SOPhiA 2026

You find here some information about the programme of the conference. We are pleased to announce our keynote speakers below! An overview of the locations can be found at the bottom of this page.

SOPhiA 2026 will be held as an in-person event.

You can find a PDF version of our programme here. Please note that it might not be up to date.

Keynote speakers:

• Philip Ebert (University of Salzburg): Varieties of Risk
• Michela Massimi (University of Edinburgh): Ways of world knowing
• Julian Reiss (Johannes Kepler University Linz): Scientific Objectivity: A Virtue-Theoretic Conception

Quick Updates: Check here for any last minute changes or cancellations to our conference programme below.

• Jana Baum’s talk on Wednesday, 2nd of September (Epistemology, 14:00 – 14:30) was cancelled.
• Luka Buratta’s talk on Wednesday, 2nd of September (Epistemology, 14:40 – 15:10) was cancelled.
• Pengyu He’s talk on Wednesday, 2nd of September (Metaphysics, 14:40 – 15:10) was cancelled.
• Dani Alnashi’s talk on Thursday , 3rd of September (Philosophy of Language, 10:00 – 10:30) was cancelled.
• Federica Melis’ talk on Friday , 4th of September (Logic & Philosophy of Mathematics , 14:00 – 14:30) was cancelled.
• Adriano Aguado Nocilla’s talk on Friday, 4th of September (Philosophy of Language, 15:20 – 15:50) was cancelled.
• Alba Lavagnoli Gonzalez’ talk on Friday, 4th of September (Philosophy of Technology, 12:00 – 12:30) was cancelled.
• Kida Lin’s talk on Friday, 4th of September (Ethics, 10:50 – 11:10) was cancelled.
• Sofia Rosa Tinto’s talk on Friday, 4th of September (Philosophy of Technology, 10:50 – 11:10) was cancelled.

02 September 2026 (Wednesday)

Time	HS E.002	SR 1.003	SR 1.004	SR 1.005	SR 1.006	SR 1.007
09:45 – 10:00	Opening & SOPhiA Best Paper Award
10:00 – 11:30	Plenary Lecture Philip Ebert Varieties of Risk
11:30 – 11:45			Coffee Break
11:45 – 12:30	J.B. Metzler Session Publishing your Dissertation with J.B. Metzler
12:30 – 14:00			Lunch Break
14:00 – 14:30	Philosophy of Mind Vaggelis Spathis Perceptual Recognition and the Limits of Naïve Realism	Epistemology Jana Baum The Logical Alien and the Concept of Error (Cancelled)	Philosophy of Language Naomi Mușan The paraconsistent life of faultless disagreements. Relevance and information	Ethics Erik Ossenkopp Intertwined Fates and Why Ex-Ante Contractualism Cannot Handle Them	Philosophy of Science Tyler Miniati Explanatory Completeness: A Place for Informativeness Within Bayesian Explanationism	Philosophy of Religion Samuel Geiger Why did Gödel believe in the immortality of the soul?
14:40 – 15:10	Philosophy of Mind Pengyu He No Stable Middle Ground: Weak Overdetermination and Mental Causation (Cancelled)	Epistemology Luca Buratta Backtracking and Counterfactual Reasoning: The Variably Strict Theorists’ Perspective (Cancelled)	Philosophy of Language Elena Eid The Power of the Interlocutor: A Split-Agency Account of the Illocutionary Act	Ethics Sebastian Jantsch The Prescriptive and the Hypological: A Not-So-Radical Detachment	Philosophy of Science Julian Vincent Laggner Propensities Without Magnitudes: Overdisposing and the Deflation of Chance	Philosophy of Religion Jan Seibert Does the World need an External Explanation? Four Versions of the Applicability Objection against the Cosmological Argument and why they are not as convincing as they first might seem
15:20 – 15:50		Epistemology Nina Tod Defending Classical Logic against Bayesian Measures of Argument Strength	Philosophy of Language Caterina Lupieri Can morphology inform philosophy? The case of Italian pejoratives as Hybrid Evaluatives	Ethics Travis Rebello The Procreative Asymmetry and Impersonal Goodness	Philosophy of Science Maxim Pfaffenrot Facing Fringe Scientific Theories in the Eye of the Storm: Defending Anderson et al’s Proximal Origin Using an Inductive Risk Argument	Philosophy of Religion Martin Nosek Modal ontological proof or disproof?
16:00 – 16:30	Philosophy of Mind Giorgia Carli Of Sound and Source – A Necessarily Non-Acousmatic Thesis of Musical Listening			Ethics Johannes Baer The Platonic Lens: Investigating Two Issues in Iris Murdoch’s Moral Psychology
16:30 – 16:50			Coffee Break
16:50 – 17:20		Epistemology Jana Engel Reconstructing collective beliefs from collective rational action	Philosophy of Language Malte Schlenker Defusing Watkins’ Paradox for the semantics of deontic modals	Ethics Drishtti Rawat A Dilemma for the Reasonableness of Blame	Philosophy of Science Piet Fritz Pankratz Science as a “Signpost” in Carnap’s Scientific Humanism	History of Philosophy Stanislav Hrubiznyi Did Criticism Change Quentin Skinner’s Methodology?
17:30 – 18:00	Philosophy of Mind Giorgio Geuna Does the Multiple Realizability Argument Generalize?	Epistemology Giulia Sicuro Performative equilibria and democratic coordination failure	Philosophy of Language Maxi Viola Mirabel Seidl Criticizing the methodological vindication of the Value-Free Ideal: A response to Sikorski	Ethics Yiyun Pan Subjectless Wrongs? Individual Responsibility in Hermeneutical Injustice	Philosophy of Science Patrizio Proietti Why Should We Eliminate the Concept of Emotion? Griffiths and Hochstein in Comparison
18:10 – 18:40	Philosophy of Mind Juan Pablo Cortés Knowledge of Truths and Knowledge of Thinks: A Pluralist Account of Introspection	Epistemology Pauline Flora Paulik When Epistemology and Epidemiology Meet: Rethinking Depression through Epistemologies of Ignorance	Philosophy of Language Bartosz Wultański Normativity of meaning in local contexts	Ethics Andrea Huete Rodríguez Moral luck and higher-order control: not to worry	Philosophy of Science Aphrodite Simalas Diagnosing the Cause, Not the Symptoms: Epistemic Gatekeeping Injustice in Medicine and Healthcare
18:50 – 19:20	Philosophy of Mind Antonia Grunert The Paradox of Disagreement	Epistemology Severin Rohrer The Amical Epistemic Style, or How Friendship Influences Belief Formation			Philosophy of Science Piotr Paszkowski What Is Pseudo-Philosophy? Two Accounts of Metaphilosophical Demarcation
19:20 – 21:30			Evening Dinner

