Featured News
Laura Gow and Robin McKenna start £1 million AHRC/FNR international project exploring the role of cognitive experience in decision and action
Chris Earley wins prestigious Early Career Fellowship with the Leverhulme Trust
Vid Simoniti’s ‘Art Against the World’ Podcast Series returns for Liverpool Biennial 2025
MA student Sophie Williams is off to Tennessee!
New Reading Group for Researchers Interested in Social Justice, Law, and Political & Moral Philosophy
Introducing the Liverpool-Oxford-St Andrews Kantian (LOSAK) Research Centre
Kantian Justice. 5-year, €2 million ERC Advanced Research Project Underway
Researchers in Focus: Philosophy Team looks at the ethics of entrapment
International News
Yiota Vassilopoulou is an invited FSA Academic Fellow of the Foro di Studi Avanzati Gaetano Massa. She attended the annual Conference in Rome, on the theme of Renaissance, Ancient, Medieval and Modern Patterns, and presented a paper on “The Reality of the Self: Plotinus and Mary Midgley”
Sorin Baiasu has been invited to give a talk to an online workshop on Forms of Civil Subordination in Kant’s Practical Philosophy at the University of Laval, Canada, 16-17 June. The paper will be on ‘Kant, Racism and the Dictates of Reason’. Professor Baiasu has also been invited to give a paper at the University of Cagliari, Italy, on the topic ‘Kant on democracy, citizenship and migration’; the conference will take place on 20-21 October 2025.
Rachael Wiseman will be giving the keynote lecture in Lund at The Somerville Group: Influences, impact and legacy conference, 13-15 June.
Rachael Wiseman and Clare Mac Cumhaill’s Metaphysical Animals is out in Sweden, published in translation by Natur & Kultur as Kvinnorna i Oxford: Fyra vänner
Other news
PhD researcher Neil Williams has been awarded a prestigious AHRC NWCDTP award for his project, ‘The Existential Virtues - Flourishing in the Abyss’.
On 19 May, Vid Simoniti delivered a paper, ‘Thinking without Knowing: a Defence of Aesthetic Cognitivism’ to the Aristotelian Society. This month, Vid also spoke on ‘The Cognitive Value of Inconclusively in Art’ at the Scottish Aesthetics Forum, University of St Andrews.
On 27 May Steve McLeod gave a talk at the University of Glasgow on ‘Entrapment and Culpability’. The talk falls under the project ‘Entrapment, Criminal Justice, and Ethics’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Sorin Baiasu gave an invited online lecture by to the Digitales Kant-Zentrum Nordrhein-Westfahlen, on ‘Kant and “Merit”: Retrieving a Neglected Notion of Verdienst’. A version of this paper is forthcoming in the Belgrade Philosophical Annual with the title: ‘Kant, Equal Opportunities and Merit’. The paper will be part of a special issue organised on the occasion of the tricentennial of Kant’s birth.
PGRs Faisal Chuhan, Megan Rawson and Huitong Zhou were judges in the Think Essay Prize competition, run by The Royal Institute of Philosophy. Students aged 15-18 submitted essays on a range of philosophical topic.
Faisal and Huitong read essays on question ‘Does the existence of evil provide good evidence that God does not exist?’. Faisal writes: ‘Reading the essays was enjoyable. The overall quality was high … I would be interested in volunteering in future’. For Huitong, it was ‘a brilliant experience’. She ‘was pleasantly surprised by how many students are interested in this classic theological-philosophical question, and how deeply they have gone on to reflect on issues of free will, morality, and meaning. … I’d love to volunteer to help again in the next Think Competition’. Megan judged essays on the topic of whether objective values exist. She writes: ‘I thought it was great! I’d definitely volunteer again’.
Robin McKenna gave a talk at the Cambridge HPS, on ‘Doing your own patient activist research’. He also spoke at Stirling for their department seminar on ‘Sophistry on Steroids? The Epistemology, Ethics and Politics of Persuasive AI’.
The PGR conference was held in May, organised by Megan Rawson. The conference took place over two days, and fourteen students gave presentations. Congratulations all!
Upcoming Events
Tuesday 3 June: Chiara Pellegrini will be speaking at the Women In Parenthesis Seminar Series. Her talk is ‘Discussing Relationality Starting From G.E.M. Anscombe’. Contact Rachael Wiseman for a zoom link.
Thursday 19 June, 9am - 4.45pm, GHH: Inaugural Northern England Postgraduate Philosophy Conference organised by PGRs Neil Williams and Daniel Baldwin.
The aim is to create an informal community of postgraduate philosophers across Northern England. Twelve speakers from nine different universities will present their research to an audience of their peers. The conference will be free to attend for guests. A full programme with be posted here. For more information and registration queries email NEPPC@liverpool.ac.uk.
KantianDESERT Reading group meetings will take place on Wednesdays, 3.30-5.00pm: 11 June, 25 June, 9 July; more meetings to be confirmed. The sessions are hybrid. Please contact: Tom Bunyard at t.bunyard@liverpool.ac.uk if you would like to attend
Publications
Tom Whyman’s ‘Fichte and Humanism About Reason’ is out in IJPS