Colloquia and Conferences

Current: 2025-2026
  • October 9: Lowry Pressly, Stanford University
  • November 13: Geoff Lee, UC Berkeley 
  • February 19: Zoe Drayson, UC Davis
  • March 12: Amelia Wirts, University of Washington
  • April 2: Daniela Dover, Rutgers University
  • April 23: Rima Basu, Claremont McKenna College
2020-2025

2025-2025

  • October 10: Keshav Singh, University of Alabama at Birmingham
  • December 3: Daniel Story, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and Amy Kurzweil, Independent Scholar
  • January 30: Amy Kind, Claremont McKenna College
  • April 12-13: Queer Aɸ Conference
  • April 22: Meena Krishnamurthy, Queen’s University
  • May 8: Wendy Salkin, Stanford University

2023-2024

  • October 19: Zoe Jenkin, Rutgers University
  • December 5: Nathan Wildman, Tilburg University
  • May 16: Peter Langland-Hassan, University of Cincinnati

2022-2023

  • October 22: Shamik Dasgupta, UC Berkeley
  • November 10: Adam Pautz, Rutgers University
  • April 13: Gurpreet Rattan, University of Toronto
  • May 4: Angela Mendelovici, University of Western Ontario

2021-2022

  • February 3: Shawn Wang, UC San Diego
  • February 8: Carolina Flores, Rutgers
  • February 10: Dee Payton, Howard University
  • February 15: Hannah Read, Wake Forest University
  • February 18: Rachel Achs, Oxford
  • February 22: Ege Yumusak, Harvard
  • February 24: Greyson Abid, UC Berkeley
  • March 1: Elise Woodard, University of Michigan

2020-2021

  • Oct 22: Talia Bettcher, California State, Los Angeles
  • Nov 5: James Garrison, Baldwin Wallace University
  • Oct 21: Timothy Brown, University of Washington
  • Nov 18: Kevin Cahill, University of Bergen
  • Dec 2: Rei Terada, UC Irvine
2015-2020

2019-2020

  • Oct 17: José Medina, Northwestern University
  • Nov 7: Myisha Cherry, UC Riverside
  • Jan 30: Joseph Rouse, Wesleyen University
  • May 12: Eric Schliesser, University of Amsterdam

2018-2019

  • Mark Schroeder, University of Southern California
  • Casey O’Callaghan, Washington University, St. Louis
  • David Donley, UC Santa Cruz doctoral candidate
  • Vida Yao, Rice University
  • Robbie Kubala, Comulbia University
  • Rachel Cristy, University of Toronto
  • Gabbrielle Johnson, UCLA
  • Rima Basu, Claremont McKenna College
  • Barry Lam, Vassar College
  • Fatema Amijee, Simon Fraser University
  • E. Hande Tuna, Brown University
  • Theodore George, Texas A & M
  • C. Thi Nguyen, Utah Valley University

2017-2018

  • Jonathan Cohen, UC San Diego: Many Molyneux Questions
  • Linda Kealey, UC Santa Cruz doctoral candidate
  • Ram Neta, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Ed Casey, Stony Brook University
  • Ori Simchen, University of British Columbia
  • Gene Witmer, University of Florida

2016-2017

  • David Landy, San Francisco State University: Explanation and Personal Identity in the Appendix to Hume’s Treatise
  • Susanna Schellenberg, Rutgers: Perceptual Consciousness as a Mental Activity
  • Audun Dahl, UC Santa Cruz (Psychology): The Empirical Reality of Moral Reasoning
  • Maudemarie Clark, UC Riverside: Nietzsche’s Nihilism

2015-2016

  • Imogen Dickie, University of Toronto: Proper Names: Transition to the End Game
  • Casey O’Callaghan, Washington University in St. Louis: The Multisensory Character of Perception
  • Noa Latham, University of Calgary: Meditation and Self-Control
  • Gayle Salamon, Princeton University: Gender Essentialism and Eidetic Inquiry
  • Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Duke University: Implicit Moral Attitudes
  • Paul Lee : The Greeks had a word for it: thumos
  • Jonathan Ellis: UC Santa Cruz: Motivated Reasoning, Heavy and Light
2014 and Older