03 September 2026 (Thursday)

Time	HS E.002	SR 1.003	SR 1.004	SR 1.005	SR 1.006	SR 1.007
10:00 – 10:30	Metaphysics Carolina Berrutti Bartesaghi Constituted Group Agents	Epistemology Essence Ujah Educational Epistemic Injustice	Philosophy of Language Dani Alnashi Performative Contradictions Defended (Cancelled)	Ethics Medha Kalyani Nayar Rational Regret as an Epistemic Tool: From Defeated Reasons to Epistemic Alternatives	Philosophy of Science Jorge Ramos Toward an autonomous metaphysics of biology based on practice	Logic & Philosophy of Mathematics Krzysztof Dyrda The Logic of Leśniewski’s Set Theory
10:40 – 11:10	Metaphysics Alicia M. Wach Internally conflicted group agents: Against the coherence condition	Epistemology Jenny Kurrath Whose Feelings Count, Whose Words Matter: Toward an Affect-Sensitive Theory of Epistemic Injustice	Philosophy of Language Michael Stöger Against implicature-based explanations of metalinguistic disputes	Ethics David Lussi Explanationism About Reasons and Guidance	Philosophy of Science Fabricio Carvalho A Minimalist Approach to Design in Biology	Logic & Philosophy of Mathematics Qianli Zeng Positive Noncontingency Logic
11:20 – 11:50	Metaphysics Pavel Matail Agent Causation: A Notion of Active Control Invulnerable to Luck	Epistemology Donggeon Kim Being in an Epistemic Environment to Know: A Case of Sanctioned White Ignorance for Socializing Knowledge-First Epistemology	Philosophy of Language Bianca Zito Does Language Speak Through Us? Language as a Cognitive Gadget in Knowledge Formation	Ethics Guanzhang Li Virtues, Thick Concepts and the Tension	Philosophy of Science Arianna Laura Savelli The Ontological Ambiguity of QBism: A Diagnosis	Logic & Philosophy of Mathematics Angel Odette Martínez A problem with Keefe’s supervaluationism and possibilism of fiction.
12:00-12:45	De Gruyter Session Christoph Schirmer Getting published with De Gruyter
12:45 – 14:00			Lunch Break
14:00 – 15:30	Plenary Lecture Michela Massimi Ways of world knowing
15:30 – 15:50			Coffee Break
15:50 – 19:30		Workshop Brian Ortmann Does Manipulation Imply Causation?	Workshop Martin Niederl Themes from the History of Analytic Philosophy	Workshop Mathijs Geurts Speech Acts at the boundaries of communication	Workshop Corina Strößner, Georg Brun The legacy of logical empiricism between and during the two world wars

