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OZSW 2026 Annual Conference Programme with Abstracts

To be held May 19-20, 2026 at the Erasmus University Rotterdam
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Programme - Tuesday, May 19

9:30–10:30 | Keynote I

11:00–12:30 | Parallel Sessions 1

Methods 1 – Open Society • #Van_der_Goot_M1-04_Montreal

History 1 – Engaged History of Philosophy • #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore

Aesthetics & Culture 1 – Aesthetics & Ethics • #Van_der_Goot_M1-08_Leuven

Climate & Ecology 1 – Philosophy of Degrowth • #Van_der_Goot_M1-07_Franeker

13:30–15:00 | Parallel Sessions 2

Methods 2 – Philosophy & Language • #Van_der_Goot_M1-04_Montreal

Ethics & Politics 1 – Feeling & Doing • #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore

Climate & Ecology 2 – Transition & Climate Justice • #Van_der_Goot_M1-08_Leuven

Science & Technology 1 – Ethics & Technology • #Van_der_Goot_M1-07_Franeker

15:30–17:00 | Parallel Sessions 3

Feminist, Queer, Decolonial Philosophies 1 – Coloniality & Critique • #Van_der_Goot_M1-04_Montreal

Ethics & Politics 2 – Resistance • #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore

Philosophy of Interdisciplinary Research (curated panel) • #Van_der_Goot_M1-18_Lund

Science & Technology 2 – LLMs • #Van_der_Goot_M1-08_Leuven

Methods 3 – Philosophy and the Crisis of Form (curated panel) • #Van_der_Goot_M1-07_Franeker

20:30–21:30 | Evening Lecture Performance at WORM

Programme - Wednesday, May 20

9:30–10:30 | Keynote II

11:00–12:30 | Parallel Sessions 4

Ethics & Politics 3 – Politics & Economy • #Langeveld_1-08

Aesthetics & Culture 2 – Representation & Imagination • #Van_der_Goot_M2-06_Galway

Feminist, Queer and Decolonial Philosophy 2 – Decoloniality & Critique (curated panel) • #Van_der_Goot_M2-07_Basel

Workshop – Philosophical Classroom of 2026 • #Langeveld_1-02

Methods 4 – Critical Engagement in the Open Society (curated panel) • #Van_der_Goot_M2-08_Harvard

Science & Technology 3 – Science & Society • #Van_der_Goot_M2-09_Melbourne

14:00–15:30 | Parallel Sessions 5

Ethics & Politics 4 – Practical and Historical Engagements • #Langeveld_1-08

Climate & Ecology – Ecology & Affect • #Van_der_Goot_M2-06_Galway

Feminist, Queer, Decolonial Philosophies 3 – Social Epistemology (curated panel) • #Van_der_Goot_M2-07_Basel

Methods 5 – Marxism & Critique • #Van_der_Goot_M2-09_Melbourne

Aesthetics & Culture 3 – Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Creativity in the Age of AI (curated panel) • #Van_der_Goot_M2-08_Harvard

Science & Technology 4 – Ontology & Technology • #Langeveld_1-02

16:00–17:00 | Keynote III

Tuesday, 9:30–10:30 | Keynote I

Keynote I: Rozena Maart - Philosophies born of struggle, philosophies born of massacre

#Tuesday-0930-1030 • Room: #Sanders_0-02 • 🔝
Drawing on the early and foundational work of Leonard Harris, one of two founding members of Philosophy Born of Struggle – an academic and political movement that foregrounds the experience of colonised and oppressed peoples – I situate the early conceptualisation of Philosophies Born of Massacres following the Marikana Massacre in South Africa in 2012, to address structural, systemic and epistemic violence. It is the absence of the knowledge of necro-being, articulated by Harris as “living death” – a condition that both kills and prevents people from being born, along with the philosophical thought of European thought that continues to throttle African presence, that this paper is concerned with. Drawing on Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida’s “White Mythology,” Black existentialist philosopher Lewis Gordon’s disciplinary decadence and recently deceased Congolese philosopher, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe’s
Scent of the Father, this paper mounts a systematic examination of the absence of the knowledge of White Consciousness in contemporary philosophical thought preoccupied with in-vogue textual decoloniality whilst benefitting, maintaining and reproducing the very coloniality they claim to be against.

Biography

Rozena Maart was born in District Six, the former slave quarter of the Cape, in Cape
Town, South Africa. Her family, along with thousands of others, was forcibly removed in 1973 under the Apartheid government’s Group Areas Act and Forced Removal Act.
From the year after the removal, annual hives appeared on her body for sixteen years, marking the anniversary of that displacement. Her family names – Maart, April and
September – carry traces of the Dutch colonial practice of naming enslaved people brought from Bengal, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Eastern Cape according to the month of their enslavement.

In 1987, at the age of 24, Maart was nominated for South Africa’s “Woman of the Year” award for her work on gender-based violence and for co-founding, with four women, Women Against Repression [W.A.R.], the first Black feminist organisation in South
Africa. She published her first book in 1989, aged 27. In 1992, shortly after the birth of her daughter, she won “The Journey Prize: Best Short Fiction in Canada” for “No Rosa, No District Six.” Four months later, she began her PhD in political philosophy and psychoanalysis at the University of Birmingham, which she completed in three years.

Professor Maart has published widely across fiction, non-fiction, journal articles and book chapters, and has collaborated on documentary and art projects. Her short story collection Rosa’s District Six became a bestseller in Canada and was listed on South
Africa’s HOMEBRU list in 2006. Her novel The Writing Circle was shortlisted in 2009 for the Aidoo-Snyder Award. She recently edited Decoloniality and Decolonial Education:
South Africa and the World (2020), and co-edited, with Lewis Gordon and others, Black
Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: The Work of Lewis Gordon (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Maart has received two lifetime achievement awards: from Philosophy Born of Struggle (2016) and the Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Award from the Caribbean
Philosophical Association (2021). She is a Research Ambassador at the University of
Bremen, a Mercator Fellow in Contradiction Studies, and currently holds the South
African Research Chair [SARChI] on the Study of the National Question. Her edited volume Palates of Pleasure was published by Routledge in August 2025. Her book
Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh is forthcoming.

Tuesday, 11:00–12:30 | Parallel Sessions 1

Methods 1 – Open Society

Methods 1 – Open Society

Despoina Chatzakou - The a priori enemies of the Open Society

#Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-04_Montreal • 🔝

In this paper I use Karl Popper's critique of historicism to assess the freedom status and political stakes of Mises's theory of human action. Popper characterises deterministic social theories not by metaphysical claims about causality, but by three methodological features: they treat large-scale outcomes as necessarily fixed by underlying laws, they do not formulate those laws as falsifiable "if–then" hypotheses, and they immunise them against refutation through conventionalist strategies. While Popper deploys these criteria primarily against Marxist historicism and explicitly exempts economics, I argue that Mises's praxeology fulfils them just as well.

By rethinking praxeology as a layered set of basic laws and theories that eventually lead to real-world economics, I demonstrate that its main ideas are considered absolutely true and are protected from being questioned by real-world evidence. Praxeology presents its foundational axioms as necessarily valid for human action and treats apparent counterevidence as misinterpretation rather than as grounds for revision. In this respect, it mirrors the very methodological structure Popper criticises in his historicist doctrines.

I therefore contend that, despite Popper's explicit endorsement of Mises's theorems, praxeology violates the methodological standards Popper establishes, rendering it unscientific and, in a qualified sense, deterministic. Determinism here should not be understood as a thesis about physical necessity, but as a methodological posture that frames social outcomes as law-governed and unavoidable, thereby narrowing the conceptual space for genuine contingency and collective transformation.

The significance of this tension extends beyond an internal debate in mid-twentiethcentury philosophy of science. This tension directly impacts the challenges of contemporary philosophical engagement. If influential strands of liberal social theory rely on frameworks that portray social arrangements as the inevitable products of universal laws of action, philosophy risks legitimising political silence by naturalising existing economic orders. Exposing this contradiction within Popper's programme thus contributes to a critical re-examination of philosophy's own genealogies and their political implications.

Robin Hillenbrink - When the World Outgrows Our Words: How Socially Disruptive Technologies Reshape Moral Conceptual Frameworks

#Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-04_Montreal • 🔝

Technologies impact social and moral practices, but also the conceptual frameworks through which we interpret, express, and critically engage with techno-social and techno-moral changes. This paper analyses how Socially Disruptive Technologies (SDTs) induce conceptual disruptions in moral conceptual frameworks. More specifically, it focuses on the mechanisms through which technologies generate conditions that inherited moral vocabularies struggle to capture.

First, I make a distinction between technology in the role as the driver or enabler of conceptual disruptions, following Woodward’s interventionist account of causation and
Mackie’s INUS model. Technology-driven conceptual disruption occurs when a technology directly alters the empirical conditions presupposed by a concept’s application. This involves systematic dependencies where manipulating a technological capacity predictably modifies the world-state relevant for concept use. An example is the mechanical ventilator, which enabled respiration independently of brain function and challenged the assumption that cardiopulmonary failure and death coincide, forcing moral, medical, and legal concepts of death into explicit contestation.

Technology-enabled conceptual disruption occurs when technologies expand possibility spaces that only become disruptive through uptake within the wider socio-technical constellations of discourse, norms, institutions, etc. Examples include AI companions, which enable new intimacy practices, and invite the expansion of moral-relational concepts such as ‘partner’, ‘care’, or ‘infidelity’ into new technological domains.

Second, I present a theoretical account in which I infer six recurrent mechanisms of
SDT-induced conceptual disruption: (1) novel ontological phenomena, (2) new decision options, (3) novel socially meaningful practices, (4) new or reshaped relationships and social roles, (5) novel epistemic visibility that becomes morally salient, and (6) domain transposition, where concepts migrate into technological domains that outgrow their original conditions of use. These show how philosophical concepts become sites of normative tension under techno-moral change.

Methodologically, the paper combines causal-mechanistic analysis with conceptualdiscourse mapping to build a preliminary taxonomy of disruption mechanisms. It clarifies how SDTs create shifting conditions of epistemic and practical possibility that inherited moral classifications cannot accommodate. This in turn reveals how social and moral concepts come under pressure during socio-technical and techno-moral changes, and why philosophical engagement with conceptual disruption and change is itself a highstakes response to such changes.

Felix Rudi - The social aspect of utterance formulation

#Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-04_Montreal • 🔝

My presentation would be on the social aspects of utterance formulations, and more specifically on what is called their presuppositional elements. Increasing focus is currently being paid, within pragmatics, to the various ways in which people can 'smuggle in' information in their utterances, so to speak, in a way that escapes an audience's awareness. This phenomenon in itself is of course nothing new, but attempts at integrating it into formal models of communication is. A good example here would be
David Beaver and Jason Stanley's recent book The Politics of Language (2023).

What I would like to do in my paper and talk is to explain the development of this trend. I would start with an elaboration on the notion of presupposition (and related concepts such as implicature and accommodation), and then explain why the traditional modeling of this has been deemed unsatisfactory to account for its social elements. I would then provide examples of strategic usage of presuppositions within the political sphere. In this last respect the connection to the overall conference topic becomes evident: here I will make explicit why philosophy of language is useful for understanding aspects of the current political climate.

Current reference list

History 1 – Engaged History of Philosophy

This sesion contains a "Lightning Talk" and a Panel Discussion.

Kasper Essers - Reclaiming Utopia for Who? Questions Regarding a Proletarian Programme

#Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore #lightningTalk • 🔝

The analysis of capitalism proposed by Karl Marx in Capital Vol.1, lacks a clear epistemological underpinning, whilst being filled to the brim with epistemological questions and concerns. Moreover, Marx’ engagement with the field of political economy and its imperative call for an abolishment of the present state of things, can only be achieved by means of a thorough understanding of the processes involved in the capitalist mode of production. Hence presupposing a peculiar method by means of which one can grasp and more pressingly, build a framework for understanding the capitalist mode of production. In intend to elucidate the missing link by situating Marx within the larger debate of German Idealism, specifically its occupation with logic. Marx intends to rearticulate the concerns of this intellectual strand, in short, the relation between thought and being. By broadening and problematising, the usual, oversimplified, equation of Marx’ analysis with that of his predecessor Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, I show the Marxian dialectic to provide a more intricate account of the, classical, understanding of the concordance of thought and reality. Marx theoretical innovation lies in showing the reflexive intertwinement of material and logical processes present within the dialectic. This reconsidered dialectic is, I argue, more apt to appropriately articulate the role of the proletariat in Marx’ economical analysis. A term which, following the work of Etienne Balibar, remains both integral and absent to Marx’ theory in general. This absent proletarian presence shows not only the overlap between theory and practice within Marx’ own, but the centrality of workers inquiry as a pertinent mode of examination and expression.

Panel on Engaged History of Philosophy

The panel will look at different aspects of the question of engagement when it comes to the history of philosophy from different moments in time.

Ada Bronowski - The ancients on the interesting absence of progress in philosophy

#Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore • 🔝
Ada Bronowski’s paper entitled ‘The ancients on the interesting absence of progress in philosophy’ considers the question of the use and benefits of philosophy to society from a satirical point in Antiquity.

Wiep van Bunge - Stephen Fry's Pipe Problem

#Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore • 🔝
Wiep van Bunge, in his paper entitled, ‘Stephen Fry’s Pipe Problem’ considers the modern historiography of the history of philosophy

Han van Ruler - Concepts, history and emancipation

#Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore
Han van Ruler, in his paper entitled ‘Concepts, History and Emancipation’ shines a light on the role of the history of philosophy in the conceptualisaiton of philosophy as a disicipline.

Aesthetics & Culture 1 – Aesthetics & Ethics

Derman Tacyilidiz - Where the Wall Hesitates

🔝 • #Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-08_Leuven #lightningTalk

Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project (1999) that "history decays into images, not into stories." And now, I would like to tell a story instead of submitting an industry standard paper abstract.

From November 1 to December 19, 2025, I followed the construction of Hadassah
Emmerich's mural on the EUR campus almost daily, photographing the process. My primary focus was not the finished artwork itself, but its becoming – its incompleteness – and the relationship between the artwork and the university as an institution. In this context, the questions guiding my inquiry can be grouped under three headings: (i) why the university needed such a work, (ii) to what extent the artist was able to work freely, and (iii) how this artwork is perceived/engaged within an environment dedicated to cultivating future generations of potential Nobel Prize candidates. The conceptual tools I used were drawn mainly from Foucault, Benjamin, and Lefebvre. Rather than searching for resistance in the artwork itself, which was commissioned by the university board, I turned my attention to the process of its production. To think through the mural's affects on the building and the campus – what Foucault might describe as forms of microresistance – I relied on Lefebvre's notion of "lived space". On the final day of the mural's completion, I coincidentally met Emmerich and told her about the project and my reflections. That night, I sent her my essay I had written, along with the photographs.
She later told me that her favourite image was one depicting the improvised coffee corner they had set up in a classroom temporarily used as their workspace. At the end of December, I sent the essay to the university to draw further attention to the artwork.
The absence of any response, however, only reinforced for me the continuing relevance of Foucault's writings on universities more than fifty years later. In short, I want to articulate the relationship between an artwork that has been situated within an institutional framework (the one, you will encounter during the conference) and its creator and audience, through the theoretical traces leftby Foucault's power/knowledge and Benjamin's take on history.

Lisa van Sorge - The Limits and Possibilities of Shared Experience in and Through Painting

#Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-08_Leuven • 🔝

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology describes perception as an expressive process.
Following his approach, art presents one way in which we can give form to how we, as embodied and situated subjects, are always already in the midst of things. MerleauPonty situates painting at the heart of his phenomenology, conceptualizing it as that which gives expression to how the world is in the process of appearing. In accordance with this, I outline how art has the capacity to give provisional form to the processes that configure sense. By turning to the work of contemporary artists like Ellen Gallagher and
Beatriz González I show how art, and painting specifically, stages an encounter with the possibilities for, and limits of, shared experience.

In this paper, I discuss how Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality challenges the rigid distinctions between self, world, and others. He puts forward an intersubjective mode of being that is grounded on reversibility and flesh, which establishes a radically different understanding of what constitutes artistic expression and our experience thereof. By describing how the artistic gesture does not come from a determinable individual, I show how art has the potential to open up a space for feeling-with others. At the same time, however, I foreground the limits of empathy as instigated in and through a work of art. By comparing the artistic gesture to Merleau-Ponty’s figure of the hands as touching and touched in The Visible and the Invisible, and by tracing his analysis back to Husserl’s Ideas II, I describe the limits of the process of reversibility. Although paintings are attempts to make an experience visible, they equally refuse complete exchange or understanding. Due to art’s capacity to remain opaque while putting forward something particular, artistic expression foregrounds the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the processes that shape meaningful perception. Phenomenology can underline the vital role of the artistic gesture in times of immense political, social, and environmental challenges. As a back-and-forth that remains unstable yet urges us to look again, art calls for a responsivity to the gesture of the other while underlining the need to take responsibility for one’s limited perspective.

Alexandru Stanescu-Bellu - The Ethos of Fantasy in Pierre Klossowski

#Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-08_Leuven • 🔝
In the following we argue that a proper notion of 'fantasy' was articulated in the philosophical and literary works of Pierre Klossowski, in contrast and parallel to Jacques
Lacan's concept of the "psychoanalytic cure". Lacan identifies the problem of Western neuroticism in a split between the neurotic's illusions and the world as Other, and offers psychoanalysis as the process of establishing 'commerce' between these two registers through the notion of the unconscious. We will argue that Klossowski identifies a similar problem in the unavailability of means to communicate our drives under industrial society, but offers an alternative solution in art, to which philosophy will become subservient. We demonstrate that this unique relation between art and philosophy unfolds around the contested concept of "fantasy" (or "phantasm"), where artistic expression, and neither therapy nor theory, grants the happiness of our affective life.
While Lacan posits the fantasy as an illusion to overcome through Analysis, in Klossowski the fantasy designates a multitude of bodily incommunicable drives, impulses, sensual pleasures that assert themselves as communicable signs, called "simulacra", either as art (books, paintings, stagings, statues), or as tradable goods (commodities). In a sweeping overhaul of what is art (apparently, books are art too), Klossowski's ethos lies in allowing for a different kind of commerce between affective life and its (re)production. Jean Francois Lyotard will say, therefore, that the singularity of Klossowski's work lies in the fact that here "Eros can live happily together with Logis"
(1974). The understudied differences between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Klossowski's libidinal economy will be shown by contrasting Klossowski's essays The
Women of Rome (1956) and Living Currency (1970) with Lacan's Seminar XIV, "The Logic of Fantasy" (1966). The emergence of a unique conceptual triad between (philosophical) theory, art and desire rests between these texts on the contested notion of 'fantasy' and can provide an alternative answer to the (non)usefulness of philosophy today.

