Stapledon Colloquium 2026-27
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 Rachel Handley
Semester 1
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08/10/2026 |
Enzo Rossi (University of Amsterdam) The Hobgoblin of Moralist Minds Many contemporary political philosophers derives normative conclusions about politics from widely and confidently held moral commitments, while remaining reticent on their warrant, metaethical or otherwise. I argue that these two habits cannot be combined. Absent any indication that widely held moral judgments track their subject matter, consistency-based theorising establishes only relations among the judgments themselves. It can reveal the structure of our commitments. It cannot thereby yield knowledge of justice, legitimacy, or politics. A natural reply is that consistency retains practical value even without epistemic force. Drawing on existing empirical results, I argue that it does not: politics neither tracks nor rewards philosophically sophisticated consistency. And the looser coherence it does reward is available without philosophy. The upshot is disjunctive: those unwilling to provide metaethical or moral-epistemological receipts must abandon normative political theory as a scholarly enterprise, or embrace a political realism grounded in epistemic normativity. |
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22/10/2025 |
Mary Walker (La Trobe University) TBD |
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03/12/2025 |
Julia Langkau (University of Geneva) TBD |
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10/12/2025 |
Jean-Marc Narbonne (Université Laval) TBD |
Semester 2
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05/02/2026 |
Corinna Mieth (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) TBD |
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19/02/2026 |
Patrick Cockburn (Swansea University) TBD |
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05/03/2026 |
Cécile Fabre (University of Oxford) TBD |
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19/03/2026 |
Joanna Leidenhag (University of Leeds) TBD |
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23/04/2026 |
Alex Grzankowski (King’s College London) TBD |
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07/05/2026 |
David Enoch (University of Oxford) TBD |