04 September 2026 (Friday)

Time	HS E.002	SR 1.003	SR 1.004	SR 1.005	SR 1.006	SR 1.007
10:00 – 10:30	Metaphysics Kotryna Elijosiute Investigating the Composition of Hylomorphic Wholes	Epistemology Aleksander Kałuski The problem of intuitions through the example of the “zombie” argument	Philosophy of Language Marvin Thinschmidt On the context-sensitive Aspects of Quotation	Ethics Zofia Sierant The Limits of Parental Control over Minors’ Sexual Lives	Philosophy of Technology Joachim Stein Does Mechanistic Interpretability Research Provide Mechanistic Explanations?	Logic & Philosophy of Mathematics Nirvana Ribić Suppressing the Suppression Effect: The Role of Relevance in Hypothetical Syllogism and Verbal Reasoning
10:40 – 11:10	Metaphysics Mara Zschommler Symmetrical Grounds of Metaphysical Indeterminacy	Epistemology Flavia Cignini Open-Mindedness as Corrigibility	Philosophy of Language Manuel Englert How fictive names can refer	Ethics Kida Lin Requirements and Coercion in War: An Argument for Ad Bellum Pacifism (Cancelled)	Philosophy of Technology Sofia Rosa Tinto Beyond Observable Performance: Sanctionability and the Limits of Meaning in Large Language Models. (Cancelled)	Logic & Philosophy of Mathematics Simon Eggersmann In Search of Closure – Sensitivity and Deductive Knowledge
11:20 – 11:50	Metaphysics Sven Hirsbrunner Weak Emergence as Level-Relative Future Indeterminacy	Epistemology Nike Charlott Frings What is Fake Inquiry?	Philosophy of Language Niklas Jung Gradual Lies	Ethics Andrea Sanders A New Epistemic Theory of Grooming: Norms, Expectations, and Trust	Philosophy of Technology Julian Lee-Sursin A Regress Argument Concerning Autonomous Self-Correction in AI Agents	Logic & Philosophy of Mathematics David Peter Burits A minimal theory of existential quantification
12:00 – 12:30	Metaphysics Cansu Irem Meric Refining the Debate between Multiple Realisation and Mental Constraint Theses	Epistemology Ivan Catanzaro Alienated Belief and the Limits of Belief-Relative Pragmatism	Philosophy of Language Dimana Orlinova Anastassova Degrees of language understanding: from children’s acquisitional pathways to Large Language Models	Ethics David Kubíček When Does an Act Express an Attitude? The Expressivist Objection and Meanings of “Expressing“	Philosophy of Technology Alba Lavagnoli Gonzalez Knowing How in the Age of Machines: A Rylean Analysis of Deep Learning (Cancelled)	Logic & Philosophy of Mathematics Finn Matthiessen Circumstantial possibility and embedded disjunction
12:30 – 14:00			Lunch Break
14:00 – 14:30	Metaphysics Arkadiusz Synowczyk Towards a Neo-Aristotelian Hybrid Metaphysics of Modality		Philosophy of Language Veronika Lassl A critique of Jared Warren’s account of synthetic a priori truths	Ethics Karol Milczarek That an action is wrong is not a reason against it	Political Philosophy Domagoj Krpan Balancing Skepticism and Integrity: The Role of Political Bias in Journalism and the Ethics of Conspiracy Theories	Logic & Philosophy of Mathematics Federica Melis Deductive-Nomological Explanations in Logic and the Circularity Problem (Cancelled)
14:40 – 15:10	Metaphysics Agnes Katona Spatiotemporal Universals: A Dilemma for Aristotelianism		Philosophy of Language Dominik Robel Sellars’ and Davidson’s Guide to Meaning: Running Away From Abstract Entities	Ethics Leon Schmitt The Practice of Concepts: How the role of our concepts matters for their analysis	Political Philosophy Marcin Nowicki Escaping the Non-Identity problem: Bridging Bioethics and Intergenerational Justice	Logic & Philosophy of Mathematics Elena Padoan On the Possibility of Parity: Multi-dimensional Values as Vectors
15:20 – 15:50			Philosophy of Language Adriano Aguado Nocilla Propositions and the Problem of Fineness of Grain: A Type/Token Approach (Cancelled)	Ethics Emese Havadtői Antirealism and the Threat of Relativity	Political Philosophy Ana Maria Popescu Towards a feminist pragmatic turn in the philosophy of medicine	Logic & Philosophy of Mathematics Mykolas Lekevičius Inferential practices, laws of logic and their normativity
16:00 – 16:30			Philosophy of Language Eric Wallace Davidson’s Method of Truth in Metaphysics: The Problem of Exotic Commitments		Political Philosophy Christian Ennsgraber The Blue Bus Paradox is not about Statistics
16:30 – 16:45			Coffee Break
16:45 – 18:15	Plenary Lecture Julian Reiss Scientific Objectivity: A Virtue-Theoretic Conception
18:15			Closing Dinner

Locations

• HS E.002 (HS Agnes Muthspiel) (Ground floor, Erzabt-Klotz-Straße 1, 5020 Salzburg, Austria)
• SR 1.003 (First floor, Erzabt-Klotz-Straße 1, 5020 Salzburg, Austria)
• SR 1.004 (First floor, Erzabt-Klotz-Straße 1, 5020 Salzburg, Austria)
• SR 1.005 (First floor, Erzabt-Klotz-Straße 1, 5020 Salzburg, Austria)
• SR 1.006 (First floor, Erzabt-Klotz-Straße 1, 5020 Salzburg, Austria)
• SR 1.007 (First floor, Erzabt-Klotz-Straße 1, 5020 Salzburg, Austria)