Mandi Astola - Art as a Branch of Ethics of Technology

#Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-08_Leuven • 🔝

Philosophical engagement with art in the ethics of technology has tended to frame artistic contributions in instrumental terms: as primarily providing "intuition pumps,"
sparking public deliberation, or illustrating ethical dilemmas for pedagogical purposes.
Even work in ethics that highlights how art should not be instrumentalized has tended to assume that artists' contributions differ in kind from those of ethicists (Roeser and
Steinert 2019). We argue that these framings are insufficient. We propose that artistic practice and experience constitute modes of engaged ethical inquiry that expand philosophy's capacity to address technological transformations.

We distinguish two complementary modes of engaged ethical inquiry. First, artistic practice as ethics: creative processes that constitute forms of ethical reasoning.
Drawing on practitioners including Adrian Piper (1996), Eric Rietveld (2022), and Abbas Zahedi (2023), two of which (Piper and Rietveld) are "philosopher-artists", i.e., practitioners with equal level of achievement, engagement, and production in both fields, we analyse how material engagement, embodied practice, and skilled responsiveness to the affordances of objects and environments can reveal ethical tensions that philosophical reflection alone cannot access. Second, aesthetic experience as ethics: engaging artworks as sites for ethical understanding. Here we consider how philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum (1990, 2001), Albrecht Wellmer (1984), and Sophie Grace Chappell (2022) treat literary and artistic encounters not as prompts for applying antecedent principles but as transformative experiences through which ethical insight is constituted.

Methodologically, justifying these modes of ethical inquiry requires addressing key issues in moral epistemology. We argue that coherentist frameworks can accommodate artistic experience as contributing to the mutual adjustment of principles and considered judgments. We also draw on moral empiricism – understood as an approach that characterizes certain encounters as providing a non-inferential grasp of ethical salience.
Finally, we attend to art's materiality: the embodied know-how involved in artistic production that discloses ethical dimensions of technology that are experientially more encompassing than deductive reasoning based on philosophical propositions.

We conclude by proposing a conception of ethical inquiry as integrating embodied, material, and discursive modes, also drawing on arts, and by using the ethics of socially disruptive technologies as an illustration.

Climate & Ecology 1 – Philosophy of Degrowth

Catarina Moiteiro das Neves - Degrowth and global justice

#Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-07_Franeker • 🔝

Degrowth proponents argue for downsizing production and consumption to reduce ecological footprints, which should be planned democratically and done in an equitable way, while securing wellbeing (Kallis et al. 2018, 40). Two important qualifications unite degrowth visions. First, because the degrowth approach to sustainability focuses on reducing material throughput, it favours a selective downscaling: shrinking sectors which cannot be made more sustainable, while sectors with low emissions and resource use can maintain or even increase their production , e.g., care services or local sustainable food production (Schmelzer et al. 2022; Jackson, 2024). Second, degrowth requires downsizing production and consumption in the wealthiest countries (Hickel, 2021). Thus, it favours a self-contained degrowth.

I will argue that a self-contained degrowth is not desirable. In a globally integrated economy, low- and middle-income countries will be harmed by degrowth, particularly in their capacity to pursue poverty-eradication plans. However, instead of arguing that this outcome renders the degrowth project morally impermissible (Callies and Moellendorf 2021), I will claim that it raises concerns of global justice that can be addressed. I will argue that affluent countries have an obligation to remediate harms of degrowth because they are morally responsible for them: first, they have coercively imposed a global economic order that made other countries vulnerable to the impacts of a selfcontained degrowth – I call this the made-dependent argument; second, they have contributed to form legitimate expectations of a development path sustained by global growth – the legitimate expectations argument. This remedial obligation can be discharged through different proposals, which I clustered into four goals: altering the rules of global engagement; preserving and adapting existing industries; developing a new ecosystem; and compensation.

Caleb Althrope - Degrowth and democratic legitimacy

#Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-07_Franeker • 🔝

A core commitment to many degrowth proposals is that the transition to a post-growth economy will be a democratic one. But the actual status of this claim is not clear: both in terms of whether this is a descriptive or normative claim, and because the underlying principle of democracy being used is unclear. This ambiguity is unhelpful given there are good reasons to have some doubts about the compatibility between democracy and degrowth given the significant material and cultural sacrifices that the proposal requires, at least in the short to medium term. This paper examines this relationship and argues that degrowth can be an instance of democratic legitimacy. It does this by using the notion of ecological reasonableness: once the basic interests of future citizens are considered, then the uncertainty over disconnecting growth from environmental harms is what can justify degrowth proposals as an instance of democratic sanctioning.

Gideon Frey - Post-growth and well-being

#Tuesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-07_Franeker • 🔝

Most post-growth views rely on growth's harm, such as climate change. I argue that we can defend post-growth even without such views. I propose a public satiation claim:
People have claims on public institutions to improve their well-being, but such claims must be fulfillable. Thus, to be admissible for public policy, a conception of well-being must be satiable, such that no further improvement is possible. Once everyone reaches such a point, a state has no further reason to promote further growth. I further address the epistemic problem of where to locate such a threshold.

Tuesday, 13:30–15:00 | Parallel Sessions 2

Methods 2 – Philosophy & Language

Auke Montessori - On the Need for Appreciation

#Tuesday-1330-1500 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-04_Montreal • 🔝

I argue that successfully using reasons requires appreciating their relevance. This holds both for using reasons to reach rational decisions and using reasons to form rational beliefs. While this idea is common, the requirement has never been fully defended in detail. This paper aims to do so. In particular, I will introduce common core cases that cannot be accounted for without invoking appreciation. It will be shown that potential alternative notions to appreciation, like knowledge, having reasons, grasping propositions, or Boghossian-style Taking, do not work. I will also tackle various objections to appreciation, for example that it is too demanding or that there seem to be counterexamples in which reasons are successfully used without appreciation. Since requiring appreciation is needed to account for certain core cases, alternatives are lacking and objections to it fail, appreciation indeed is required for successfully using reasons to obtain rational beliefs and make rational decisions.

Victor Gijsbers - A New View on the Gettier Problem

#Tuesday-1330-1500 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-04_Montreal • 🔝

Gettier cases tend to be recherché scenarios involving fake barns, identical twins, and sheep that lie hidden behind cardboard cut-outs of sheep. Such cases involve what has become known as epistemic luck: circumstances conspire to turn a belief that could easily have been false into one that happens to be true. For this reason, the standard analysis of the Gettier problem is that it shows that luck is incompatible with knowledge, and that an anti-luck epistemology is needed to solve it.

We argue for a very different view of the Gettier problem. First, we consider dispositional beliefs and show that any situation of knowledge acquisition is a situation in which oodles of beliefs are acquired. When acquiring the belief that there is a sheep in the field, one also acquires the belief that there is a mammal in the field; that there is a sheep in the vicinity; that there is a sheep in the field or John McDowell is in
Barcelona; and so on. We then give a new recipe for constructing Gettier cases. This recipe does not work by constructing a strange, lucky situation in which a particular belief happens to be true, but rather by taking the already existing situation and identifying Gettiered beliefs among the oodles of belief that the subject acquires. Such
Gettier cases, which are ubiquitous rather than rare, do not involve epistemic luck and cannot be solved with anti-luck epistemology.

If time permits, we will then present the lesson we think such cases teach us, which is that the Gettier problem lives in the space between concrete situations of knowledge acquisition on the one hand, and the propositional representations of beliefs on the other. Instead of trying to solve the Gettier problem, we should understand that propositional representation of beliefs function as a scientific model – it is an immensely useful abstraction from the complex real situation, but things go wrong if you mistake the model for reality.

Ethics & Politics 1 – Feeling & Doing

James Hutton - When Emotions Clash: Affective Conflict, Ethical Disagreement, and Moral Empiricism

#Tuesday-1330-1500 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore • 🔝

According to Moral Empiricism, people can obtain noninferential ethical knowledge through emotional experiences. But a serious challenge remains unanswered: how can one person gain ethical knowledge via her emotions, when others have divergent emotional responses?

This talk develops the first systematic Moral Empiricist response, with implications for debates about ethical disagreement and for ethical decision-making in times of affective polarisation.

First, I identify two classes of emotional difference that pose no epistemological problems (paralleling but revising work on when an ethical disagreement is “fundamental”). Agents often have different but normatively compatible emotions, e.g.
emotions that target different parts of a complex whole, or attribute different but compatible ethical qualities to the same target. In such cases, both parties can obtain emotion-based ethical knowledge.

Even when agents’ emotions conflict, many such conflicts are “nonfundamental”: they stem from differences in the nonethical information the agents possess or attend to. If the agents exchange nonethical information, this will often dissolve the conflict, or else give one agent substantive reason to regard the other’s emotion as less trustworthy. In neither case is emotion-based ethical knowledge threatened.

The real challenge comes from “fundamental emotional conflicts” (incompatible emotional responses, same nonethical information). I develop two complementary replies.

The Modest Reply argues that, with these analytical tools in hand, it’s far from clear that fundamental emotional conflicts are pervasive. Anthropological evidence reveals deep emotional differences between societies; but many such differences are not really “conflicts” or not plausibly “fundamental.” Within philosophical ethics, fundamental disagreements in ethical belief are pervasive; but theories like egoism or actutilitarianism often conflict with their proponents’ own emotional responses, so these disagreements don’t exhibit fundamental emotional conflicts.

The Ambitious Reply draws on externalist epistemology to argue that emotion-based ethical knowledge is sometimes possible even in the face of a fundamental emotional conflict. When two agents’ emotional sensitivities differ, this creates an asymmetry in reliability, with the result that one obtains a piece of emotion-based ethical knowledge that is not available to the other – they are not epistemic peers. This warrants a kind of “steadfastness” that diffuses the epistemological threat posed by emotional conflicts.

References

Moral Emotions and Intuitions. Roeser, Sabine. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Milona, Michael. ‘Intellect versus Affect: Finding Leverage in an Old Debate’.
Philosophical Studies 174, no. 9 (2017): 2251–76.

Hutton, James. ‘Moral Experience: Perception or Emotion?’ Ethics 132, no. 3 (2022):
570–97.

Brandt, Richard. ‘Ethical Relativism’. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3, ed. Paul
Edwards. Macmillan, 1967.

Shafer-Landau, Russ. ‘Ethical Disagreement, Ethical Objectivism and Moral
Indeterminacy’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54, no. 2 (1994): 331–44.

Haidt, Jonathan, and Craig Joseph. ‘Intuitive Ethics: How Innately Prepared Intuitions
Generate Culturally Variable Virtues’. Daedalus 133, no. 4 (2004): 55–66.

Wong, Ying, and Jeanne Tsai. ‘Cultural Models of Shame and Guilt’. The SelfConscious Emotions: Theory and Research. Guilford Press, 2007.

Knowing Right from Wrong. Setiya, Kieran. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Srinivasan, Amia, and John Hawthorne. ‘Disagreement Without Transparency: Some
Bleak Thoughts’. The Epistemology of Disagreement. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Joel Anderson - Doing Being Disrupted: Social Justice and the Practices of Transformation

#Tuesday-1330-1500 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore • 🔝

While philosophical discourse has developed sophisticated frameworks for analyzing harm, risk, and distributive justice in contexts of social transformation, it has been less attentive to loss as a distinct experiential and practical category – one that demands not only practices of acknowledgment and mourning but also interpretive resources through which affected communities can articulate what is at stake. This paper examines how philosophical engagement with loss can contribute to understanding contemporary responses to transformative change.

Drawing on Andreas Reckwitz's sociology of loss in late modernity, I develop the concept of "doing disruption" to analyze how societies actively construct the meaning of transformative change through culturally available practices. Some practices are constructive, enabling communities to acknowledge what has been taken away while remaining oriented toward the future. Others are destructive, channeling unprocessed grief into populist mobilization and "retrotopian" fantasies. Understanding these practices may help explain patterns of resistance to beneficial change that puzzle policymakers and technology ethicists.

Methodologically, the paper combines philosophical analysis with phenomenology, recognition theory, epistemic injustice frameworks, and empirical sociology of populism.
This interdisciplinary approach reflects the insight that those who bear losses often have epistemic advantages for understanding a transformation's human dimensions – and that philosophy's task includes developing vocabulary that enables what I call "robust and responsive hermeneutic agency". Philosophy can contribute by facilitating attention to how affected communities make sense of their situated experiences.

The paper articulates seven principles for ethical governance of societal transformations – from technological change to climate transitions: acknowledgment of genuine losses;
interpretive resources for hermeneutic agency; institutional affordances for mourning;
recognition justice and inclusion; concern for disparate impact of loss; empowerment of participatory self-governance; and resistance to exploitation of grief.

These principles aim to contribute to frameworks that can navigate necessary transformations without either suppressing loss in the name of progress or allowing grief to be exploited for regressive politics. Centrally, this requires developing interpretive resources through which affected communities can name their losses, claim recognition, and participate in shaping what transformations mean.

Keywords: loss, societal transformation, engaged philosophy, recognition theory, hermeneutic agency, epistemic injustice, populism, democratic legitimacy

Benedict Lane and Charlie Blunden - The Futility of Moral Scepticism and the Cultural Evolution of Moral Certainties

#Tuesday-1330-1500 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore • 🔝

In Wittgensteinian epistemology, certainties are basic commitments which make possible practices of belief, doubt, and deliberation (Wittgenstein 1969, §341–§343).
Moral certainties (Hermann 2015), such as the wrongness of killing innocents (Pleasants 2015), are conceived of as conditions, rather than outputs, of moral deliberation: we cannot meaningfully doubt them while engaging in the practices of moral reasoning they make possible.

Yet this tradition has largely failed to explain why particular moral commitments function as certainties for creatures like us. A key Wittgensteinian ambition remains unfulfilled: to explain certainties’ functional role in our forms of life without reducing first-personal experience to mere instrumentalism, providing a picture in which "neither [the]
usefulness nor [the] dignity" of these commitments are left "out of account"
(Wittgenstein 1967, V, §3).

We argue that cultural evolutionary theory (Richerson and Boyd 2005; Henrich 2016)
provides two key resources for fulfilling this ambition. First, conformity bias, whereby we preferentially imitate the most common cultural variants in our environment, can help explain why we possess moral certainties at all. Conformist acquisition of social norms can explain human cooperativeness (Heath 2008), where purely instrumentalist accounts fail. We argue that conformist bias is thus functional and can explain moral certainties: conformist learning ensures members acquire the shared background commitments necessary for collective practices, securing the deep agreement that certainties require (Lane 2025).

Second, mechanisms of cultural group selection (Richerson et al. 2016), including differential migration and prestige-based transmission (Henrich 2016), explain why particular moral certainties proliferate and persist. Communities lacking particular certainties in particular contexts can face multiple selection pressures (internal cooperation problems, vulnerability to cohesive competitors, member migration to more secure communities, and norm-copying from perceived successful groups) selecting for certainties that promote cooperation.

Our account offers a ‘stereoscopic’ response to moral scepticism, combining
Wittgensteinian moral epistemology’s first-personal perspective with cultural evolutionary theory’s third-personal ethnographic perspective (Queloz 2024). This reframing transforms questions about how to answer individual moral scepticism into questions about normative systems’ pragmatic sustainability under cultural selection, explaining why thoroughgoing moral scepticism is socially unsustainable because it would undermine the social cooperation that sustains human forms of life.

Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint. Heath, Joseph. 2008.
Oxford University Press.

The Secret of Our Success. Henrich, Joseph. 2016. Princeton University Press.

On Moral Certainty, Justification and Practice: A Wittgensteinian Perspective. Hermann, Julia. 2015. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137447180.

Lane, Benedict. 2025. ‘Socially Disruptive Technologies, Moral Progress, and Rule
Following.’ Philosophy & Technology 38: 64. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-025-00897Pleasants, Nigel. 2015. ‘If Killing Isn’t Wrong, Then Nothing Is: A Naturalistic Defence of
Basic Moral Certainty’. Ethical Perspectives 22 (1): 197–215.

Queloz, Matthieu. 2024. ‘Internalism from the Ethnographic Stance: From SelfIndulgence to Self-Expression and Corroborative Sense-Making’. The Philosophical
Quarterly, May 20, pqae051.

Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. 2005. University of Chicago Press.

Richerson, Peter, et al. 2016. ‘Cultural Group Selection Plays an Essential Role in
Explaining Human Cooperation’. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39: e30.

Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1967. MIT Press.

On Certainty. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. Harper & Row.

Climate & Ecology 2 – Transition & Climate Justice

Alyssa Delarosa - Relational Value with Biodiversity Offsetting

#Tuesday-1330-1500 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-08_Leuven #lightningTalk • 🔝

Biodiversity loss is occurring at a rapid pace and is described as the sixth mass extinction event driven by human activities (Wollmuth et al., 2022; Lewis & Maslin, 2015). In order to prevent future loss of biodiversity, common mitigation efforts within the EU are conserving biodiversity and biodiversity offsetting. Biodiversity offsetting is controversial amongst environmental ethicists and is usually considered a "last resort"
within the EU context (Karlsson, 2021). When looking at the three main values with biodiversity (instrumental, intrinsic, and relational), it seems clear that relational values with biodiversity can be disrupted with biodiversity offsetting. For example, Indigenous people can have a mutual relationship where nature is viewed equally. When biodiversity is offset, this does not account for the particular and contextual relationship that Indigenous people have with that nature (Armstrong, 2025; Armstrong, 2024;
Whyte, 2018). While relational value with biodiversity is discussed primarily within the
Indigenous context, I propose that relational value with biodiversity offsetting should be further examined with more populations, including non-Indigenous people. This is important for navigating the complex tradeoffs and decisions that different stakeholders make when deciding to offset, including the procedure of how local people participate in that decision.

