Annual Lectures, Symposiums, and Events

In this Annual London Lecture, Professor Quassim Cassam explores novel forms of extremism whose purpose is not to advance a political cause and examines the implications of this for the legal definition of terrorism.

Can there be moral progress? Some optimists would argue that there can, because there already has been, with fewer people living in poverty, and corporal punishment now a rarity. But do optimists confuse material progress with moral progress? Is their story too Eurocentric? If there is less poverty but more inequality or less community, how do we take the overall balance? And if moral standards themselves change along with other changes, how are we to gain the perspective we need in order to ...

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...

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...

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 th...