Conferences

The department typically hosts a conference, on a particular theme, every year. 

Every other year (typically in even-numbered years), the department hosts a major conference at which speakers and commentators from other colleges and universities present their research to an audience of W&M faculty, students, and scholars from other institutions. The conference is organized around a particular theme, and presented papers are sometimes revised and published in an edited volume. The next biennial conference, in 2026, will be on the topic of moral luck.

The department also regularly hosts smaller conference and workshops.

On September 11-13, 2025, the department hosted the Ninth Theistic Ethics Workshop (program in pdf format).

The Department of Philosophy is grateful to the Rachel and E.W. Thompson Philosophy Endowment and Foradas Philosophy Department Speaker's Series Endowment for supporting our conferences and colloquia.

Past Conferences

Dimensions of Normative Strength (2024)

Reading Hume Today: A Conference in Honor of Elizabeth Radcliffe (Emerita, W&M) (2023)

Ethics and Theism (2022) [Postponed from 2020 due to the pandemic]

Workshop on the Intersection of Ethics & Metaphysics (2020)

Applied Neo-pragmatism (2018)

5th Annual Early Career Metaphysics Workshop (2018)

3rd Annual Theistic Ethics Workshop (2017)

Epistemology and Cognition (2016)

The Authority of Tradition (2014)

Responsibility & Relationships: 50 Years of Strawson's 'Freedom and Resentment' (2012)

Study of the Human Self (2008)

The Future of Democracy (2006)