Armstrong, C. (2024). The biodiversity crisis and global justice: a research agenda.
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 1-20.

Armstrong, C. (2025). When Biodiversity Offsetting Licenses Injustice. Ethics, Policy & Environment, 1-11.

Karlsson, M., & Edvardsson Björnberg, K. (2021). Ethics and biodiversity offsetting.
Conservation Biology, 35(2), 578-586.

Lewis, S. L., & Maslin, M. A. (2015). A transparent framework for defining the
Anthropocene Epoch. The Anthropocene Review, 2(2), 128-146.

Whyte, K. (2018). Settler colonialism, ecology, and environmental injustice.
Environment and society, 9(1), 125-144.

Wollmuth, E. M. et al. (2022). Is Earth currently undergoing a sixth mass extinction?.
CourseSource, 9.

Constanze Binder - Sustainable Transitions in Democracies

#Tuesday-1330-1500 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-08_Leuven • 🔝

Abstract (329 words): Global natural resources are depleting rapidly, and a transition away from current resource-intensive socio-economic systems and individual lifestyles is extremely urgent. Whether the required transition is possible within liberal democracies is the subject of debate on green liberalism (Brinn 2022; Di Paola et al., 2018; Goodin, 2013; Wissenburg, 1998). Arguments in this debate highlight an alleged conflict between liberal values and measures needed for a sustainable transition.

The objective of this article is to gain a better understanding of this alleged conflict in order to explore the potential and possible limitations of green liberalism. In a first step, we explore the roots of different strands of liberalism in political philosophy and argue that their core commitments allow much of the alleged tension to be resolved.

In a second step, we focus on one of the discussed conflicts between environmental mandates and (non-)interference with resource-intensive private lifestyles, arguing that it is not necessarily at odds with liberal values. The reason is twofold. First, it depends on a conception of negative freedom that disregards potential decreases in freedom due to a lack of resources. If conceptions of freedom are adapted to account for resource constraints, interference can be justified in the name of freedom. Second, some strands of liberal theory treat individual preferences as given and independent of existing socioeconomic institutions. Once one moves beyond fixed preferences to people's more fundamental values, environmental mandates do not necessarily interfere with conceptions of the good life per se, but rather with specific preferences for realising these within our current socio-economic systems.

In a third step, we discuss how this insight opens new avenues to accelerate and steer sustainable transitions in liberal democracies while safeguarding core commitments to fundamental freedoms and human rights and potentially increasing human well-being (Robeyns, 2017). We examine two such avenues, climate litigation and the participatory expansion of welfare measures in policymaking. We conclude by discussing limitations related to accounting for the rights and well-being of non-human animals and nature.

Brinn, G. (2022), "The path down to green liberalism", Environmental Politics 31(4):
643-662.

Di Paola, M. and D. Jamieson (2018), "Climate Change and the Challenges to
Democracy.", University of Miami Law Review 72: 369–424.

Goodin, R.E., (2013). Green political theory. Cambridge (MA): Polity Press.

Robeyns, I. (2017), "Freedom and Responsibility - Sustainable Prosperity through a
Capabilities Lens", CUSP Essay Series on the Morality of Sustainable Prosperity | No 4, http://www.cusp.ac.uk/essay/m1-4/

Wissenburg, Marcel (1998), Green liberalism, the free and the green society. London:
Routlegde.

Sine Bagatur - Relational Productive Justice

#Tuesday-1330-1500 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-08_Leuven • 🔝

This paper proposes relational productive justice as a normative account for evaluating economic organization in the context of degrowth. Drawing on critical theory and economic sociology, it challenges dominant distributive and perfectionist paradigms for inadequately addressing production itself and for presupposing economic growth as a legitimate background condition. Instead, relational productive justice treats the social purposes, structural organization, and ecological conditions of economic activity as normatively central.

The account is developed through two sites of normative debate: international trade and the future of work. First, the paper critically examines two influential accounts of trade justice: James’s structural equity model (2012) and the exploitation-based approach of
Risse and Wollner (2019). While both aim to define fairness in trade relations, they remain embedded in a growth-fetishistic logic that treats rising global output as the primary normative benchmark. Neither account sufficiently considers whether trade structured around perpetual expansion is compatible with ecological sustainability, intergenerational justice, or broader conceptions of economic well-being. Although
James acknowledges environmental concerns, these remain insufficiently integrated into his framework, while Risse and Wollner explicitly set them aside. This omission highlights a significant shortcoming in trade justice debates: the failure to engage adequately with the ecological consequences of global trade and with the question of whether “sustainable growth” is ethically defensible or practically feasible within ecological limits.

Second, debates on the future of work serve to extend the relational productive justice account along three dimensions. First, the differentiated valuation of labor challenges the neoclassical assumption that all market activities are equally productive (Barnthaler and Gough 2023). Forms of labor such as “guard labor” (Jayadev and Bowles 2006) or “bullshit jobs” (Graeber 2018) may lack normative justification, while relational and careoriented work – often systematically undervalued – should be prioritized in post-growth economies. Second, the ecological embeddedness of economic activity underscores the need to situate work and production within ecological limits, given the resource and energy demands typically ignored in mainstream models. Third, the future of work raises foundational questions about the purpose of production itself. In an age of accelerating technological transformation and ecological crisis, should the aim of economic organization be perpetual growth or rather sustainable welfare, increased free time, and collective well-being?

Relational productive justice responds to this challenge by refocusing normative inquiry on the collective ends of economic life, such as sustaining livelihoods, enabling autonomy, and organizing production in ways that transcend both growth metrics and debates about the inherent value of work versus non-work.

Barnthaler, R., and I. Gough. 2023. “Provisioning for Sufficiency: Envisaging Production
Corridors.” Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 19 (1): 2218690.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Graeber, D. 2018. London: Allen Lane.

Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy. James, A. 2012. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Jayadev, A., and S. Bowles. 2006. “Guard Labor.” Journal of Development Economics 79 (2): 328–348.

On Trade Justice: A Philosophical Plea for a New Global Deal. Risse, M., and G.
Wollner. 2019. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Science & Technology 1 – Ethics & Technology

Emma Kopeinigg - Engaging Longevity

#Tuesday-1330-1500 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-07_Franeker • 🔝

New and emerging biomedical technologies have spurred the hope for radical longevity that would significantly exceed current human lifespans. This article examines a central normative tension within contemporary, Western discourses on ageing and longevity technology. Namely, how ought longevity aspirations be responded to, while subjecting the techno-optimist hopes that tend to accompany them with scrutiny? I argue that prevailing responses tend to polarize between either uncritically endorsing longevity research due to techno-optimist hopes for progress, or skeptically rejecting it, grounded in concerns about distributive injustice, marginalization, and techno-ableism and/or ageism. This article aims to navigate this tension and hopes to advance a novel position, one that rejects both uncritical endorsement and abandonment. First, I defend the claim that aspirations towards longevity–understood as the desire for living a long and healthy life–constitute a legitimate component of the good life and therefore warrants ethical consideration rather than dismissal. Second, I argue that dominant techno-optimist imaginaries surrounding longevity technologies risk reinforcing patterns of techno-ableism and -ageism by privileging certain bodies, capacities, and life courses, thereby exacerbating existing forms of vulnerabilities. From these premises, I propose that ethical engagement with longevity technology and innovation should neither advance at the expense of vulnerable populations, nor require abandoning the project of longevity altogether to avoid its ethical risks. Instead, I aim to point towards an ethical framework that is capable of jointly endorsing pro-longevity and pro-ageing commitments, which challenges the assumption that support for longevity technology is incompatible with affirming ageing as a valuable dimension of human life.

Karolina Kudlek and Marijana Vujosevic - Self-Control Enhancement Technologies within Kant's Theory of Virtue

#Tuesday-1330-1500 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-07_Franeker • 🔝

Self-control – often understood as the ability to pursue valuable goals in the face of conflicting motivation – is fundamental for moral agency and moral development. In light of widespread phenomena such as weakness of will, and especially digital addictions (gaming and social-media addictions), the prospect of enhancing self-control is more pressing than ever. Yet in the contemporary enhancement debate, self-control enhancement (SCE) has received surprisingly little focused attention. Given the significance of self-control in moral development and its potential neurotechnological malleability, we believe that SCE warrants more thorough investigation in its own right.

In this paper, we question whether technological improvements of self-control would be prohibited, permissible, or even necessary according to Kant's theory of virtue. We adopt this normative framework for two main reasons. First, SCE technologies such as brain stimulation and neurofeedback devices pose distinctive ethical concerns in a
Kantian framework, particularly insofar as they challenge Kantian virtue – understood as a kind of moral self-control. Using SCE tools promotes overreliance and automaticity, thereby risking the hindrance of self-control development and the undermining of autonomous moral agency. By situating SCE within Kant's theory of virtue, however, we argue that such technologies can be permissible, and even necessary means to moral improvement.

Second, Kant's conception of self-control explains self-control in goal-pursuing and goal-setting. Such a broader view, including instrumental and guidance self-control, has interesting implications for the permissibility of SCE. For instance, if we offload our instrumental self-control to an app that periodically locks us from social media, its use may still be permissible for we may have guidance control. Furthermore, if self-control is necessary for making moral judgments and SCE is yet morally permissible, then we have a case of the permissible enhancement of a cognitive capacity.

Eline de Jong - From Blind Spot to Moral Patient: Animals as Stakeholders in Technology Ethics

#Tuesday-1330-1500 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-07_Franeker • 🔝

Abstract

Technologies increasingly shape animals’ lives – yet animal interests are still largely marginal in mainstream technology ethics and in frameworks of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) (Szymanski et al., 2021). This paper argues that this neglect constitutes a serious moral blind spot and reflects a failure of ethical engagement with all morally considerable stakes affected by technological development.

Debates about the ethical acceptability and societal desirability of new and emerging technologies typically take human interests as the normative baseline. This anthropocentric conception of who has a stake in technological innovation is deeply embedded in both RRI and technology ethics. However, such a restricted moral scope is ethically indefensible for two mutually reinforcing reasons. First, technological innovations have profound direct and indirect impacts on animals – which will only intensify with the rise of new system technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI)
(Bossert, 2024; Meijboom et al., 2023; Kramer & Bovenkerk, 2024; Kramer & Meijboom, 2022). Second, as sentient beings, animals possess moral status and should be recognised as moral patients – beings worthy of moral consideration and care (Nussbaum, 2023; Torpman & Röcklinsberg 2021). This grounds a responsibility to take animal interests seriously in our technological activities.

To give this responsibility a practical foothold, the paper mobilises the concept of stakeholdership, a cornerstone of both RRI and technology ethics. It explores how reinterpreting stakeholdership to include animals could facilitate their inclusion in ethical deliberation and decision-making about technology, and sketches possible pathways for putting this responsibility into practice. The paper also examines key conceptual and institutional challenges such an extension is likely to face. It concludes that only by broadening the moral scope beyond human concerns can RRI and technology ethics uphold their normative integrity, attend to a wider range of technological harms and benefits, and genuinely pursue ethically acceptable and socially desirable innovation.

Keywords: Responsible research and innovation (RRI), Technology ethics, Animal ethics, Ethical Engagement, Anthropocentrism, Stakeholdership

Tuesday, 15:30–17:00 | Parallel Sessions 3

Feminist, Queer, Decolonial Philosophies 1 – Coloniality & Critique

Tullio Viola - Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Problem of "Subaltern Speech"

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-04_Montreal • 🔝

In this talk, I present a specific aspect of a broader research project currently funded by an NWO Open Competition scheme ("Folk Narratives and Social Critique: Recovering an Epistemological Paradigm at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," DOI 10.61686/WHBWO82244). The project examines how early twentieth-century American social philosophers such as Jane Addams and W.E.B. Du Bois gathered and analyzed folk narratives (such as myths, songs, and legends) as tools through which disenfranchised communities expressed their grievances and their critique of society.

A major theoretical problem I have encountered in this project centers on the question of when, and to what extent, we should consider it legitimate to reconstruct the voices of historical actors who have been silenced or excluded from mainstream discourse. Since at least Gayatri C. Spivak's influential essay Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988), the legitimacy of "elite" reconstructions of marginalized voices has been a pressing concern. This concern has resurfaced today, for instance, in contemporary worries about our "extractivist" relation to indigenous knowledge. Thus, philosophers and historians alike appear caught in a dilemma: on the one hand, post-colonial scholars have fostered skepticism about the ethical, political, and epistemic legitimacy of such reconstructive practices; on the other hand, major historiographical traditions like "history from below" rest precisely on the possibility of giving voice to those excluded from dominant narratives.

Rather than advancing a sweeping argument about the political or epistemic validity of all attempts to reconstruct "subaltern speech," this talk follows the methodological approach of philosophers of science in practice: it conceptualizes a specific epistemic practice, explores its motivations, assesses its success or failure, and cautiously draws broader insights from this analysis. In this sense, it explores the validity of a "thick"
approach to philosophical historiography – one that emphasizes detailed, practiceoriented descriptions of historical research to uncover the normative and epistemic scaffolding underpinning these practices. It takes the scholarly practices of Addams, Du
Bois, and other early twentieth-century figures as a case study, or perhaps better, a historical "episode" (see Chang 2012) that can illuminate broader theoretical issues.

Lucas Gronouwe - Postcolonial and Decolonial Elsewheres: Derrida and Glissant on the Stakes of Philosophical Engagement

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-04_Montreal • 🔝

How should contemporary intellectuals engage with the historical legacies of colonialism and their enduring logics? One influential answer, articulated by postcolonial thinkers such as Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, holds that critical engagement must proceed immanently: one must acknowledge oneself as the heir to a cultural tradition deeply entangled with colonial violence and mobilize that inheritance to expose and unsettle its contradictions from within. A markedly different response – often formulated in explicit tension with this postcolonial strategy of engagement – has emerged from decolonial thinkers such as Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and
Catherine Walsh, who call for a displacement of the geography of knowledge away from
Europe and the United States toward epistemic perspectives rooted in the Global South.

This paper intervenes in this post-/decolonial controversy by reading the as yet unpublished 1993 public debate between Jacques Derrida and Édouard Glissant in Strasbourg as a staged reflection on the stakes of philosophical engagement with colonial legacies. Although both Derrida and Glissant claim a certain exteriority vis-à-vis European philosophy – Derrida as a Franco-Maghrebi Jew from Algeria, Glissant as a writer/poet from Martinique – their respective genealogies give rise to divergent strategies of engagement. Derrida articulates a postcolonial “elsewhere” already operative within the tradition, emphasizing its internal cracks and fissures as sites of critique. Glissant, by contrast, mobilizes a decolonial “elsewhere” grounded in Global
South epistemologies, ontologies, and cultural practices, repeatedly confronting Derrida’s immanent critique with Amerindian temporalities, Inca and Aztec myths, African and Native American cosmologies, and non-European spatial imaginaries.

Ultimately, I argue that Derrida presses the question of whether philosophical thinking can ever exceed the tradition from which critique emerges, while Glissant poses the counter-question of whether immanent critique is itself radically insufficient as a mode of philosophical engagement with the colonial logic that continues to structure that tradition. By situating this exchange within broader postcolonial and decolonial methodologies, the paper clarifies what is at stake in different forms of philosophical engagement with colonial pasts and presents.

Braedon Steven - Philosophies of Struggle

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-04_Montreal • 🔝

This paper is situated at the intersections of Philosophy Born of Struggle – the intellectual movement and philosophical thought pioneered by Leonard Harris and taken up by Rozena Maart – Black Consciousness and Psychoanalytic thought, as espoused by Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko and Rozena Maart, and the gender critiques of Sylvia
Tamale and Judith Butler. The paper utilizes a decolonial lens to situate the Durbanbased subject’s existential engagement with LGBTQIA+ politics, weaving it through
South Africa’s National Question. The radical questioning of the concept of Being amid
South Africa’s history of enslavement and indentured labour from India and South East
Asia along with the settler coloniality of our colonisers, bring a series of troubling concerns to the ways in which LGBTQIA+ identities have emerged not only in the margins of Western philosophical thought adopted and asserted in White dominated
Philosophy departments in South Africa as foundational and the necessary platform from which Black students ought to think and reason but as crucial to the adoption of an intellectual project more than thirty years post the first democratic elections in South
Africa, are problematised and interrogated throughout

Ethics & Politics 2 – Resistance

Riccardo Molin - Engagement Without Access

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore #lightningTalk • 🔝

When institutions face technological uncertainty, they often invite stakeholder participation while policy development proceeds elsewhere. This lightning talk examines this gap through student engagement in AI education policy at a Dutch research university.

As a Faculty Student Council member, I developed comprehensive policy recommendations addressing assessment, pedagogy, and academic integrity, and formed a joint taskforce with the StaffCouncil. Yet policy was already being drafted across organizational layers, without student input or communication. My advisory role provided voice without access to deliberation: what Arnstein (1969) terms tokenism.

This exclusion emerged not from bad faith but from bureaucratic opacity, a form of structural exclusion within formally inclusive institutions (Young, 2000). When technological governance bypasses affected communities, it produces what Jasanoff (2004) identifies as a legitimacy deficit in the co-production of knowledge and social order.

The philosophical question: when participation is formal but access is absent, what does engagement require? I argue that when policy windows are closing and access is structurally denied, patience becomes consent to exclusion. Engaged philosophy must then escalate to counter-institutional pressure, as a practice of intensified participation.

Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224.

Jasanoff, S. (2004). States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social
Order. Routledge.

University of Amsterdam. (2025). Policy framework and guidelines on GenAI in education. https://www.uva.nl/en/about-the-uva/policy-and-regulations/education/policyframework-and- guidelines-on-genai-in-education.html

Young, I. M. (2000). Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford University Press.

Jonne Maas - Democratic Control of Public Power: Governing Material System Choices in Public-Sector AI

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore • 🔝

Seemingly routine and technical decisions for algorithmic systems can have significant consequences for how people subjected to these systems are affected. We call these decisions material system choices. They are upstream choices in design, configuration and the lifecycle of a system that determine who is subjected to AI-mediated power and how. For systems used in the public domain these decisions affect how citizens are governed, and should therefore be subject to democratic control. However, despite familiar "responsible AI" criteria, a political problem remains. Who has authority over these material system choices? And is there meaningful democratic control over said choices?

