methods: e.g., the analysis of randomised controlled trials and observational studies, meta-analysis, and model-based approaches such as structural equation modelling and graphical causal modelling. I suggest that this trend is pernicious because it has contributed to the replication crisis that is currently plaguing the health and social sciences. That observed associations are not replicated by subsequent studies is a part of normal science. A problem only arises when those associations are taken to establish causal claims: a science whose established causal claims are constantly overturned is indeed in crisis. The strong view leads to this problem because it tends to establish causal claims on the basis of associations of one sort or another. I argue that Evidential Pluralism, an emerging philosophical account of causal enquiry, offers a way out of this crisis, by helping to avoid fallacious inferences from association to causation. According to Evidential Pluralism, causal inference requires a combination of statistical inference and mechanistic inference. Evidential Pluralism is thus allied to the weak view of the relationship between causal inference and statistical inference: statistical inference is important for causal enquiry, but not the whole story.
30/10/2025	Jack Shardlow (Liverpool) Appearances of Activity and Motion(less) Pictures If we offer a brief, naïve characterisation of our experiential encounter with still and moving images, it doesn’t take long for us to find cases which give pause for thought and call out for further explanation. First, think about still and moving images presenting subjects as engaged in some dynamic activity – e.g., dancing, running, jumping. It only takes a moment’s reflection to appreciate that moving and still images may present their subjects as in motion, yet, looking at the two side-by-side, it is equally clear that films typically present that motion unfolding in a way in which paradigmatic still images cannot. How do we best explain both the comparison and the contrast here? Second, think about still and moving images presenting subjects as remaining still; as not engaged in some dynamic activity – e.g., a video recording and a photograph of a man at rest. If we control for the manner in which each work is presented, we may create visually indistinguishable still and moving images of a static subject; but, insofar as we are aware that we have one film and one photograph, the two would plausibly be experienced differently. How do we best explain both the comparison and the contrast in this case? Motivated by such issues, and taking proposals from Danto (2006) and Walton (2008) as a point of departure, in this talk I present an explanatory account of our experiential encounter with imagistic representations of activity – i.e., subjects moving (e.g., dancing, running, jumping) and remaining motionless (e.g., standing, sitting, laying) – in moving images and still images. If time allows, I will also outline arguments for what I take to be a common-sense view of the very distinction between still and moving images: that moving images unfold and thereby present a viewer with a duration in the content of the work, and that still images do not. These issues ought to be of interest to theorists in aesthetics, but also the philosophy of mind, since discussions of appearances of activity – and especially of the static and unchanging – are under-represented in the wider literature.
13/11/2025	Stella Sanford (Manchester Metropolitan) Plant Agency: A Critical View Recent work in the plant sciences is being interpreted with what some believe to be a ‘new paradigm’ for the understanding of plant life. This makes a set of concepts derived from studies of animal life central to the study of plants. These concepts include agency, intelligence, intention and choice. This new ‘agency paradigm’ can be understood as a critical reaction to the dominant ‘reductionist’ tendencies of twentieth-century biology and to the broader cultural presuppositions about plant life related to a longer scientific history: the historically dominant view of plants as somehow ‘lesser’ than animals: ‘lower’, simpler, insensitive life forms. For some, the new paradigm also chimes with aspects of some indigenous knowledge systems, and this is taken to be part of its strength. Although the agency paradigm is highly controversial amongst scientists its claims are often received quite uncritically in the humanities and social sciences and often communicated to lay publics as if was established and uncontested scientific knowledge. To address the agency paradigm in a critical, philosophical way we need to ask: which concepts of agency are being used in the scientific literature professing the agency paradigm, and are these the appropriate ones? Which concepts of agency are being used in the transfer of the scientific claims into other disciplines and in popular science? Which concepts are appropriate if we want to forge connections between Western science and philosophy and indigenous knowledges, and for the former to learn from the latter? In this talk, I will examine some of the claims about plant agency in the scientific literature in relation to discussions of agents and agency in some recent philosophy of biology. I will then compare these with the some of the discussions of plant agency in more popular scientific presentations and the concept of agency that seems to be presumed there. Finally, in the light of this, I will ask whether we can identify which concept of agency is most appropriate for thinking plants philosophically. Drawing on John Dupré’s work on the nature of biological concepts I will argue that there is there is no one ‘correct’ concept of agency for plants in either the sciences or philosophy, and end with a brief suggestion concerning the way forward.
27/11/2025	Bill Wringe (Bilkent) Global Obligations and International Judicial Institutions In previous work I have argued for the existence of Global Collective Obligations - in other words, collective obligations which fall on the world’s population as a whole (Wringe 2005, 2015, 2018 cf Korsgaard 2018.) Obligations of this sort would be uninteresting if they did not give rise, either directly or indirectly, to reasons for individuals to behave in particular ways. Here I argue that as well as giving us a reason to create and uphold institutions that promote various kinds of distributive justice these arguments give us reasons to support international institutions concerned with retributive justice. Unlike institutions focused on distributive justice, institutions that promote retributive justice do not seem to play a direct role in satisfying people's basic needs. However, I argue that in a world of nation states, the institutions which are required to protect human beings’ basic rights will include international judicial institutions and an international judicial framework analogous to international criminal law. This conclusion leaves open the extent to which we should support existing international judicial institutions and the extent to which we ought to work for their reform and/or replacement. I argue that this is a strength rather than a weakness of the approach I advocate: in particular, it helps to address questions about the legitimacy of existing international judicial institutions which have recently been pressed by Thomas Christiano and others (Christiano 2020, 2024).

Semester 2

05/02/2026	Anneli Jefferson (Cardiff)
19/02/2026	Heather Logue (Leeds)
05/03/2026	Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham)
19/03/2026	James Pearson (Amsterdam)
23/04/2026	Adina Preda (Trinity College, Dublin)
07/05/2026	Philip Goff (Durham)

Past events