Category Archives: Seminars

Events for researchers

Dan Zeman on New Applications of the Assessment-Sensitivity Framework

29 Saturday Nov 2025

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We are pleased to host a guest talk by Dan Zeman (MLAG, University of Porto).

The talk is on campus only. Non-KCL attendees are welcome but should register in advance. Details below.

Date and Time

Tuesday Dec 2nd, 2025 at 13:30-15:00 UK Time (UTC)

Location

Room PB 508, Philosophy Building, Strand, London WC2B 4BG. Access via King’s Strand campus entrance and then King’s Building.

Accessibility. If you have special access needs, please send an email to julien.dutant@kcl.ac.uk for us to ensure that you can reach the room.

Non-KCL attendees are welcome but must register by sending an email to julien.dutant@kcl.ac.uk by Monday Dec 1st, 13:00 UTC and should check in as visitors upon arrival with the security desk at the Strand Building entrance (Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS).

Title and Abstract

Dan Zeman

New Applications of the Assessment-Sensitivity Framework

The idea that various expressions in natural language are assessment-sensitive (that is, their denotation depends not only on the context of utterance, but also on the context of assessment) is not new. Authors such as MacFarlane (2003, 2005, 2009, 2014), Egan, Hawthorne & Weatherson (2005), Lasersohn (2005, 2016), etc. have applied this idea to a large array of perspectival expressions such as predicates of taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral terms, epistemic modals, gradable adjectives, knowledge attributions, conditionals, future contingents, etc. In this presentation, I attempt to make a prima facie case that the framework can be extended to other natural language expressions, including some socially relevant ones. For example, the view is suitable as an ameliorative account of gender terms (“man”, “woman”, “non-binary”); it seems to offer a simple treatment of dogwhistles (“inner city”, “welfare”); and it can be applied to expressives (“jerk”, “asshole”) and perhaps slurs. To be sure, in order to apply to such expressions, various modifications of the core idea of the framework will have to be introduced. Although many details remain to be ironed out, I take the prospect of applying the assessment-sensitivity framework to such expressions to show both its fruitfulness and its capacity to illuminate important social phenomena.

Organization

The talk is hosted by the Formal Methods Research group, Department of Philosophy, King’s College London.

Fabrice Correia and Sven Rosenkranz on Higher-Order Tense Realism

24 Friday Oct 2025

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We are pleased to host a guest talk by Fabrice Correia (Professor of Analytic Philosophy, University of Geneva), presenting joint work with Sven Rosenkranz, LOGOS/University of Barcelona on Higher-Order Tense Realism.

The talk is on campus only. Non-KCL attendees are welcome but should register in advance. Details below.

Date and Time

Tuesday Oct 28th, 2025 at 17:30-19:00 UK Time (UTC)

Location

Room PB 508, Philosophy Building, Strand, London WC2B 4BG. Access via King’s Strand campus entrance and then King’s Building.

Accessibility. If you have special access needs, please send an email to julien.dutant@kcl.ac.uk for us to ensure that you can reach the room.

Non-KCL attendees are welcome but must register by sending an email to julien.dutant@kcl.ac.uk by Mondy 27th, 20:00 UTC and should check in as visitors upon arrival with the security desk at the Strand Building entrance (Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS).

Title and Abstract

Fabrice Correia & Sven Rosenkranz

Higher Order Tense Realism

Realism about tense comes in various forms. Kit Fine (“Tense and Reality”, 2005 and “The Reality of Tense”, 2006) offers a helpful taxonomy. In our paper “Eternal Facts in an Ageing Universe” (2012), we improve upon this taxonomy, identifying a further type of view that Fine leaves out: Dynamic Absolutism. Both these taxonomies construe the different versions of tense realism in terms of first-order quantification over facts or states of affairs. Our goal is to show that the logical space of these first-order tense-realist positions can be replicated using higher-order quantification instead. Along the way, we rebut an argument given by Lukas Skiba in his “Higher-Order Being and Time” (2025) to the effect that there is no coherent higher-order version of Dynamic Absolutism.

Organization

The talk is hosted by the Formal Methods Research group, Department of Philosophy, King’s College London.

BBLOC Philosophy of Physics Seminar Series

07 Friday Feb 2020

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The Birmingham-Bristol-London-Oxford-Cambridge Philosophy of Physics Seminar Series is restarting! This is a research seminar for philosophers of physics across the South of England to meet each term, hosted at King’s College London. 

The next two events will take place on Monday 23rd March at 5pm in Bush House (SE) 1.02 and Thursday 21st May at 4:30pm in K2.40, King’s Building, KCL Strand Campus. The speakers will be Emily Adlam and James Read.