In this paper, we argue that this remaining political problem can best be approached through the problem of domination. Understood in a neo-republican sense, domination refers to unchecked and arbitrary power relations. Interpreting "democratic control" in this way draws attention towards (the lack of) institutional mechanisms that constrain arbitrary power over material system choices. We develop a conception of meaningful democratic control (MDC) as non-domination that requires AI-mediated decision-making to be constrained in three ways. First, there has to be addressability. With this, we mean that there should be identifiable public officials or bodies that are answerable for material system choices. Second, there should be public defensibility. This implies that the values and trade-offs embedded in the system should be made explicit, and translated into design requirements. These requirements should be implemented in a way that they can be audited over time. Third, there has to be structural revisability.
With this, we mean that the people who are affected should be able to trigger revisions of the system in a way that is binding. They should be able to do this directly, or through representatives.

Maria Kourpa - From Alienation to Assembly: Prefigurative Democracy as Philosophical Engagement

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore • 🔝

Contemporary capitalism is in a deep and inextricable crisis. Its growing inequality and ecological devastation are not only destroying the planet but also fueling resurgent authoritarianism and fascism worldwide. At the same time, movements attempting to address these trends are hindered by the persistent and growing disempowerment that capitalism has fostered. How can philosophy engage with ruptural action in times of structural disempowerment?

We argue that the practices of local prefigurative assemblies can act not only as political practices, but as sites where philosophical concepts of freedom, democracy, agency, and utopia are enacted, tested, and transformed. Drawing on Marxist theories of revolutionary praxis, we first analyze how contemporary capitalism generates powerful forms of material and ideological disempowerment through alienating and alienated structures and relations, or what Sartre calls the practico-inert (Sartre, 2004). We further argue that many established leftist political forms and canonical conceptions of "ivory tower" philosophy often reproduce and reinforce these forms of disempowerment and thus are insufficient to foster an emancipatory transition to a more just society.

We propose that prefigurative democratic assemblies offer an effective political instrument that can address capitalist disempowerment and facilitate a revolutionary process. Using interdisciplinary scholarship on prefigurative democracy (van de Sande, 2023; Yates & de Moor, 2022; Monticelli, 2021; Raekstad & Gradin, 2020; Gordon, 2017) and utopianism (Thaler 2022; Wilder, 2022; Abensour, 2008; Geoghegan, 1987), we suggest that bottom-up, non-hierarchical assemblies can help recompose class power as concrete utopias of non-alienated democratic participation.

Thus, the philosophy of prefigurative assemblies is one that becomes immanent to practice. The prefigurative assemblies function as collective sites of civic learning and solidarity, where the organizational forms offer concepts like democracy, freedom, and solidarity to be lived, within safe spaces of inclusivity, polycentricity, and reciprocity. We finish by exploring how these practices can generate and transform philosophical ideas, how philosophising as a social and embodied practice can be rethought through them, and how philosophy can inform these practices from within.

Mariska van Dam - Populism Revisited: Democracy’s Social Imaginary at Stake

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-06_Baltimore • 🔝

Populism has been stirring public and academic debate for a long while now, centering around a double-sided question: what is populism, and how to normatively evaluate it?
The main approaches have yielded very different answers: populism is an ideology, a strategy, or a discourse, and it is threatening, correcting, parasitic to, radically emancipating, or a shadow of democracy. This wealth of definitions and judgments should not surprise us.

Different conceptions of both populism and democracy produce different conceptions of what kind of relationship between them is even possible, let alone of how to qualify it.
This is why the key question of the debate is double-sided: definition and judgment of populism mutually implicate each other.

In my contribution, I take issue with Mudde’s ideological approach, because it suffers from internal contradictions between how it defines populism (as an ideology leaning towards the far-right) and how it judges it (as partly compatible with liberal democracy still). Instead, borrowing key insights from the strategic and discursive approaches, I develop a constructivist account of populism as a master frame of shared social imaginaries of democracy. This account furthermore draws upon the study of contentious politics, representative claim-making, and pragmatist conceptions of populism and democracy. The populist master frame constructs the sovereign people against powerful others, enabling political actors to express any ideology through this frame. In doing so, populism highlights certain parts of the imaginary of democracy (the sovereign people as bearers of legitimacy) and hides others from view. Thus, my account evokes a different normative question – not so much whether populism is good or bad for democracy, but in what way it transforms social imaginaries of democracy.

This question is particularly pressing in light of the (international) surge of the far-right, which uses the populist master frame as a legitimation strategy to spread its antidemocratic ideologies. I will indicate several ways in which democratic imaginaries could be infused problematically with far-right notions of biological racism, nativism, and authoritarianism, a question my PhD research will take up in the future.

Philosophy of Interdisciplinary Research

Philosophy of Interdisciplinary Research

Caroline Bollen, Julia Hermann, and Udo Pesch - Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Research

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-18_Lund • 🔝

In this interactive session, we will explore 1) the meaning and social significance of philosophy as a discipline, 2) insights on challenges and practices of doing inter- and transdisciplinary research, and 3) institutional barriers and opportunities. The panel is hosted by PIRC (Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Research Community).

Amid multidimensional challenges such as climate change, global inequality, political instability, and artificial intelligence, calls for interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are growing louder, not only in academia but also across other social spheres, including the business world, governments, and nonprofit organizations. We conceive of "interdisciplinarity" as the collaboration between two or more disciplines to build knowledge that would otherwise not have been possible, namely, that goes above and beyond the epistemic possibilities of a single field.

Pulls towards inter- and transdisciplinarity also reaches academic philosophy: in the last decades, fields such as bioethics, neurophilosophy, environmental philosophy, and the philosophy of AI have grown substantially. Philosophers often position themselves explicitly at the intersection of other disciplines, or are involved in inter- or transdisciplinary research projects, actively working with the sciences, albeit history, law, literature, physics, engineering, or the social sciences, as well as with actors from outside of academia.

These evolutions raise important questions: How can philosophers juggle and communicate with multiple disciplines and societal actors? What expertise and skills do philosophers bring to inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations? How to balance generalism and specialisation, theoretical and empirical perspectives and methods, and teamwork besides individual research? Should these philosophers make more direct contributions to policy, ethical guidelines, and scientific progress, or do we forego our critical potential if we do so? When do research projects require not only interdisciplinary, but also transdisciplinary philosophy? What are institutional barriers for inter- and transdisciplinary philosophy within university education, funding schemes, and the world of publishing, and how to address these?

In January 2026, a group of philosophers working on the crossroads of philosophy and other disciplines met for a week to navigate these questions. In this panel, we present the main outcomes of that workshop written down in a white paper, focused on the following question: How can and should philosophers navigate inter- and transdisciplinary research? In this session, we present five controversial statements on (1) how philosophy education in universities should be reformed, (2) what the identity of inter- and transdisciplinary philosophers is, (3) what the (moral) responsibilities of interand transdisciplinary philosophers are related to societal impact, (4) whether inter- and transdisciplinary philosophy changes the way philosophy is traditionally practiced, (5)
how philosophers should navigate empirical data and the tension between the 'is' and 'ought', and (6) when interdisciplinarity is not enough, and philosophers should make an effort to do transdisciplinary research.

Science & Technology 2 – LLMs

Tijn Smits - Thinking for Yourself: Duties to Oneself in the Age of AI

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-08_Leuven • 🔝

‘Sapere Aude! (Dare to be wise!). Have courage to make use of your own understanding!’ (QE, 8:35). With this motto, Kant ushers in the age of Enlightenment.
Today, technological developments challenge the tendency to think for oneself. With the rapid introduction of generative AI, people are outsourcing more of their intellectual labor to machines. This raises the question of how we should relate to technologies that are developing towards human levels of intelligence. Kant holds that individuals have a duty to themselves to respect and cultivate their rational capacities (G, 4:422–3; 4:430;
MM, 6:386–8; 6:444–6). We believe this to be a valuable guideline for the ethical use of
AI.

This duties-to-oneself approach should complement existing considerations based on what we owe to others. Common concerns include harm to people’s privacy and intellectual property, biases and unfair treatment, and the lack of creativity and authenticity (Floridi 2013; Benjamin 2019; Da Pelo 2025). Kantian approaches are typically used to question whether machines can be moral (Chakrabarty & Bhuyan 2024; Sanwoolu 2025; White 2022). Instead, we ask whether we can be moral while engaging with AI. This duties-to-oneself approach reveals ethical concerns about outsourcing intellectual tasks.

Duties-to-oneself have recently received more attention in the literature, overcoming technical and interpretive obstacles (Davies 2024; 2025; Eckert-Kuang 2024; Schaab 2021). This paves the way for their application. In this paper, we take up Kant’s wide duty to develop one’s capacities and take inspiration from concrete practices that conflict with respect for oneself as a rational being. For instance, Kant believes one cannot degrade or stupefy oneself (MM, 6:435; 6:427).

People are increasingly using AI to write speeches, perform self-evaluations at work, or complete exams and research proposals. Moreover, AI is used to help us decide who to vote for, what social causes to support, and what to look for in a romantic partner.
These practices might have bad effects, but we are concerned about the expression of disrespect towards one’s own rationality. While these developments raise concerns about the cultivation of intellectual capacities, the opposite might also be argued. A sound use of AI may enhance our cognitive capacities (Nyholm 2024), and self-tracking may support our duty of self-knowledge (Leuenberger 2024).

Reference list

Allen, Anita L. 2013. “An Ethical Duty to Protect One’s Own Informational Privacy?” Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law.

Chakraborty, Arunima, and Nisigandha Bhuyan. 2023. “Can Artificial Intelligence Be a
Kantian Moral Agent?” AI and Ethics 4 (2): 325–31.

Cohen, Alix. 2024. “Kant on Doxastic Agency, Its Scope, and the Demands of Its

Exercise.” Inquiry: 1–19.

Da Pelo, M. (2025). Artificial creativity: Can there be creativity without cognition? AI & Society, 40, 1–14.

Davies, Luke. 2024. “Duties to Self, Consent, and Respect in Kant’s Moral Philosophy.” Journal of Moral Philosophy: 1–24.

Davies, Luke. 2025. “Duties to Self in Par 2 of Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue.” History of
Philosophy Quarterly 42 (2): 193–204.

Eckert-Kuang, Bennet. 2024. “Kant on Self-Legislation as the Foundation of Duty.” European Journal of Philosophy: 1–17.

Kant, Immanuel. 1996 [^1788]. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant:
Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge University
Press.

Leuenberger, M. 2024. “Track Thyself? The Value and Ethics of Self-Knowledge through Technology.” Philos Technol 37 (1): 13.

Nyholm, S. 2024. “Artificial Intelligence and Human Enhancement.” Camb Q Healthc
Ethics 33 (1): 76–88.

Sanwoolu, Oluwaseun Damilola. 2025. “Kantian Deontology for AI: Alignment without
Moral Agency.” AI and Ethics 5 (5): 5425–37.

Schaab, Janis David. 2021. “On the Supposed Incoherence of Obligations to Oneself.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (1): 175–89.

White, Jeffrey. 2022. “Autonomous Reboot: Kant, the Categorical Imperative, and
Contemporary Challenges for Machine Ethicists.” AI & Society 37 (2): 661–73.

Kees Greven - The Difference in Self-Knowledge Between Humans and LLMs

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-08_Leuven • 🔝

This paper examines the contrast between forms of self-knowledge available to human beings and large language models (LLMs) respectively to argue that current AI systems cannot reasonably be said to employ folk-psychological terms to explain their own behaviour. We propose that the field of explainable AI and AI-safety as well as the field of philosophy of mind have something to gain from an analysis of LLM self-knowledge.

Folk psychology relies on concepts such as belief and desire, propositional attitudes whose ontological status have long been contested in the philosophical literature (Churchland, 1981; Dennett, 1989; Fodor, 1989; Ramsy, Stich, Garon, 1990). A common argument in favour of a realism with respect to these concepts is the direct first-person access human beings appear to have to their own mental states and attitudes (Schwitzgebel, 2024). Human agents routinely invoke such intentional mental states to justify or explain their behaviour, and this self-knowledge seems to enjoy a privileged epistemic status (Smithies, 2013; Kriegel, 2013).

We argue that human and LLM self-knowledge differ in at least two important ways.
Firstly, human agents are able to acquire self-knowledge through immediate first-person introspection, whereas an LLM’s self-knowledge claims result from training on publicly available textual data (Comsa & Shanahan, 2025; Zakharova, 2025). This has for example implications for infallibility and incorrigibility claims. Secondly, human selfknowledge operates at the level of a psychological entity, i.e. a more or less stable self over time. By contrast, it is less clear what enduring entity the self-knowledge of an LLM would individuate (Chalmers, 2025). This has for instance implications for the stability of
LLM goals.

We conclude that while human introspection lends some support to intentional realism, LLM self-knowledge remains vulnerable to eliminativist critiques. This has practical implications insofar as LLM self-reported explanations should be treated with caution, as they lack the justificatory force of human first-person reports. In this way, the field of
AI can benefit from a dialogue with philosophy. At the same time, the field of AI presents new entry points into standing philosophical debates about the epistemic nature of human introspection.

Chalmers, D. J. (2025). What we talk to when we talk to language models.

Churchland, P. M. (1981). Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. The
Journal of Philosophy, 78(2), 67–90.

The intentional stance. Dennett, D. C. (1989). MIT press.

Comsa, I. M., & Shanahan, M. (2025). Does It Make Sense to Speak of Introspection in
Large Language Models? arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.05068.

Fodor, J. A. (1989). Why there still has to be a language of thought. In Computers, brains and minds (pp. 23–46). Springer Netherlands.

Ramsey, W., Stich, S., & Garon, J. (1990). Connectionism, Eliminativism, and the
Future of Folk-Psychology.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2024). Introspection. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Zakharova, D. (2025). Missing the Subject: Introspection in Large Language Models.

Kris Goffin - Normative Chatbot Fictionalism

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-08_Leuven [cancelled] • 🔝

Emotional chatbots have reshaped how people seek comfort, advice, and companionship. Large numbers of users turn to systems like ChatGPT for emotional support. Alongside general-purpose agents, we now see therapy bots, romanticcompanion bots, and griefbots designed to recreate the dead digitally. These systems raise ethical questions about the kind of emotional relationships we form with them.

A common response from industry is that such systems do not pose an ethical risk because users know the bot is not real. Griefbots, for instance, are “harmless” because they are simply “a fiction.” In the emerging literature on chatbot fictionalism (Krueger & Osler 2022, Krueger & Roberts 2024, Mallory 2023), several authors have proposed that interacting with a chatbot resembles interacting with fiction. Most of them are building on Walton (1990) theory that engagement with fiction is structured by prescriptions to imagine, instructions that tell us how to participate in a game of makebelieve. Talking to a chatbot is participating in such a make-believe game: we treat the interface as if we were conversing with a real person. Friend and Goffin (2025) criticize chatbot-fictionalism by arguing that, in extreme cases of dependency and AI psychosis, chatbots can elicit genuine emotions that sometimes breach the usual “quarantine” between make-believe and real attitudes.

I argue that existing accounts overlook a key feature of Walton’s theory: its normative dimension. Fiction is a rule-governed practice structured by prescriptions that direct how one ought to imagine. Building on this insight, I propose normative chatbot fictionalism, which takes these prescriptions to be central. These prescriptions are partly designed (both intentionally and unintentionally), partly socially constructed, and partly shaped by users’ psychological tendencies. But crucially, they are normative: one can follow them well or poorly.

Episodes described as “AI psychosis” or extreme dependency, as Friend and Goffin describe, can be interpreted as failures to follow the relevant prescription. However, the question is whether such systems are actually designed to avoid extreme dependency.
A good case could be made that some are designed to be addictive. Normative chatbot fictionalism provides a new framework for evaluating these cases ethically.

Methods 3 – Philosophy and the Crisis of Form

Panel description

This panel deals with the metaphilosophical question of form. Before one could even ask what topics or issues philosophy should engage with, the question is how philosophy should engage with its material. Like the arts, and unlike most other academic disciplines, philosophy is not confined to any field of reality, but by the way in which it engages with reality. Thus, if philosophy's form is in any way at risk, philosophy as such is at risk. The main claim from which we all three depart is the critical observation that, today, philosophy is in crisis–not because there are too few philosophers, or because there is not enough interest, effort or money to engage with real-world problems. The crisis of philosophy is rather a crisis of form.

Marcus Döller - Between anti-academic populism and academic anonymization

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-07_Franeker • 🔝

Our panel departs with a critical analysis of this crisis of form as that of formal homogenization. In a dialectical analysis, Marcus Döller demonstrates that the crisis of form arises from a process of desubjectification. Paradoxically, the death of the author leads to both a neutralisation and a demand of individual prestige. Both these tendencies, however, are in fact sides of the same coin of the homogenisation of contemporary philosophical practice: the beheading of the individual subject only takes place on condition of the glorification of a pseudo-individualism. What is thus needed, according to Döller, is a 'resonant interdisciplinarity'.

Aldo Kempen - After clarity or towards a formal pluralism

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-07_Franeker • 🔝
Aldo Kempen investigates the possible challenges of such an interdisciplinarity or plurality of philosophical forms. If philosophy requires multiple forms to address this crisis, how can we critically engage with this plurality without appealing to a neutral meta-standard that would adjudicate between forms? Put differently: if there is no privileged formal standpoint from which to evaluate philosophical form, from where do we think the limits and legitimacy of form itself? Kempen traces how philosophy of science's conceptual toolkit for understanding epistemic and methodological plurality might offer resources for addressing this. In this way, he attempts to outline where an immanent critique of philosophical form would start in order to navigate between the twin dangers of formal relativism (where all forms are equally valid) and formal monism (where only one form is legitimate).

Errol Boon - The unempirical stakes of philosophy: Aesthetics as the refuge of metaphysics in Theodor W. Adorno

#Tuesday-1530-1700 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M1-07_Franeker • 🔝

Lastly, further developing this immanent self-critique of form, Errol Boon addresses the possibility of an "aesthetic theory" in a more emphatic sense – namely, as a philosophical practice that takes its own aesthetic form as the decisive problem of philosophical theory. Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno's posthumous Ästhetische
Theorie, Boon asks whether philosophy is capable not merely of reproducing an implicit aesthetic form, but of becoming ''aesthetic'' itself: that is, whether it can disclose a truth through formal constellations irreducible to discursive reason. This entails a radically unempirical conception of philosophy, one that seeks truth in what does not empirically exist and is repressed by the dominant discursive order of society. Boon argues that such an aesthetic theory necessarily culminates in an aporia, in which philosophy demands of itself something it can ultimately neither fulfil nor renounce. Yet it is precisely within this unresolvable formal tension that philosophy has its stakes.

