Explore every episode of the podcast Annual Lectures, Symposiums, and Events

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

These are among the urgent questions to be addressed by our panel of four distinguished philosophers, chaired by the radio and TV presenter, Ritula Shah.

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

In this talk, Professor Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature.

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

A political philosopher, he has worked on questions of inequality, disadvantage,social justice, and questions of public policy, and in his Address he explored the positive role of ceremonies in a meaningful life and how ceremonies can help us to think about human values.

Stephen Hawking's proclamation that philosophy is dead was clearly hyperbole. But when it comes to understanding the fundamental nature of reality, has philosophy really got anything left to contribute? Does the rise of physics demand the end of metaphysics?

Debating these questions are Carlo Rovelli (Centre de Physique Théorique of the Aix-Marseille University), Eleanor Knox (King’s College London) and Alex Rosenberg (Duke University) with the BBC’s Ritula Shah in the chair.

Over the past two decades, our view of the ideals for science in society has changed. Discussions of the roles for values in science and changes in the views on the responsibilities in science have shifted the understanding of science from ideally value-free to properly value-laden. This shift, however, seems to remove a key difference between science and politics, as now both science and politics are value-laden, and disputes in both can arise from value disagreements. If science is not value-free (nor should it be), what differentiates science from politics? Heather Douglas lays out norms for scientific inquiry that make it distinct in practice from politics and argues that understanding and defending these differences help to protect science from abuses of power.

Heather Douglas is a philosopher of science who works on the relationships among science, values, and democratic publics. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University, Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh (2021-2022), and a AAAS fellow. She is the author of "Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal" (2009), "The Rightful Place of Science: Science, Values, and Democracy" (2021), and editor of the book series "Science, Values, and the Public" for University of Pittsburgh Press.

Justyna Bandola-Gill, a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, offers a response.

Axel Honneth’s 2021 Royal Institute of Philosophy Dublin Lecture seeks briefly to reconstruct the history of conceptual disputes about the meaning of work from the beginning of capitalist industrialisation. Initially, the only kind of activity that counted as work in the proper sense was the industrialised manufacture of goods. Subsequently, this extremely narrow view of work was challenged by a succession of social actors who attempt to expand the definition by interpreting additional kinds of activity as work. At the present juncture, there is widespread acceptance of the view that caring and curative activities, be they in private households or in public facilities, should also count as work in the strict sense. However, this new, broader notion of work poses the problem of how to distinguish socially important work from activities performed for merely private ends. Honneth concludes with a proposal for resolving this conceptual difficulty.

Axel Honneth holds professorships at both Columbia University and the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. His work focuses on social-political and moral philosophy, especially relations of power, recognition, and respect. One of his core arguments is for the priority of intersubjective relationships of recognition in understanding social relations. He has been awarded the Ernst Bloch-Preis from the City of Ludwigshafen, the Bruno-Kreisky Prize from the Karl-Renner Stiftung in Vienna and the Ulysses Medal, University College Dublin’s highest honour.

Certain philosophies describe us as prone to forms of attachment that are illusory, and promise to indemnify us against the hazards of life by exposing such illusions. One such hazard is that of transience and temporal life itself, and it is sometimes urged that since the present is the only genuine reality, attachments to the past or the future are forms of illusion we can and should be free of. In the 2021 Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Cardiff Lecture, Richard Moran questions the ideal of “living in the present” and so escaping the contingencies and loss that are part of temporal life.

Richard Moran is the Brian D. Young professor of philosophy at Harvard University. His primary philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind and moral psychology, aesthetics, the philosophy of literature, and the later Wittgenstein. His book, "Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge" was one of the most lauded and influential works in the field in recent times. His most recent book is "The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony and Intersubjectivity".

The terms 'systemic injustice' and 'structural injustice' are often used interchangeably and are often equated with 'institutional injustice.' But in order to understand these different forms of injustice, we should have a clear idea of what they are and how to distinguish them. Using racism as a paradigm case, Sally Haslanger sketches an account of society as a complex system and shows how relations that make up the structures are constituted by social practices. This helps us locate some of the leverage points for social change.

Sally Haslanger is Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT. She has published in metaphysics, theory of knowledge, feminist theory, and critical race theory. Her work links issues of social justice with contemporary work in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Haslanger is deeply committed to promoting diversity in philosophy and beyond, and was the founder and convener of the Women in Philosophy Task Force. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.

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

The expert panel of this year's Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Symposium, chaired by award-winning journalist Ritula Shah (formerly at the BBC), discuss these issues and more, thinking of ways we might address them.

The Panel:
Mark Coeckelbergh, Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the Philosophy of Department of the University of Vienna. 

Shannon Vallor, Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also appointed in Philosophy. 

Linda Eggert, Early Career Research Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy, at Balliol College, and the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. 

Allan Dafoe is a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind leading work on Frontier Safety and Governance.

Ritula Shah (chair) is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. She is the presenter of ‘Calm Classics’ every weekday evening on ClassicFM. Ritula left the BBC in April 2023, after a career spanning almost 35 years. 

Find out more about the panel here: https://royalinstitutephilosophy.org/event/is-ethical-ai-a-fantasy/