For more details see: https://kingsphilosophy.com/bbloc/

KHOPS – 08/11/19 – Peter Dews – ‘Transcendental and Objective Idealism in Schelling’s Early Philosophy’

05 Tuesday Nov 2019

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King’s History of Philosophy Seminar will meet regularly throughout the academic year at King’s College London.  The Seminar aims to promote discussion of methods and approaches to the History of Philosophy as well as of thinkers and topics within the tradition.  We wish to encourage contextual and interdisciplinary perspectives, and welcome researchers in disciplines such as History, Theology, and Political Theory as well as Philosophy.  Meetings take place on Fridays from 11am to 1pm.  All welcome. For inquiries contact John Callanan (john.callanan@kcl.ac.uk)

This Friday we are welcoming Peter Dews (https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/dewsp24209/peter-dews)

Peter Dews

who will be speaking on ‘Transcendental and Objective Idealism in Schelling’s Early Philosophy’  – Philosophy Building, Room 405 – 11am-1pm,

Frege Workshop

25 Friday Oct 2019

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The department will be hosting a workshop on the philosophy of Gottlob Frege on Friday 1st of  November in Room 405, Philosophy Building.

11am-1pm: Robert May (University of California, Davis): ‘Sense’

Abstract: What is sense? Frege’s answer is this: Sense is what makes a reference thinkable such that in virtue of thinking this way an agent has grounds for making a judgement. In this talk, I explore this conception, which places sense at the crux of Frege’s account of judgement. The central claim is that sense is a composite notion, split between what makes a reference thinkable (mode of determination) and how we think of references (mode of presentation). These are related via grasp: an agent who grasps a mode of determination of a reference has a mode of presentation of that reference, and accordingly has grounds for making a judgement. This is crucial to understanding how Frege responded to the threat to logicism posed by the identity puzzle, viz. that a = b requires a special act of recognition in judgement. But it does, perhaps surprisingly, leave open the analysis of a = a.

2.30pm-4.30pm: Mark Textor and Eliot Michaelson: ‘Frege on Thinking in Signs and Sense’

Abstract: Contemporary Fregeans standardly take the theory of sense and reference to apply to natural languages, and to earn its keep by helping to explain communicative success and failure in such languages. So construed, Frege’s theory of sense and reference faces serious difficulties. We argue for an alternative understanding of Frege’s project: following Humboldt, Trendelenburg, and others, Frege held that languages, systems of signs, are primarily means of thought and that beings like us can only think ‘in signs’. On this alternative construal of Frege’s work, his theory of sense and reference applies first and foremost to the sentences in which we think rather than sentences of natural languages like English or German. Not only is this understanding of Frege historically motivated, but viewing his work in this manner actually makes many of the puzzling features of the theory which have so preoccupied more contemporary Fregeans effectively disappear.

Date: Friday 1st November (11am- 4.30pm)

Venue: Room 405, Philosophy Building

The Ethics of… Exhibiting

12 Thursday Sep 2019

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Prof. Sarah Fine will be chairing a panel discussion on the ethics of exhibiting to be held at the Photographer’s Gallery on Wednesday 25th September. This is part of an ongoing collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery and the Centre for Philosophy and the Visual Arts at King’s College London.

Speakers include the playwright and researcher, Raminder Kaur (University of Sussex); anthropologist and art historian Christopher Pinney (University College London); curator and cultural historian Mark Sealy (Autograph ABP). 

THE ETHICS OF… EXHIBITING

Wednesday 25th September

18:30 – 20:30

The Photographers’ Gallery

Click here for details

Seamus Bradley (Leeds) at King’s Formal Methods seminar

10 Wednesday Oct 2018

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“Belief models, aggregation and impossibility”

Friday Oct 12th – 14:00-16:00
Room 508, Philosophy Building

Abstract:
The “Belief Models” framework is a very general formal theory of rational belief. It encompasses propositional logic belief sets, but also ranking functions and lower previsions (i.e. lower probabilities). De Cooman (2005) shows that AGM-style expansion and revision operators can be defined in this framework. In this paper I will discuss aggregation of belief models, and draw some connections to various well-known impossibility results for aggregation.

King’s History of Philosophy Seminar

18 Tuesday Sep 2018

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[Updated] The KHOPS schedule for this year is as follows:

Semester 1
October 26th – Mogens Laerke (CNRS, Paris), On Spinoza – K0.19, Strand Campus, King’s College London
November 16th – Susanne Sreedhar (Boston University), On Hobbes – Rm 405, Philosophy Building, Stand Campus, King’s College London
December 7th -Anastaisa Berg (Cambridge) – On Kant – Small Committee Room, Strand Campus, King’s College London
Semester 2
January 25th – Julia Borcherding (Cambridge) – On Conway –  Rm 405, Philosophy Building, King’s College London
February 15th – Jeremy Dunham (Durham) – On James – Small Committee Room, Strand Campus, King’s College London
March 29th – Eric Watkins (UC San Diego) – On Kant – Small Committee Room, Strand Campus, King’s College London

Click here for more details.

 

Art and Philosophy at Tate Britain

25 Wednesday Apr 2018

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Sacha Golob, Vanessa Brassey and Emma Syea will be leading a series of art/philosophy discussions at Tate Britain over the summer in response to their hugely popular All Too Human show (Bacon, Freud, Rego, Souza and others).

The first event features Amalia Ulman, described by the Telegraph as having created the first ever ‘Instagram masterpiece’, the philosopher Timothy Secret and the Bacon specialist Katharina Guenther:

WHAT MAKES US HUMAN: THE GAZE
12 May 2018
13:00-15:00 and 15:30-17:30
(full details and bookings)