Tuesday Evening – Performance Lecture at WORM

Catherine Koekoek - Bookshops and theatres: on practice-based philosophy and democratic infrastructures

#Tuesday-2030-2130 • Room: #WORM_Boomgaardsstraat_71 • 🔝

What does it mean to express oneself democratically, and on one’s own terms? And what spatial and practical conditions might facilitate such democratic articulations? This performance/lecture reflects on developing a practice-based philosophy in Rotterdam – a search away from the walls of academia and into feminist bookshops and the participatory community theatre Rotterdams Wijktheater. And there may be more at stake in this engagement than just the topic of research.

Wednesday, 9:30–10:30 | Keynote II

Keynote II: Leo Catana - Some problems and prospects in the use of Aristotle in modern environmental ethics

#Wednesday-0930-1030 • Room: #Sanders_0-03 • 🔝

The paper argues that contemporary environmental virtue ethics (EVE) suffers from a lack of nature-oriented virtues rooted in Aristotle’s works, and that his situationist ethics puts epistemic demands on moral agents that may not be realistic in a globalized world. It also argues that EVE has ignored two aspects in Aristotle’s texts, which hold promise in the context of a modern environmental ethics, namely that land (Gr. chôra) and agriculture was an integral part of his political philosophy, and that his virtue ethics comprised important theories about collective virtues.

Biography

My contributions to science draw on my competences in philosophy, philology and theology. My research is driven by questions crossing disciplinary boundaries, and I have consciously positioned myself where such disciplines intersect. Trained in philosophy, I have explored into the ways in which knowledge about philosophy’s past has been produced, and how that knowledge influence philosophy proper. In 2018, I was thus invited to act as co-editor at the prestigious British Journal for the History of Philosophy, developing my methodological ideas. My research has been recognized in The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945-2015 (published 2019), primarily due to my work on the methodology of history of philosophy, which has influenced philosophy, classical philology, history and theology. As a person, I am deeply motivated by ethical concerns about the ways in which we live our lives, how we relate to each other and to nature, and how we perceive ourselves in collective memories.

Wednesday, 11:00–12:30 | Parallel Sessions 4

Ethics & Politics 3 – Politics & Economy

Felix Hohlfeld - Global Limitarianism

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Langeveld_1-08 #lightningTalk • 🔝

Limitarianism is the normative view that it is morally impermissible to possess more than a certain amount of wealth in non-ideal circumstances. In recent years, there has been increasing philosophical engagement with this subject. However, these discussions have primarily focused on issues of domestic justice. Conversely, scholars of international distributive justice have yet to systematically address the emerging limitarian doctrine. This begs the question of what role, if any, limitarianism could have in debates about global justice. Two distinct but interrelated questions stand out as particularly salient: Firstly, what conceptual modifications are required to apply limitarian principles to the global sphere? Secondly, how can a globally sensitive limitarianism inform existing normative discussions about international distributive justice, and how must such discussions evolve to accommodate limitarian normative concerns? In this lightning talk, I present some prima facie possibilities and challenges of global limitarianism. I argue that the global dimension of limitarianism is significantly underdeveloped and that more scholarly engagement is required to address its manifold theoretical and normative implications – some of which I attempt to lay out in this talk.

Ingrid Robeyns - The goals and methods of real-world political philosophy

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Langeveld_1-08 • 🔝

This paper aims to make progress on the methodology of real-world political philosophy by providing a typology of methods for this strand of philosophy. Real world political philosophy (Wolff2015), more recently also called 'engaged political philosophy' (Wolff2018, Green and Brandstedt 2021), starts from observing the world as it is, rather than from theories. It is thus problem-driven, rather than theory-driven (Robeyns 2022).

Several political philosophers interested in general reflection on the discipline have observed that political philosophy "is having a methodological moment" (Floyd 2022, 129). This is due to several methodological debates in political philosophy that have unfolded over the last two decades, especially the extensive and intense debate on ideal versus nonideal theory, but also the debate on whether political philosophy should be fact-sensitive or not, whether to ditch the methods of moral philosophy for those of realism in political thought, and how to deal with questions of feasibility.

Yet while we, political philosophers, have meta-theoretical discussions about methodology, we do not have many discussions about the methods themselves, and what they yield in terms of normative analytical power. Yet that doesn't mean there are no methods; rather, the methods that are used are unsystematically applied, not ordered, and not systematically discussed in a comparative fashion. To change this unfortunate situation, methods should be selected based on the function and goals of the knowledge one aims to produce. This is what we could call a functionalist approach to the selection of methods, since that selection depends on the epistemic function or goal of the work one is developing. Based on this starting point, and a broad review of the literature of applied political philosophy and real-world political philosophy, the paper then proceeds to defending ten different types of goals that analyses in real world political philosophy can play, as well as the corresponding method that suits that goal.
Ultimately, the goal of this paper is to empower political philosophers who want to conduct real world political philosophy to have a better understanding and command over the toolbox of methods at their disposal.

Viktor Ivanković - Deliberative silence

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Langeveld_1-08 • 🔝

Recent years have seen a marked increase in political polarization across Western democracies, with allegiances towards moderate parties and factions slowly but surely shifting towards more ideologically extreme parties and movements (Emanuele & Marino 2024). Sudden spikes in polarization often follow crises such as financial downturns (Funke et al. 2016), pandemics (McMurtry & Cheu 2026), and contentious social-media debates over political responsibility and performance (Shishode 2020; Galais & Balinhas 2025). A particularly stark episode followed the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September 2025, which triggered intense online polarization. Left-leaning reactions ranged from moral indifference to approval, while right-leaning users interpreted these responses as evidence of ideological hypocrisy and democratic intolerance. Moderate calls for restraint were largely dismissed by both camps.

This paper examines whether a practice I call deliberative silence can be justified within liberal democracies. Deliberative silence is defined as the temporary suspension of democratic exchange during periods of deep polarization, typically following crisis peaks or highly divisive events. Its aims are twofold: to prevent further escalation and to help re-establish minimally functional conditions for deliberation.

Practices involving silence are already familiar to democratic societies, including moments of silence (Billig & Marinho 2019; Makari & Friedman 2024), days of mourning, and electoral silence prior to voting (CDL-AD(2009)031). These practices share a commitment to restraint and reflection under socially volatile conditions, a commitment echoed in Rousseau’s account of suspending deliberation prior to elections (2014).

Situating deliberative silence within deliberative democratic theory (Habermas 1985; Rawls 1993; Cohen 2005), I argue that acute polarization undermines the levelheadedness required for productive deliberation (Sanders 1997). Drawing on bounded rationality accounts (Blumenthal-Barby 2013), I suggest that some circumstances are illconducive to deliberation. I assess institutional and moralized models of deliberative silence, highlight their respective objections, and propose a middle-ground approach.

Alicia Correas - Communal Strategies in Early German Romantic Women Philosophers

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Langeveld_1-08 • 🔝

Following this year’s topic, The Stakes of Engagement, this conference will focus on how philosophical thinking can help attend some of the societal demands of today, such as loneliness, alienation, and injustice.

I will explain the communal strategies we find in Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s and Karoline von Günderrode’s philosophies. Both thinkers were historically neglected, but their theories remain relevant today.

On the one hand, Varnhagen suggests a form of communal retreat as a way to resist and overcome an unjust world. She focuses on the idea of social change through community. Even on a personal level, she set up two very successful salons in Germany, and these allowed her to develop personally and philosophically. In short, we see in her theory the connection between a fulfilled and self-developed life and the role of community and deep relationships, including the concept of ethical community life as part of her philosophy.

On the other hand, Günderrode developed a sense of self as intersubjective, focusing on the idea of the absolute whole from where everything is created. In her work Idea of the Earth, she tries to convey a communal strategy by developing deep and meaningful relationships in order to harmonize the elements that constitute every being on earth.

Finally, this conference will show how to develop a critical view on today’s philosophy and its history by helping recover the work of women philosophers, which also helps building trust towards a Philosophy that isn’t based on old presuppositions – such as the idea of genius – anymore.

Aesthetics & Culture 2 – Representation & Imagination

Lene Vos - Dear to Know-Herself: Self-Knowledge as a Means to (Women's) Liberation

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-06_Galway #lightningTalk • 🔝

In this talk, I will pitch my proposal for a doctoral project which highlights the importance of re-engaging with forgotten figures in the fashioning of an inclusive discipline. It might surprise some that already in the late seventeenth century (much earlier, therefore, than the twentieth century), philosophers highlighted the importance of what we now call internalised patriarchal norms and epistemic injustice in the oppression of women, and called for women’s liberation through education and self-knowledge. However, these thinkers were intentionally written out of the grand narrative of the history of philosophy.
In this project, I aim to connect and compare the importance of ‘self-knowledge’ in the theorisation of female liberation in the (Cartesian) philosophies of François Poulain de la
Barre (1647–1723), Gabrielle Suchon (1632–1703), and Mary Astell (1666–1731). By this connection, I hope to help place these underrepresented philosophers back into the narrative of early modern philosophy, and nuance Descartes’ reception. Moreover, most importantly, as a graduate student who formed my conception of philosophy through a male-dominated image, I hope that recovering overlooked women’s, and male protofeminist voices can help marginalised philosophers understand themselves as autonomous epistemic agents grounded in a rich female philosophical heritage.

Eveline Groot - Why She Cannot Represent (Yet): Germaine de Staël's Aristocratic Liberal Republicanism

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-06_Galway • 🔝

In her work Des circonstances actuelles (1798–9) Germaine de Staël (1766–1817)
developed a unique philosophical theory about state governance due to her reworking of the republican model of government into an aristocratic liberal republicanism. An aspect that is puzzling in this theory is the role of women and femininity.

For Staël, women could not represent the people's wish in 1799. Although exceptional women like herself could meet the standards of a modern aristos, in general women did not meet the standards required to stand for office and should, therefore, not engage in policy making. Within Staël's aristocratic liberal republican theory political representation attains a masculine aristocratic shape.

Here, immediate frictions arise with representational interests, as well as with personal and collective liberties, and this is one of the reasons why Staël's political and philosophical theories have oftentimes been overlooked in feminist revisitations of historical political philosophies. Moreover, Staël has even been regarded a reactionary thinker (among which by Mary Wollstonecraftand Simone de Beauvoir), who, opposed to republican female thinkers such as Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft, did not explicitly focus on gender equality.

What is puzzling about Staël's exclusion of women representatives in Des circonstances actuelles is that Staël did develop ideas about femininity in relation to good citizenship, geniality, and morality. Her fictional portraits of the heroines Delphine (1802) and
Corinne (1807) can be regarded as feminist work about the role of women in public life (Marso: 1997, 1998; Isbell: 2023).

In this paper I will present the argument that Des circonstances actuelles is a product of
Staël's pragmatist philosophical outlook and is rooted in her analysis of the political reality, the psychological zeitgeist, and the stage of human progress. It is my view that
Staël's ideas about women representatives should be understood within this framework and that her ideas on representation do not undermine her feminist ideas about female citizenship.

Bas Blaasse - Aesthetic Mediation, Immediacy, and the Conditions of Reflective Engagement

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-06_Galway • 🔝

Contemporary public culture appears marked by an intensification of visibility, affect, and continuous demands for participation and mobilisation. Areas once considered marginal to politics – universities, cultural institutions, consumption, and social media – have become stages of ongoing contestation and positioning. Yet it remains unclear how these expanded forms of engagement relate to processes of collective judgment, durable disagreement, and a common world. Political and cultural participation appears both amplified and difficult to sustain as a basis for reflective engagement. This development calls for a reconsideration of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, in particular of how the conditions of appearance shape the possibilities of meaningful engagement today.

To this end, the paper brings into dialogue two orientations that are often held apart. On the one hand, a range of twentieth-century critiques of spectacle, mediation, and cultural production (Benjamin, Debord, Jameson, Sennett) analyse how visibility, affect, and circulation transform attention, temporality, and political experience. On the other hand, Jacques Rancière’s account of the distribution of the sensible understands politics as a dissensual reconfiguration of what can be seen, said, and recognised as common. Rather than attributing fixed effects to aesthetic forms, this perspective foregrounds the contingency of political subjectivation and the absence of any proper place or stable subject of politics.

Maria Jimena Clavel Vazquez - Social and collective imagination

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-06_Galway • 🔝

It’s the dead of winter, so you start planning a summer trip with friends. You tell your friends how nice it would be to lie in the sun at the beach. A friend adds: “And with a cold margarita!” Little by little you start painting a picture of what this trip might look like. You imagine it together. Simple as it is, it is an exercise of collective imagination. This exercise, though, remains under-theorized in philosophy.[1]

The aim of this paper is to introduce two distinctions that will allow for an articulation of this imaginative exercise. Firstly, I propose to distinguish collective imagination from social imagination. By social imagination, I mean cases in which more than one imaginer performs an imaginative exercise with the aim of participating in a shared representation that isn’t of their authorship. This is the way Walton (1990), for example, thinks of our interactions with fiction. In contrast, by collective imagination, I mean cases in which more than one imaginer collaborates in an imaginative exercise with the aim of giving rise to a shared representation, as opposed to merely participating in one.

Secondly, I propose a distinction between two ways in which we might encounter the two sorts of exercises introduced above, namely, social and collective imagination. Direct imaginative exercises that are shared with others are those that arise from interaction with others. Mediated exercises, in turn, arise in virtue of the involvement of an environmental element (e.g., a book).

The upshot of these distinctions is that they allow us to better understand exercises of imagination that are carried out with others. To show how, I will briefly turn to a paradigmatic case of shared imagination: social imaginaries (see Taylor (2004), Anderson (2016)). A social imaginary is the common understanding members of a community have of themselves.
Using the proposed distinctions, I show that the development of a social imaginary involves social, collective, direct and mediated imagination.

List of references

Anderson, B. R. O. G. (2016). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso.

Jansen, Julia. 2017. "Shared Imagining. Beyond Extension, Distribution and Commitment."
from Phenomenology and
In
Psychopathology (246 – 263), Routledge.

Imagination and Social Perspectives. Approaches

Molinari, D. (2022). Thought Experiments as Social Practice and the Clash of Imaginers.
Croatian journal of philosophy, 22(65), 229-247.

Murphy, K. M. (2005). Collaborative imagining: The interactive use of gestures, talk, and graphic representation in architectural practice. Semiotica, 156(1/4), 113-145.

Rucińska, Z., & Weichold, M. (2022). Pretense and imagination from the perspective of 4E cognitive science: introduction to the special issue. Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences, 21(5), 989-1001.

Szanto, T. (2017). Collective Imagination: A Normative Account. In M. Summa, T. Fuchs, & L.
Vanzago (Eds.), Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and
Psychopathology (223-246), Routledge.

Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press.

Walton, K. (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational
Arts. Harvard University Press.

Feminist, Queer and Decolonial Philosophy 2 – Decoloniality & Critique

Claire Tio, Saskia Pieterse, and Josephine Zwaan - Systematic Disagreement: Decolonial Approaches to Religion, Pedagogy and Logic

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-07_Basel • 🔝

The fantasy of engagement as a smooth and problem-free process presents a paradox in academia. While emphasis is placed on more impact and better results, in reality serious engagement comes with friction, conflict and disagreement – especially concerning the role of academia itself. In many ways, the institutional call for engagement therefore appears to be a means of preserving rather than changing the status quo. This panel focuses on friction, conflict and disagreement as central to decolonial engagement in academia. Saskia Pieterse and Janneke Stegeman address the historical relationship between secularism and white supremacy, and its continued impact on western objectification. Through the lens of queer theory and neurodiversity studies, Claire Tio explores the university classroom as a site where the temporal, spatial, and social arrangements privilege particular rhythms, bodies and modes of engagement. And lastly, Josephine Zwaan discusses notions of contradiction and complementarity in systems of African logic as decolonial approaches to disagreeing better. Together, they reflect on the challenges of working with decoloniality in academia, foregrounding the need for decompartmentalization of what it means to engage.

Workshop – Philosophical Classroom of 2026

Yeva Poghosyan - Philosophical Classroom of 2026

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Langeveld_1-02 • 🔝

What does it mean to "do philosophy" in 2026? Who counts as doing it well and according to whose standards?

In a moment marked by intersecting crises (i.e. worldwide political violence, climate devastation, and widespread disillusionment with our inherited systems, the list goes on) philosophy is increasingly called upon to provide critique and give us some sense of guidance. But in order for a discipline to claim normative authority in public life, it must also examine the ethical and epistemic norms governing its own internal practices, starting with the main entry point – a classroom. Classrooms are not peripheral to philosophy. In fact, they are one of its primary sites of knowledge production and dissemination – nothing to be dismissed or devaluated.

The goal of this workshop is to explore the ethical responsibilities embedded in philosophical pedagogy. Philosophical Classroom of 2026 asks whether ideas of rigor, argumentation, and excellence are truly philosophically neutral, or rather historically rooted within Eurocentric and culturally specific traditions. Is "doing philosophy" a universal practice, or a culturally shaped inheritance? Do students adapt to established disciplinary norms, or does the discipline bear responsibility to expand its conceptual and methodological boundaries to create more dignified educational experiences?

We will approach these questions through three interrelated lenses: a culturally informed perspective that examines decolonial critiques of canon formation, the rigidity of certain subfields, and the assumption that dominant Western traditions exhaust the meaning of philosophical inquiry; an accessibility informed lens that considers how knowledge dissemination, assessment practices, and classroom interaction may benefit only specific cognitive styles; and an identity informed perspective that addresses queer/survivalist/refugee visibility and the unequal distribution of epistemic and affective labour.

Note: none of this will be presented as policy proposals but rather as normative and epistemic questions about the discipline's self-understanding.

Throughout, the workshop maintains a critical but collegial stance. It does not assume bad faith, nor does it frame reform as a rejection of rigor. Instead, it interrogates the relationship between philosophical excellence and pedagogical responsibility.

Methods 4 – Critical Engagement in the Open Society

Frank Hindriks, Daan Roovers, and Maureen Sie - Critical Engagement in the Open Society

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-08_Harvard • 🔝

This panel discusses how polarization, fragmentation and the related populist and authoritarian tendencies of our current society can be counteracted and what philosophy can contribute to this. The panelists argue that the stakes are high: we are at a critical juncture that requires exploring new kinds of critical engagement.

The discussion is kicked offby Frank Hindriks, who coined the notion of an open mentality in his recent book The Structure of the Open Society (2025). He revisits Karl
Popper’s view on the demandingness of a liberal democracy and the challenges presented by a plurality of people who endorse sometimes conflicting values. Hindriks asks how liberal democracies can be protected in a time of rapid social and technological change with an unprecedented focus on identity. Contemporary polarized societies do not only come with stronger and opposite convictions, but also with more absolute identities and identity-based claims on others. People increasingly expect esteem from others who might vehemently disagree with them. This leads to an esteem deficit, with people wanting more than they can have, and giving less than they can give.

Against this background, Hindriks proposes the open mentality. This mindset has two components. First, toleration, which requires respect for those with whom you strongly disagree as well as critical engagement. Second, inclusivity, an open attitude towards people with diverse identities, but no guarantee of esteem. Hindriks proposal crucially distinguishes between what belongs to the public sphere (respect), and what belongs to the private sphere (esteem).

Daan Roovers subsequently zooms in on the dynamics of public opinion formation and the role of (new) media, focusing on critical public debate. In her recent book Critical
Publicity and its Epistemic Challenges (2025) she discusses the limitations and possibilities of our post-digital public sphere to counteract as the phenomena (partly)
responsible for the current polarization and fragmentation. According to Roovers we need to pay more attention to what she calls throughput legitimacy. A critical debate is often judged on two aspects: who takes part in it (input) and the outcomes of public debate (output). However, there is a third, often overlooked, aspect: the process itself (throughput): the machinery of publicity. That concerns how public discussions are conducted.

How is the confrontation between different viewpoints organised, and which role do information and expertise play in the debate? From Roovers’ perspective, a critical public discussion fulfills three functions: organise controversy, enable epistemic procedures, and open a reflection to the problem definition. It is these throughput procedures that are challenged in the digital public sphere, where interaction between participants is largely obfuscated, and the debate is largely moderated by nontransparent algorithms.

Maureen Sie will respond with a short comment on both contributions. She will pose some questions on what distinguishes Hindriks’ open mentality from developments that caused the pre-occupation with identity to begin with and zoom in on the distinction between the private and the public sphere, between esteem and respect. She will follow through with some questions about the throughput legitimacy and the prominent role of rationality and reason in this solution and question whether both Roovers and Hindriks presuppose a “deficiency model” of public science communication, a model that many people who work in science communication no longer adhere to and that might not be conducive to moving beyond polarisation and fragmentation. She will conclude with some questions on how philosophers could contribute to counteracting polarization, fragmentation and the related populist and authoritarian tendencies of our current society.

Hindriks, Frank. 2025. The Structure of the Open Society: Social Ontology Meets
Collective Ethics. Oxford University Press.

Popper, Karl. 1945. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton University Press
2013.

Roovers, Daan, 2025. Critical Publicity and its Epistemic Challenges. A Philosophical
Approach to Public Opinion Formation in a Post-Digital Public Sphere.

Sie, Maureen, Monsters and Fools. Looking for Common Ground Beyond Social Identity
Controversies (Submitted, Dec 2025), Based on: “De ander als wijzelf. Speels verzet tegen sociale categorisatie.”Special Issue, ANTW 116.2 (2024), pp. 126-

Science & Technology 3 – Science & Society

Susan Peeters - Between science and fiction: Neanderthal documentaries

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-09_Melbourne #lightningTalk • 🔝

Neanderthal research often highlights the exceptionality of modern humans, seen as decisively different and superior. Encounters between modern humans and
Neanderthals allegedly resulted in the latter's demise, both in research and in fiction.
Current perspectives shifttowards more dynamic views of deep history, acknowledging that Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted for thousands of years. This has repercussions for how we see ourselves. Documentaries about
Neanderthals play an important role in shaping public understanding of human evolution. We examine how Neanderthals have been represented in documentaries from the mid-twentieth century to the present, tracing key shifts in Neanderthal representations, from empathetic humans, to evolutionary failures and 'an other us'.
Particular attention is paid to how the issue of difference (human exceptionality) is linked to heroic narratives of achieving 'world mastery' and to masculinity and concepts of gender. At the same time, more recent documentaries reflect growing unease with these narratives, introducing themes of climate change, interdependence and shared ancestry. The collaboration between archaeology and philosophy may foster a more fluid conception of human identity, seeing ourselves not as exceptional but as deeply entangled within changing environments.

Vlasta Sikimić - When Algorithms Judge Science

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-09_Melbourne • 🔝

The increasing use of artificial intelligence in science evaluation raises a pressing metascientific question: how can algorithmic tools contribute to the optimization of scientific reasoning without undermining epistemic diversity, epistemic autonomy, and responsible judgment? I address this question by integrating a recent study on machine learning-based grant review with a normative analysis of epistemically responsible automation.

Algorithmic assessment promises efficiency gains in an increasingly overburdened peer-review system. For example, empirical studies in high-energy physics demonstrate that machine-learning models can predict the epistemic efficiency of research projects with moderate accuracy using proposal-level data such as team size, duration, and structure (Sikimić & Radovanović 2022). These results suggest that AI can serve as a useful heuristic for identifying structural patterns associated with successful knowledge production. However, such predictive success is domainsensitive and relies on carefully curated data, meaningful parameter choices, and awareness of unobservable variables that shape scientific outcomes.

From an epistemic perspective, full automation of grant review is undesirable.
Algorithmic systems trained on historical data risk reinforcing existing biases, narrowing the space of inquiry, and promoting algorithmic monocultures in funding decisions (Creel & Bright 2023). Moreover, generative AI systems introduce new challenges related to opacity, profiling, and the erosion of normative metascientific judgment. Grant allocation is not merely a predictive task but a value-laden practice that shapes the future direction of science, including its inclusiveness, exploratory capacity, and tolerance for epistemic risk.

The potential of automated science evaluation lies in AI systems functioning as advisory tools embedded within a human-centered evaluative framework. Key safeguards include field-specific modeling, transparency about data and parameters, locally stored evaluation data, and a rebuttal phase that allows applicants and human reviewers to contest and contextualize algorithmic recommendations.
Rebuttals should serve both as procedural safeguards and as mechanisms for strengthening critical reasoning and epistemic autonomy in human-AI evaluation loops. The central claim is that AI can support the optimization of scientific reasoning only if its use is constrained by human epistemic values and continuous human oversight. Therefore, responsible automation of science should be designed to cultivate epistemic values and virtues of researchers.

Creel, K. A., & KofiBright, L. (2023). Don't use machine learning to evaluate grants.
In Annual Conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.

Sikimić, V., & Radovanović, S. (2022). Machine learning in scientific grant review:
Algorithmically predicting project efficiency in high energy physics. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 12(3), 50.

Giles Howdle - Justifying Socially Disruptive Technologies: Can We? Must We?

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-09_Melbourne • 🔝

Socially disruptive technologies (SDTs) – technologies that destabilise established normative and conceptual frameworks – impose distinctive costs on those who must navigate the 'space of reasons' in their wake. Drawing on recent work characterising these costs as serious setbacks to persons' interests in exercising moral agency (Nickel 2020; Anderson, Hopster & Lundgren forthcoming), this paper asks: can developing and introducing SDTs be morally permissible, and do those responsible owe justifications to those affected?

I defend two claims. First, introducing SDTs can be permissible when the costs of disruption are outweighed by sufficiently weighty countervailing considerations – including, potentially, moral progress that replaces oppressive norms with better ones. Second, and more demandingly, even permissible introductions of SDTs generate residual duties of justification owed to those most severely affected. This follows from a general principle: infringing legitimate moral claims – even permissibly – obligates one to demonstrate that those claims received appropriate weight in deliberation (Dishaw 2025).

The central argumentative task is establishing that persons possess not merely interests but claim-rights to normative orientation. I argue that normative orientation – the capacity to navigate practical life using established normative landmarks – is partly constitutive of autonomous agency. Just as a ship's captain cannot exercise navigational autonomy without points of reference, agents cannot exercise autonomous agency without normative landmarks enabling reasonsresponsive deliberation. Given a core right to autonomy, we possess derivative claim-rights to its constitutive conditions, including normative orientation. SDTs, by definition, substantially challenge this orientation, thereby infringing these claims and triggering justificatory duties.

This argument highlights the importance of philosophical engagement in contexts of disruptive technological changes. If my conclusions are correct, then there are (often burdensome) duties of justification attached to decisions to develop and implement
SDTs. Philosophers and ethicists occupy an important role in helping the moral community to understand the shape of these duties and what is required to meet them. Ethical and philosophical work is thus not merely academic but integral to the moral ideal of mutual recognition and accountability – of understanding and providing 'what we owe to each other' (Scanlon 1998).

Anderson, J., Hopster, J., & Lundgren, B. (forthcoming). Defining socially disruptive technologies and reframing the ethical challenges they pose.

Dishaw, S. (2025). The right to a justification. Political Philosophy, 2(2), 496–520.

Nickel, P. J. (2020). Disruptive innovation and moral uncertainty. NanoEthics:
Studies of New and Emerging Technologies, 14(3), 259–269.

Scanlon, T.M. (1998). What We Owe to Each Other, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.

Luca Consoli - The embedded philosopher as a mode of engagement

#Wednesday-1100-1230 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-09_Melbourne • 🔝

This contribution presents the embedded philosopher as a distinct mode of philosophical engagement. With this term we refer to philosophers and ethicists of science working within a Faculty of Science, as part of its institutional and epistemic infrastructure. Drawing on the experience of the Institute for Science in Society (ISiS), we argue that embeddedness should be understood as a philosophically productive position that reshapes both how philosophy is done and what it can contribute.

Conceptually, the embedded philosopher plays a hybrid role that combines participation and critique. Rather than approaching science from an external, evaluative standpoint, embedded philosophers engage immanently with scientific practices, norms, and decision-making processes. This immanent engagement allows philosophical critique to operate from within the epistemic commitments of science itself, making explicit its implicit assumptions, normative orientations, and standards of justification. This position raises distinctive challenges, including the maintenance of critical independence, navigation of institutional and epistemic hierarchies, and the translation of philosophical reflection into actionable guidance.

We argue that this embedded mode of engagement is particularly well suited to facilitate good scientific practice. By being closely involved in everyday research contexts, embedded philosophers can contribute to methodological rigor, transparency, and ethical responsibility, while also fostering inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration. Embeddedness extends the stakes of engagement beyond internal scientific norms. Positioned at the interface between scientific communities and broader publics, embedded philosophers can critically reflect on and intervene in how scientific knowledge is communicated, justified, and mobilized in societal contexts, contributing to responsible outreach, policy engagement, and public trust in science.

As illustrations, we present three cases from our research: 1) ethical challenges surrounding the use of generative AI in higher education; 2) developing an assessment framework for the translational potential of biomedical animal studies; 3)
assessing the contribution of machine learning methods to the aims of science.
While not exhaustive, these cases show how the embedded philosopher can function as a mediator between epistemic, ethical, and societal dimensions of scientific practices. Embedded philosophy constitutes a distinctive and valuable response to the contemporary stakes of philosophical engagement.

Wednesday, 14:00–15:30 | Parallel Sessions 5

Ethics & Politics 4 – Practical and Historical Engagements

Wednesday, 14:00–15:30 | Parallel Sessions 5

Ethics & Politics 4 – Practical and Historical Engagements

Sietse van Mierlo - Engaging the Reader: Spinoza's Pedagogical Role in Schleiermacher's Über die Religion

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Langeveld_1-08 • 🔝

In Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern by Friedrich
Schleiermacher, Baruch de Spinoza is strikingly presented as an exemplary "religious" thinker. At first glance, this appears problematic. Spinoza's philosophy is systematically articulated and conceptually rigorous, whereas Schleiermacher explicitly demarcates religion from metaphysics and theoretical knowledge. How, then, can Spinoza occupy such a prominent position in a work that defines religion as Anschauung und Gefühl des Universums?

This paper argues that the tension arises from a misreading of the Reden as a theoretical treatise. Instead, Über die Religion is interpreted as a pedagogical text whose primary aim is not to define religion, but to actively guide the reader into a religious disposition. From this perspective, attention shifts to the function Spinoza fulfills within the movement of the text itself: not as a metaphysical point of reference, but as a provisional moment of orientation that necessarily recedes once religion is concretely articulated in positive forms.

Building on Schleiermacher's determination of religion as a passive, non-discursive, and non-objectifying mode of consciousness, the paper contends that the Reden function primarily as an exercise through which the reader is drawn into a specific way of relating to the whole. Spinoza appears in this context only in the early stages of the work, where the task is to detach the reader from a rationalistic reduction of religion and to open a perspective on the universe as totality.

Crucially, this role remains strictly provisional. Spinoza's philosophy relies on conceptual evidence and thus belongs to the domain of cognition. For this reason, it cannot function within the further elaboration of religion as positive praxis. Once religion is no longer merely introduced, but lived and differentiated in concrete religious forms, Spinoza ceases to function as a guiding figure. What remains is not metaphysics, but a cultivated religious consciousness that immediately experiences the individual as a manifestation of the whole.

The paper concludes that Schleiermacher's invocation of Spinoza is not a doctrinal claim, but a pedagogical strategy. Über die Religion engages its readers not by offering them a theory, but by transforming them as readers. Spinoza thus functions as a transitional moment within a text that understands philosophical engagement as a form of guided participation.

The Stakes of Engagement: Philosophy, Credibility, and the Work of Reading Headlines

Zainab Sabra - Philosophy, Credibility, and the Work of Reading Headlines

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Langeveld_1-08 • 🔝

In a present marked by ongoing violence and real-time media circulation, philosophy’s relevance lies in its capacity to interpret, assess, and respond to testimony as it appears in public discourse, particularly in news media. Philosophical engagement today is not limited to abstract theorizing; it involves examining how knowledge claims are received, contested, or dismissed in the interpretation of current events. This paper situates itself within this task by analyzing how testimonial credibility is constructed and undermined in contemporary news and political narratives.

Focusing on testimonies concerning Palestine from the 1980s – following Edward
Said’s The Right to Narrate – to the present, I argue that credibility cannot be reduced to competence and sincerity alone. Rather, it is shaped by the narrative frameworks within which testifiers are situated. Credibility is conferred or withheld through dominant narratives that structure public interpretation, determining in advance whose testimony is taken to count as evidence. As long as credibility is primarily granted through such narratives, testimonies that diverge from them are deprived of epistemic weight. As Mohammed El-Kurd observes in Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, Palestinians are repeatedly required to render their suffering legible within externally imposed narrative constraints, often being recognized only as victims or threats, but rarely as authoritative witnesses of their own reality.

In such contexts, the social identity of the testifier frequently takes precedence over the evidence presented. This dynamic constitutes a prejudicial dysfunction in testimonial practices, which, as Miranda Fricker explains, can take the form of either credibility excess or credibility deficit (Fricker 2007). I conclude by arguing that analyzing testimonial credibility under conditions of ongoing violence is not merely an application of epistemic theory to contemporary events. It exemplifies a central task of philosophy today: to examine how knowledge claims are authorized or dismissed in public discourse and to expose the narrative and institutional conditions that shape credibility itself. Philosophy’s engagement with the present consists in making visible the mechanisms through which evidence is overridden by identity and power, and in articulating the normative responsibilities of audiences who encounter testimony as it circulates in news and media. On this view, philosophical analysis becomes a form of engagement aimed at reclaiming the epistemic conditions under which testimony can be intelligible, actionable, and just.

Ties van Gemert - Scholarly Practices and Moral Virtues in the French Tradition of Historical Epistemology

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Langeveld_1-08 • 🔝

In response to a 1938 lecture by the philosopher H.J. Pos on the unity of science, the philosopher Léon Brunschvicg succinctly set out his view on the moral virtues derived from the scholarly practice of studying the history and philosophy of science.
First, Brunschvicg emphasized that the philosophical and historical inquiry into the natural sciences instills in the scholar a concept of necessity that can guide all their actions, making one not only a better historian but also a better human being.
Second, through the practice of studying the history of ideas, he insists that the scholar becomes intimately acquainted with 'the development of the human spirit'
and all its 'dramatic phases', thereby overcoming presentist prejudices, and abandoning the notion of history as linear and progressive (Brunschvicg in Pos 1938, 51).

In this presentation, I will trace this conception of the relation between scholarly practices and moral virtues of the historian and philosopher of science in France. My objective is to show that within the French academic milieu of the Third Republic, there existed a distinct humanist ideal associated with the practice of the history and philosophy of science – one that viewed human actions as governed by necessity, and social positions as determined by history.

First, I will explore this ideal in the writings of Hélène Metzger, both in her letters with
Otto Neurath and her reflections on fascism. Next, I will discuss the relation between philosophy and practice in the works and life of Jean Cavaillès. A resistance fighter shot by the Nazis, Cavaillès drew on the very same idea of necessity evoked by
Brunschvicg when asked about his activities: 'I believe we submit to the necessary everywhere' (Canguilhem 1967/1996, 28). Finally, I will demonstrate how this humanist ideal was appropriated by Louis Althusser during the 1960s, resulting in his idea of the practice of philosophy as "class struggle in theory". In conclusion, I will critique the idea that there are particular moral virtues accompanying the study of the history and philosophy of science, arguing that the connection between theory and practice is historically mediated, and often arbitrary and contingent.

Canguilhem, Georges. 1967/1996. Vie et mort de Jean Cavaillès. Paris: Éditions
Allia.

Pos, Hendrik-Jan. 1939. "L'Unité des sciences et le problème le valeurs." In Bayer, R. Les conceptions modernes de la raison. III. Raison et Valeur. Paris: Hermann & Cie.

Climate & Ecology – Ecology & Affect

Climate & Ecology – Ecology & Affect

Joost Wijffels - Love and Rage in the Anthropocene

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-06_Galway • 🔝

The urgent nature of the ecological crisis easily inspires both fear and desperation and begs for radical interventions and eco-activism. How should we navigate these complex emotions and, consequently, orient ourselves towards the Anthropocene?
This presentation argues that critical theory, which exhibits a similar ambivalence between hope and critique, can be instructive here. In particular, I argue that
Theodor Adorno's and Eve Sedgwick's theories can help us understand the potentials and limits of activism in the Anthropocene and the importance of reconciling a negativistic outlook with a more affirmative orientation.

To this end, this presentation opens by examining Adorno's hesitations about actionism, a fetishised form of activism that reiterates an instrumental and subjectcentred logic. Since Adorno saw this logic to undergird the status quo of domination, an actionist form of resistance risks reproducing rather than transforming the status quo. After considering whether these hesitations might apply to eco-activism, I consider the implications of Adorno's hesitations for his views on activism. I explain how these hesitations led him to endorse a highly negativistic form of resistance, one that is centred around self-critique and a negative categorical imperative, saying 'no'
to the present, and refusing to participate in the daily practices that contribute to widespread injustice. Yet as many activists will know, consistently engaging in refusal is draining. Thus, whilst not denying the importance of negativistic activism, this presentation closes by considering its limitations through the work of Eve
Sedgwick. As her notions of paranoid and reparative reading reveal, negativism or paranoia can stultify and paralyse those aiming to change the world and forecloses any meaningful engagement with the present, including a transformative one. After considering how Adorno's and the presenter's remarks exhibit signs of paranoid reading, this presentation concludes that a self-reflective and critical orientation to the world is crucial to eco-activism today, but that such efforts must always be paired with affirmative searches for a reparative otherwise.

Keywords: Activism, Actionism, Paranoia, Anthropocene, Affirmation

Aaron Morgan - Against the Climate "Crisis": Planetary Urgency and Colonial Ecology

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-06_Galway • 🔝

"Climate" and "crisis" are inseparably linked in mainstream environmental discourse.
This paper challenges environmentalism's over-reliance on a de-historicized concept of crisis and rhetorical appeals to climate anxiety and planetary urgency. Drawing on
Kyle Whyte's critique of "crisis epistemology," I argue that mainstream climate discourse is structured by a reactionary temporal framework that leverages urgency and anxiety to motivate partial or idealist solutions to environmental catastrophe.
Although global warming is undoubtedly a devastating phenomenon that continues to push geophysical systems towards irreversible tipping points, narrating this development as a "crisis" often backgrounds the longue durée of human-nature relations and their mediation by the socioecological structures and processes of colonial capitalism. In fact, this crisis epistemology itself has deep historical roots in the practices and ideologies of colonization; in other words, colonial terraforming projects and concerns about urgent ecosystem collapse are two sides of the imperial coin. Following political philosopher Malcom Ferdinand, I suggest that we think of crisis as a core feature of "colonial ecology," in an expansive socio-ecological sense.
This historical coincidence has relevance for contemporary environmental philosophy and its impact on public debate surrounding ecological issues. Taking
Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble as a paradigmatic text of recent academic theory, I demonstrate that this reactionary crisis epistemology undermines the critical potential of dominant approaches to environmental philosophy. The question then remains: what form might an adequate concept of crisis take? Drawing from scholars in Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Marxian critical theory, I conclude by proposing a methodological re-orientation for environmental philosophy.
Against universalizing or idealizing tendencies, theoretical accounts of the "climate crisis" must be grounded in the history and ongoing processes of colonial capitalism.

Zuzanna Zgierska - Magnetic Metonymy: Iron Meteorites, Colonial Matter, and Relational Ontology

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-06_Galway • 🔝

This paper develops the concept of magnetic metonymy as a material-semiotic practice, probing the dyadic Life–Nonlife division, which remains a violent metaphysical binary underlying the colonial and extractivist projects. Drawing on personal fieldwork in Greenland and artistic research with iron meteorites, this essay argues that meteoric “mnemonics” – the capacity of this extraterrestrial matter to store, erase, and overwrite magnetic histories – offer a relational ontology of difference. Vital materialism is critically problematised by considering animacy in terms of an entity’s affective or agentive qualities (Spinoza, Chen) rather than as a token of sentience. My written work further draws on speculative geophysics, phenomenology of magnetism (inspired by Luce Irigaray’s and Astrida Neimanis’s work), quantum philosophy (Karen Barad), and anti-colonial anthropology (Elizabeth
A. Povinelli, Kathryn Yusoff) to arrive at a proposal that reads magnetism as a mode of relation structured by proximity without fusion (capture) and difference without substitution.

The analysis is based on a number of art–science experiments conducted with
Indigenous communities and science labs that artificially alter the magnetic properties of iron meteorites through controlled heating and dissolution. The counterpractice of magnetic touching – or a re-inscription of sexuate difference into a meteorite – is used to expose the pattern of colonial modernity, which has only allowed certain kinds of bodies and materials to count as Life, and only under specific conditions. Therefore, these speculative geophysical interventions are interpreted not as animist breathing life into stones, but as practices that expose the social, political, and economic stratification embedded in matter itself. This paper situates magnetic metonymy as a material-semiotic system that operates through contiguity, in contrast to the poetics of metaphor based on assimilation, domination, and consumption. In addition to Hegelian sublation, feminist theories of touch and sexuate difference, Indigenous cosmologies, and the idea of geontopower, the essay proposes magnetic metonymy as a language for holding unresolved tensions between Life and Nonlife.

The research concludes by arguing that magnetic metonymy provides an ethics of restorative reciprocity: a material-semiotic practice of coexistence foregrounding historical specificity, uneven power relations, and the possibility of rewriting colonial narratives without erasing difference.

Works Cited

Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Ahmed, Sara. Duke
University Press, 2006.

Barad, Karen. “On Touching – the Inhuman That Therefore I Am.” Differences 23, no.
3, 2012, pp. 206–23.

Bryson, James F. J., et al. “Long-Lived Magnetism from Solidification-Driven
Convection on the Pallasite Parent Body.” Nature 517, no. 7535, 2015, pp. 472–75.

Daorana, Miyuki Qiajunnguaq. “The Anthropocene and the Importance of Indigenous
People.” University of Aarhus, 2024.

Juhl, Carsten. “Being and Origin – A Presentation of Pia Arke’s Exhuming Gesture.” Afterall, vol. 44, no. 1, 2017, pp. 22–31.

Salambo. Flaubert, Gustave. Sisley’s Ltd., 1904.

Goldstein, J. I., et al. “Iron Meteorites: Crystallization, Thermal History, Parent
Bodies, and Origin.” Chemie der Erde 69, no. 4, 2009, pp. 293–325.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14.

This Sex Which Is Not One. Irigaray, Luce. Cornell University, 1985.

Marder, Michael. “Should Plants Have Rights?” The Philosophers Magazine, no. 62, Jan. 2013, pp. 46–50.

Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Neimanis, Astrida.
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic. Ng, Karen. Oxford
University Press, 2020.

Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016.

Redfern, Simon. “Meteorite Is ‘Hard Drive’ From Space.” BBC News, 21 Jan. 2015.

Wei, Qingguo, et al. “Pressure Dependence on the Remanent Magnetization of FeNi Alloys and Ni Metal.” Physical Review B, vol. 90, no. 14, Oct. 2014.

Velasco, S., and F. L. Román. “Determining the Curie Temperature of Iron and
Nickel.” The Physics Teacher, vol. 45, no. 6, 2007, pp. 387–89.

Geologic Life. Yusoff, Kathryn. 2024.

## Feminist, Queer, Decolonial Philosophies 3 – Social Epistemology

Giulia Napolitano - What's Wrong with Echo Chambers? A Collective Epistemological Approach

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-07_Basel • 🔝

Echo chambers are typically understood as epistemic environments which filter out dissenting voices; passively, in the sense that dissenting voices never reach echo chambers, or actively, in the sense that dissenting voices are discredited as untrustworthy. Social epistemologists over the last decade have been debating what if anything is epistemically wrong with echo chambers. While several problems have been identified (Avnur, 2020; Ranalli & Malcom, 2023; Sheeks, 2023), there are also those who maintain that echo chambers are not necessarily epistemically problematic (Carey & Ventham, 2024; Fantl, 2021; Lackey, 2021), and that echo chambers may be formed entirely via rational processes of trust attribution (Begby, 2024; Dorst, 2023).

In this paper, we present a radically new account of echo chambers which provides additional explanations of what is epistemically wrong with them. Current accounts commonly consider echo chambers to be epistemic environments where individuals form their beliefs. Instead, we propose to look at echo chambers as a type of collective agents. Specifically, we argue that echo chambers are belief-based collective agents: epistemic agents which revolve around certain core beliefs. Based on this collective account of echo chambers, we argue that one intuitively problematic feature is that echo chambers are dogmatic epistemic agents. We then explore how this problematic collective feature of echo chambers can trickle down to individual rationality. We identify two ways in which individuals inhabiting echo chambers can be irrational as members of a dogmatic group agent: (i) through their reliance on a dogmatic testifier; and (ii) due to non-truth tracking incentives generated by their belief-based group membership.

The shiftto the collective epistemological perspective has several theoretical upshots. Not only does it bring to the surface novel and overlooked problematic aspects of echo chambers. It also provides a more principled and fruitful way of distinguishing between echo chambers and filter bubbles, and between the phenomena of intergroup polarization due to trust attributions, and echo chambers proper.

Avnur, Y. (2020). What's wrong with the online echo chamber: A motivated reasoning account. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 37(4), 578–593.

Begby, E. (2024). From belief polarization to echo chambers: A rationalizing account.
Episteme, 21(2), 519–539.

Carey, B., & Ventham, E. (2024). There is no fresh air: A problem with the concept of echo chambers. Episteme, 1–19.

Dorst, K. (2023). Rational Polarization. Philosophical Review 132 (3):355-458.

Fantl, J. (2021). Fake news vs. echo chambers. Social Epistemology, 35(6), 645–

Lackey, J. (2021). Echo Chambers, Fake News, and Social Epistemology. Oxford
University Press eBooks (pp. 206–227). Oxford University Press.

Ranalli, C., & Malcom, F. (2023). What's so bad about echo chambers? Inquiry (Oslo), ahead-of-print, 1–43.

Sheeks, M. (2023). The Myth of the Good Epistemic Bubble. Episteme, 20(3), 685– 700.

Lena Voorbergen - Justified Group Belief and Belief-based Coalitions

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-07_Basel • 🔝

We routinely ascribe beliefs and other attitudes to groups. Sometimes we go one step further and evaluate a collective belief’s epistemic status. For example, we may want to know whether the government’s past belief that masks are effective at mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic was justified.

What determines whether a group belief is epistemically justified? For epistemologists who subscribe to evidentialism, a tempting answer would be ‘the group’s evidence’. In this paper, I raise a challenge to group evidentialism by presenting a common type of group, the ‘belief-based coalition’, for which evidentialism yields the wrong verdicts.

Belief-based coalitions are groups whose membership is conditional on the endorsement of certain core beliefs. For instance, the Flat Earth Association only consists of members who believe that the earth is flat. People who lack the required belief do not join, and those who once did but later change their mind are likely to leave the group.

In joining and leaving belief-based coalitions, members take their evidence with them. This dynamic robs the group as such from opportunities to change its mind collectively. Furthermore, it ‘launders’ the group’s evidence by making it difficult for evidence that challenges the group’s beliefs to remain part of it. From the evidential perspective of the group itself, a belief-based coalition’s core beliefs will make sense (even if they seem absurd to outsiders).

This poses a challenge to evidentialism, because the aforementioned isolation and dogmatism can arise even without any outright violations of evidentialist principles.
Evidentialism can deny justification in cases of deliberate avoidance of evidence, or through normative defeat, but these scenarios do not necessarily apply in the presented model of belief-based coalitions. The dogmatism and isolation are downstream effects of the group’s structure and can emerge even if no participating individual behaves irrationally. This makes evidentialism too ‘permissive’ with respect to the justification of the core beliefs of belief-based coalitions. It grants epistemic justification where it should not.

Williams, D. (2022). Identity-defining beliefs on social media. Philosophical Topics, 50(2), 41–64.

Echo Chambers as a Form of Epistemic Resistance;
Protest Movements and Collective Epistemic Injustice

Pepijn Heynen

Keywords: echo chambers, epistemic resistance, protest movements

Pepijn Heijnen - Echo Chambers as a Form of Epistemic Resistance

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-07_Basel • 🔝

Echo chambers are generally seen as problematic social epistemic structures, as they actively exclude and discredit outside voices, leading to isolated epistemic communities that continuously reinforce their own ideology. Besides, they can be used as tools of social oppression as they can reinforce and expand power through epistemic control (Nguyen 2020). However, this assumes a level epistemic playing field, in which every person has similar epistemic power. Literature on epistemic injustice argues otherwise, by showing how marginalised communities often face (collective) testimonial and hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007; Pohlhaus 2020).
Therefore, I believe it to be important to critically assess whether echo chambers are always epistemically destructive, or whether they could be productive under certain epistemic conditions. I am particularly interested in the way in which echo chambers can be tools for protest movements, as these movements are often doubly involved in epistemic injustice; they are often fighting epistemic injustice, while at the same time being unjustly silenced – either pre-emptively, or by not properly being listened to (Medina 2023). I argue that under already distorted and unequal epistemic conditions, echo chambers can be potentially useful tools to amplify marginalised voices in society. By intentionally and strategically isolating its community, it can provide protective spaces that cultivate trust as well as the vocabulary to combat epistemic injustice. Echo chambers may therefore potentially be used as a form of epistemic resistance, with the explicit goal to amplify marginalised voices in such a way, that it equalises the epistemic playing field as much as possible. Using echo chambers in this way needs to consider certain important elements – such as room for internal critical dialogue and the understanding that it should only temporarily be used, until its members have cultivated enough epistemic power. Ultimately, I believe that clearly laying out the potential strategic use of echo chambers as epistemic resistance for protest movements is important to support the epistemic and political challenges marginalised groups in society face.

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (1st edn).
Oxford University Press Oxford.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001

Medina, J. (2022). Philosophy of Protest and Epistemic Activism. In L. McIntyre, N.
McHugh, & I. Olasov (Eds), A Companion to Public Philosophy (1st edn, pp. 123– 133). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119635253.ch13

Nguyen, C. T. (2020). Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles. Episteme, 17(2), 141–161.

Pohlhaus, G. (2020). Gaslighting and Echoing, or Why Collective Epistemic
Resistance is not a "Witch Hunt". Hypatia, 35(4), 674–686.

Methods 5 – Marxism & Critique

Florian Kouwenhoven - Trains of Thought: Marxist Metaphors

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-09_Melbourne #lightningTalk • 🔝

Philosophical reflections on (Marxist) revolution have often been articulated through train metaphors. This is no coincidence: Marx famously described revolutions as the 'locomotives of world history' (Benjamin 402). Subsequent Marxist thinkers have critically reworked this image, often in tones of lamentation and pessimism. Walter
Benjamin's metaphor of the emergency brake (Benjamin 402) expresses a melancholic desire for critical mastery; a moment of suspension from which history might be assessed. The fantasy of pulling the brake presupposes the possibility of stepping outside history's movement, an illusion that contemporary critical theory can no longer sustain. Slavoj Žižek's ironic engagement with Marx's metaphor, where he states that "the light at the end of the tunnel is most probably the headlight of a train approaching us from the opposite direction", recasts the idea of revolutionary progress as an impending catastrophe. I argue that engagement with the original
Marxist metaphor has only reinforced a nostalgic or passive conception of philosophy's role. Returning to Marx with a critical twist, I propose the metaphor of a hijacking as the true metaphor of revolution. Revolution, on this view, is an immanent and risky redirection of motion. Seen this way, philosophy's task is to contribute to the conditions under which such a hijacking becomes thinkable from within the moving train.

Benjamin, W. (1940). Paralipomena to "On the Concept of History." Retrieved from https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/benjamin_paralipomena.pdf

Žižek, S. (2017). The courage of hopelessness: Chronicles of a year of acting dangerously. Melville House.

Giorgi Natroshvili - Eastern Marxist Epistemology: Konstantin Megrelidze’s Problems of the Sociology of Thinking

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-09_Melbourne • 🔝

The current article reviews the lesser-known early 20th-century Soviet-Georgian thinker, Konstantin Megrelidze’s (1900–1944) philosophy and his theory of knowledge, based on his work, Problems of the Sociology of Thinking (1965). First published in 1965 in Russian, but originally written in 1936, before the post-war era of 1945, during the Great Political Purges in the Soviet Union.

The article first analyses the main theoretical tenets of Megrelidze’s thought and social theory, which are situated at the intersection of currents from both Eastern and
Western strains of thought of his time. Following the book’s structure, we first delve into an introspective analysis of individual consciousness and its cognitive operations, and then move to the collective level of social. Megrelidze’s social and epistemological framework and his theory of consciousness are constructed on three axes: Nikolai Marr’s functional semantics, Marx and Engels’s labour theory, as well as the method and empirical data of Gestalt psychology. The author introduces the totality of the socio-historical complex consisting of labour, language, and reasoning, which play a crucial role in the formation and development of societies or collective unities, where we see the dialectical movement of socio-historical process and development.

The paper argues that for Megrelidze, socialism envisioned by Marx will require new forms of knowledge and the redefinition of sciences, assuming that with his work, he introduces Soviet alternative to the humanities, social sciences, and linguistics.
Nonetheless, it is a unique form of Marxist thought that is not reducible to MarxismLeninism and opposes Western-centric discourse and its conception of Eastern
Marxism that needs to be actualized.

Keywords: Konstantin Megrelidze, Marxist Epistemology, Marxism-Leninism, Eastern Marxism

Gabriel Heinrichs - Measuring Through Social Deliberation

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-09_Melbourne • 🔝

Higher education quality cannot be adequately defined or measured, according to education policy experts (Weenink, 2025). Nevertheless, present-day evaluation systems for higher education quality can be fruitfully analysed from a philosophy of measurement perspective, as I show in my study of the Dutch accreditation system.
This system relies on the work of peer review panels that employ a measurement instrument which essentially comprises quality indicators and deliberation rules.

Although these indicators and rules are very detailed, their practical application requires extensive interpretation during panels’ social deliberation. I argue that particular deliberation and judgment aggregation issues that Dutch panels face, originate as measurement complexities that arose during the accreditation system’s historical development.

Social deliberation issues are not uncommon within academic peer review. For instance, peer reviewers may be biased (Lee et al., 2013), or they disregard differences between academic disciplines’ quality standards (Lamont, 2009). Similar issues beset Dutch accreditation panels, but what sets them apart is that they involve several stakeholders: accreditation panels must include teaching/research staff, but also students and labour market representatives. Panellists must bridge their differing stakeholder perspectives on what higher education quality is, in order to reach consensus about a higher education programme’s quality. To a significant degree, panellists’ perspectives correspond to their differing social locations within academia’s power structures. Over the Dutch accreditation system’s forty-year history, these structures have also impacted the development of the system’s criteria and rules, arguably skewing them towards the epistemic trustworthiness (Dormandy, 2020) of senior academics on the panel.

As a result of this historical development, today’s accreditation panels face social deliberation issues which stem from measurement complexities. Using examples from my qualitative study, I argue that the resulting panel verdicts may be inconsistent and unreliable from a judgment aggregation theory perspective (List, 2011), but still justifiable from a philosophy of measurement perspective. Finally, I argue that policymakers’ further fine-tuning of deliberation procedures can only improve the quality of panels’ verdicts, if they are considered in coherence with other crucial aspects of measuring social concepts (Cartwright & Runhardt, 2014).

Cartwright, N., & Runhardt, R. (2014). Measurement. In N. Cartwright & E.
Montuschi (Eds), Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction (pp. 265–287).
Oxford University Press.

Trust in Epistemology. Dormandy, K. (2020). Routledge.

How professors think: Inside the curious world of academic judgment. Lamont, M.
(2009). Harvard University Press.

Lee, C. J., et al. (2013). Bias in Peer Review. Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology, 64(1), 2–17.

List, C. (2011). Group Knowledge and Group Rationality. In A. I. Goldman & D.
Whitcomb (Eds), Social Epistemology: Essential Readings (pp. 221–241). Oxford
University Press.

Weenink, K. (2025). Higher education quality and its contexts [Doctoral dissertation].
Radboud University.

Maria Wołczyk - Locating the Contemporary Crisis of Critical Theory: Lukács, Adorno and Historiography of Philosophy

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-09_Melbourne • 🔝

Immediacy (Kornbluh 2024) indicts contemporary critical theory for foreclosing its alignment with the political-economic conjuncture and “embracing rather than disarticulating dominant logics.” Kornbluh identifies the strength of the legacy of critical theory as an ability to mediate reality, and thus to grasp the social origins of culture, including philosophy. This positions “critical theory” in the lineage of Marxist critiques of “bourgeois philosophy,” or “ideology,” proposing the determination of thought by social conditions.

Simultaneously, the debate over “Western Marxism” has gathered critiques (Losurdo, Rockhill, Foster) of critical theory’s foundational figures for “revising” Marxist thought, shifting critiques of capitalist society into metaphysics. Zizek emphatically writes that Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment “accomplished [a] fateful shiftfrom concrete socio-political analysis to philosophicoanthropological generalization,” treating “instrumental reason” as a “quasitranscendental ‘principle’ or ‘foundation’” of capitalist social relations (2000, 312).

This contradiction in critical theory’s legacy points to an unexamined question of historiography of philosophy, crystallized in the opposition between György Lukács’s
The Destruction of Reason and Dialectic of Enlightenment. While Lukács and
Adorno are often reconciled through their early works on culture, their mature positions on historicizing theory form an unresolved contradiction. Lukács insists philosophical problems are directly posed by developments in material conditions, rendering philosophy responsible to answer correctly. Adorno and Horkheimer, by contrast, trace an immanent, destructive development of Reason itself, culminating in a decline of bourgeois modernity.

Only by confronting the unresolved relationship between immanent critique and materialist historiography can critical theory recover its transformative potential. I suggest that the Frankfurt School’s silence over late Lukács is symptomatic of their inability to propose a materialist historiography of philosophy to replace Lukács’s determinism, a failure reverberating till today. I will outline the issues of this in examples from contemporary theory, particularly (new) materialist theories that contradictorily rely on positing an immanent development of philosophy to justify their relevance. Finally, I will briefly take recourse to less obvious Frankfurt thinkers – Benjamin and Sohn-Rethel – to re-historicize the founding contradictions of critical theory.

Immediacy. Kornbluh, Anna. 2024. Verso Books.

Zizek, Slavoj. 2000. “From History and Class Consciousness to the Dialectic of
Enlightenment... And Back.” New German Critique Autumn 2000 (81): 107–23.

Aesthetics & Culture 3 – Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Creativity in the Age of AI

Panel Description

Contemporary computational models increasingly destabilize traditional notions of creativity and authoriality within the philosophy of art. By prioritizing the products of intelligence over its processes, the so-called Turing paradigm tends to overlook the role of metaphysical indeterminacy in creative acts, reducing creativity to a behavioral or functional criterion. This panel brings together a philosopher, a composer, and a poet to reconsider these categories in the age of artificial intelligence. Interweaving theoretical reflection with two case studies of AI-embedded artworks, the panel aims to initiate a renewed discussion of both the possibilities and the structural limits of artificial intelligence in relation to human creativity.

Errol Boon - One Last Miracle: On the Metaphysics of Creativity in the Age of Artificial Omniscience

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-08_Harvard • 🔝

The panel opens with the paper One Last Miracle: Metaphysical Variations on
Creativity and Artificial Intelligence, which challenges the prevailing tendency in contemporary philosophy to construe creativity as a psychological structure rather than as a metaphysical origin. This empirical turn supports the tendency to understand aesthetic values as, in principle, computable: identifiable “aesthetic properties” traceble by predictable rules. The paper argues that, in attempting to psychologize technology, thinkers such as Margaret Boden ultimately risk technologizing the psyche itself. Against this backdrop, a different philosophical lineage – from Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Hannah Arendt – understands ontological indeterminacy as the condition of possibility for a metaphysical account of creativity.
On this view, creativity is less a rule-governed capacity than an unruled relation to rules: a promise of inexplicability within a world increasingly organized around prediction and control.

Riccardo Ancona - Zwischenheit: A Human-Machine Dialogue on Music Understanding and the Situatedness of Listening

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-08_Harvard • 🔝

A phenomenological exploration of the limits of machinic accounts of creativity is offered in the first case study, the audiovisual performance Zwischenheit (2025).
Performed live during the panel, the work is inherently discursive and selfexplanatory. It consists of an improvised conversation between the composer and a language model, in which the latter is invited to reflect on soundscapes it "listens to"
via an audio-captioning algorithm. Whereas neural-network engineering typically treats "music understanding" as an a priori computational task, Zwischenheit seeks a speculative, empirical, and situated alternative. The live exchange unfolds contingently, yet consistently foregrounds the gap between embodied cognition and learned statistical patterns. In this way, the unsituatedness of machine listening emerges not as a contingent limitation, but as an epistemological impossibility of genuinely understanding music.

Vincent Cellucci - Resurrection Aesthetics: Poetry & LLMs

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Van_der_Goot_M2-08_Harvard • 🔝

The second case study, resurrection (2025), is a litany poem in couplet form that probes the limits of poetic production by Large Language Models. Initially conceived as an experiment in generating an infinite poem using AI, the project revealed the insufficiency of current models and subsequently evolved into an act of human– machine co-creation and a methodological inquiry into more productive forms of collaboration. Drawing on Max Bense's distinction between "artificial" and "natural"
poetry, the work juxtaposes machine-generated verse with human poetic creativity.
In its current instantiation as an interactive poetry mural, resurrection (2025) gathers input data to foreground the comparatively open-ended, potentially infinite generativity of human poetic invention against the bounded combinatorial logic of machine output. Both case studies situate artificial intelligence within feedback loops of reading–writing, as theorized by Lori Emerson: a networked practice in which writing is tracked, indexed, and algorithmized, such that systems simultaneously read our writing and write our reading.

Science & Technology 4 – Ontology & Technology

Anna Sivera van der Sluijs - Epistemic Agency in an AI-Mediated Future

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Langeveld_1-02 #lightningTalk • 🔝

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming integrated in our daily lives. As a socially disruptive technology, it challenges our current understanding of philosophical concepts (Hopster et al., 2023). One such concept is epistemic agency: the capacity to control and justify one’s beliefs, which is impacted when traditional human cognitive tasks are delegated to AI (Coeckelbergh, 2025). Dominant sociotechnical imaginaries often frame AI through binary lenses of utopian techno-solutionism or dystopian techno-phobia, thereby shaping future directions while excluding diverse public perspectives (Sartori & Theodorou, 2022).

Drawing on a 4E-inspired understanding of cognition and ethics (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) (Van Grunsven et al., 2024), this research explores a participatory approach in the form of a moral imagination workshop. Nonexpert participants engage through the making of speculative 'magical' machines (Andersen & Wakkary, 2019) that protect their epistemic agency. These co-created machines act as conversation starters for moral reflection, allowing individuals to bypass technical constraints and articulate their moral values for a technologicallymediated future.

The study both aims to identify the values desired by the public to inform the conceptual engineering of epistemic agency and to develop a replicable participatory method for inclusive ethical inquiry thereby bridging the gap between abstract philosophical theory and situated

Andersen, K., & Wakkary, R. (2019). The Magic Machine Workshops. CHI
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), 1–
Beyond disagreements on what the SGP is about, there are also disputes concerning what meaning amounts to, resulting in scholars talking past one another without sufficiently justifying the assumptions underpinning their corresponding solutions.

Rather than defending a particular theory of grounding, this paper argues that advancing the SGP requires a meta-analysis of the problem itself. I suggest that such a meta-analysis must address two interrelated dimensions. First, it must acknowledge the observer-context-dependent nature of meaning attribution.
Approaches to grounding are shaped not only by epistemic considerations but also by normative values embedded in disciplinary traditions and technological contexts.
Making these value commitments explicit is necessary for a more constructive debate. Second, the analysis must account for the ways in which the SGP bears on social practices. Judgments about whether artificial systems are grounded carry moral, legal, and epistemic consequences that have been severely overlooked in the debate. I put these two levels of analysis in dialogue by reframing the SGP through the lenses of philosophy of science and contemporary discussions of the role of values in theoretical research. Finally, I propose a new methodological framework for the SGP that explicitly resists an over-theorized non-pragmatic approach by placing the divergency of context-dependent perspectives on grounding at the core of a revised SGP methodology.

Harnad, S. The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena 42, pp. 335-346, 1990.

Harnad, S. Language Writ Language: LLMs, ChatGPT, Meaning and Understanding, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2025.

Li, J., and Mao, H. The Difficulties in the Symbol Grounding Problem and the
Direction for Solving It. Philosophies 7, no. 5, 2022.

Lyre, H. The State Space of Artificial Intelligence, Minds and Machines 30, pp. 325347, 2020.

Mollo, C., and Millière, R. The Vector Grounding Problem.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369791950

Searle, J. Minds, Brains and Programs, Behavioral and Brain Science, vol. 3, pp.
417-457, 1980.

Thijs Latten - The Ontology of Engineering a Quantum Computer: Connecting the Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics to Engineering Practice

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Langeveld_1-02 • 🔝

The interpretations of quantum mechanics are rarely connected to the significant successes of quantum mechanics in quantum technology – despite calls in the philosophy of science to bring ontological considerations closer to successful experimental and technological practice (e.g., Chang, 2009, 2022; Hacking, 1983;
Vermaas, 2005). In this paper, I explore one way to bring the largely empirically equivalent interpretations of quantum mechanics closer to the empirical world: I assess the ontological assumptions of engineers who aim to build a quantum computer.

Hasok Chang argues that for any activity to be intelligible, certain ontological principles need to be assumed (Chang, 2009, 2022), such as how the activity of narration presupposes persistence of entities over time, or how intervening only makes sense if one presupposes a notion of causality. In this talk, I analyse a successful engineering practice for physically realising qubits, namely, quantum dot spin qubits, and reflect on the ontological principles that are assumed in some of the activities of these engineers.

I argue that some essential engineering activities presuppose ontological principles that certain interpretations do not accommodate. For example, textbook quantum mechanics does notoriously not accommodate the principle of persistence of quantum systems, but engineers require the persistence of electrons to make the initialisation, manipulation, and readout of quantum dots spin qubits intelligible. Such ontological principles required for the intelligibility of engineering activities provide a novel ground for assessing interpretations. I formulate a challenge to the interpretations of quantum mechanics to accommodate the ontological principles of engineering activities. Lastly, I warn against a literalist interpretation of the ontology that arises from the practices and argue that much care is needed to avoid building an ontology on outdated forms of understanding.

Scientific Understanding. Chang, H. (2009). Ontological Principles and the
Intelligibility of Epistemic Activities. In H. W. de Regt et al. (Eds.), (pp. 64–82).
University of Pittsburgh Press.

Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science. Chang, H.
(2022). Cambridge University Press.

Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural
Science. Hacking, I. (1983). Cambridge University Press.

Vermaas, P. E. (2005). Technology and the conditions on interpretations of quantum mechanics. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 56(4), 635–661.

Aliah Yacoub - Socially Disruptive Technologies and the Phenomenology of Solidarity

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Langeveld_1-02 • 🔝

This article examines how Socially Disruptive Technologies (SDTs) fundamentally transform both the practice and the phenomenology of solidarity. Focusing on technologically mediated contexts such as algorithmic platforms, data infrastructures, and digitally organized labor, it analyzes how solidarity is reshaped along four interrelated dimensions: embodiment, temporality, spatiality, and epistemic uncertainty. Rather than approaching solidarity as a fixed moral principle or political ideal, the article treats it as a lived, situated practice whose conditions of possibility are increasingly structured and constrained by technological systems.

Drawing on phenomenological analysis informed by concrete cases of platform labor and digital mediation, I argue that SDTs affect solidaristic relations through three distinct but overlapping modes of impact: fostering, suppressing, and manipulating solidarity. First, technologies may foster solidarity by enabling new forms of collective coordination, visibility, and mutual recognition across distance. Second, they may suppress solidarity by fragmenting shared experience, individualizing responsibility, and obscuring lines of accountability within complex sociotechnical systems. Third, and most problematically, SDTs may actively manipulate solidaristic orientations by steering affective responses, shaping epistemic horizons, and instrumentalizing collective identification for economic or political ends.

Across these modes, the article shows that SDTs introduce disruptions that are not merely practical or institutional but deeply phenomenological. They reshape how vulnerability is encountered and recognized, how temporal commitments are formed and sustained, how spatial distance and proximity are experienced, and how shared knowledge and trust are established under conditions of algorithmic opacity. These disruptions are particularly pronounced in contexts marked by global asymmetries, where technological mediation often intensifies existing forms of precarity, invisibility, and unequal exposure to risk.

The central question driving the article is whether these cumulative practical and phenomenological transformations amount to a conceptual disruption of solidarity itself. By systematically mapping the scope and character of these disruptions, the article clarifies what is at stake in contemporary appeals to solidarity in technologically mediated contexts. In doing so, it prepares the ground for a critical reassessment of whether existing philosophical accounts of solidarity can adequately capture solidaristic relations under conditions of pervasive technological disruption, or whether new conceptual resources are required.

Wednesday, 16:00–17:00 | Keynote III

Keynote III: Megan Blomfield - How Should Philosophers Engage with Climate Change? Integration versus Isolation

#Wednesday-1600-1700 • Room: #Sanders_0-03 • 🔝

In discussions about how philosophers should engage with the problem of climate change, one key question that has been raised is whether they should adopt an integrationist or isolationist methodology. Roughly speaking, isolationists treat climate change as a problem that can and should be dealt with separately from other matters of global justice (such as poverty, inequality and the legacies of historical injustice – see e.g. Posner & Weisbach). Integrationists, on the other hand, hold that questions of climate justice can only be answered by considering climate change in conjunction with these other problems (see e.g. Caney). In this talk I will argue that the difference between these two approaches appears to be overstated. Even climate justice isolationists must take various ‘other’ global injustices into consideration, because these injustices are an integral part of the normative problem that climate change poses.

Biography

Megan was born and raised in Sheffield. She studied philosophy at the Universities of Bristol (BA, PhD) and Toronto (MA), and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the
Stanford Center for Ethics in Society. After a lectureship at the University of Bristol, she returned to Sheffield in 2018 as Lecturer in Political Philosophy.

Megan’s research focuses on global justice, climate change, and the environment.
Her 2019 book, Global Justice, Natural Resources, and Climate Change, argues that considering what fair global resource sharing would require helps clarify the ethical challenges raised by climate change.

She has since worked on land rights in a changing climate, co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Applied Philosophy and collaborating with the Peak District
National Park Authority on climate-related challenges in the region. From September 2025 to June 2027, she will hold a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for her book project, Global Responsibilities in a Changing Climate. The project examines responsibility for climate-related harms, whose causes lie not only in anthropogenic climate hazards but also in their interaction with social and ecological vulnerabilities.

Megan’s broader work addresses climate engineering governance, epistemic injustice in asylum adjudication, reparations for historical injustice, and the links between climate change, colonialism, and global injustice.

Susana Carvalhodosreis - A Meta-Analysis of the Symbol Grounding Problem

#Wednesday-1400-1530 • Room: #Langeveld_1-02 • 🔝

The Symbol Grounding Problem (SGP) concerns the possibility of intrinsic meaning in AI: how can a system that operates solely through internal, (sub)symbolic relations refer to entities in the world, given its lack of direct contact with that world (i.e. given its ungroundedness)? Since Harnad's (1990) original formulation, the SGP has been interpreted in different ways. Some view its solution as enabling artificial systems to understand language (Li and Mao 2022), while others explicitly reject this reading, distinguishing semantic content from such higher-level cognitive capacities (Mollo and Millière 2023). A further line of critique views the SGP as a theoretical framework for conceptualizing artificial minds (Lyre 2020) or even distinguishing human and artificial intelligence (Harnad 2025).

2026-05-15 @ 21:31 Changes that still need to be made:

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  1. For some treatments, see e.g. Jansen (2017), Molinari (2022), Murphy (2005), Rucińska & Weichold (2022), Szanto (2017), Walton (1990). ↩︎

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