2014-2015

  • Eric Schwitzgebel, UC Riverside: The Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors
  • Paul Roth, UC Santa Cruz: Reviving Philosophy of History
  • Abe Stone, UC Santa Cruz: Why Does Space Have More than One Dimension?
  • Rebecca Kukla, Georgetown: The Sedimentation of Bias in Medical Institutions
  • Fabrizzio McManus Guerrero, Unversidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico: Neuro-Biological Explanations of Sexual Orientation and Their Counter-explanations 
  • Felipe De Brigard, Duke: The Explanatory Indispensability of Memory Traces
  • Samantha Matherne, UC Santa Cruz: Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Physics
  • Shelley Wilcox, San Francisco State: Immigration Justice in Nonideal Circumstances

2013-2014

  • Otávio Bueno, University of Miami: Seeing with a Microscope
  • Seth Yalcin, UC Berkeley: Epistemic Modality De Re
  • Ric Otte, UC Santa Cruz: Skeptical Theism and the Problem of Evil
  • Kyle Robertson, UC Santa Cruz: Humility as Virtue
  • Becko Copenhaver, Lewis & Clark College: Berkeley on the Language of Nature and the Objects of Vision
  • Ned Block, NYU: Conscious, Preconscious, Unconscious
  • Mikkel Willum Johansen, University of Copenhagen: Material and Social Conditions for the Development of Mathematics

2012-2013

  • Rasmus Winther, UC Santa Cruz: “Free to Universalize or Bound by Culture? Philosophy in a Multicultural Context” Conference
  • Roger White, MIT: “What’s so Bad about Bootstrapping?”
  • Scott Gilbert, Biology, Swarthmore College: “We are all lichens: How symbiosis research has reconstituted a new realm of individuality”
  • Jonathan Kaplan, Oregon State University: Turning Social Categories into Biological Realities: ‘Race’ made biological
  • Daniel Guevara, UC Santa Cruz: Has Traditional Ethical Theory Been Made Defunct by Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory 
  • Jorge Hankamer, UC Santa Cruz: Definiteness (in Danish) How the morphology of Definiteness interacts with the Syntax and Semantics of Nominal Phrases
  • Carlos Sanchez, SJSU: A truth that matters: Alain Badiou after Ortega y Gasset
  • Neil Sinhababu, National University of Singapore: Desire’s Explanations

2011-2012

  • Colin Koopman, University of Oregon: Pleasure and Parrhesia in Foucault’s Self-Transformative Ethics
  • Paul Horwich, NYU: Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy
  • Hans Sluga, UC Berkeley: From Normative Theory to Diagnostic Practice
  • Kevin Cahill, University of Bergen, Norway: Some Reflections on the Dreyfus-McDowell Debate
  • Jose Ruiz, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain: On Two Types of Evidence of Something Necessary
  • Eugen Zelnack, Catholic University, Ruzomberok, Slovakia: Who Should Characterize the Nature of History?
  • Daniel Guevara, UC Santa Cruz: Kant Conference
  • Claudio Campagna (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UC Santa Cruz)
  • Ronnie Lipschutz (Politics, UC Santa Cruz)
  • Daniel Press (Environmental Studies, UC Santa Cruz): Conservation in No Man’s Land
  • Maeve Cooke, University College Dublin, Ireland: Social Freedom
  • Warren Sack, Digital Arts & New Media, UCSC: Narrative Intelligence
  • Abe Stone, UC Santa Cruz: Workshop in Phenomenology

2010-2011

  • John MacFarlane, UC Berkeley: A Puzzle About Modal Necessity 
  • Colin Koopman, University of Oregon: Pleasure and Parrhesia in Foucault’s Self-Transformative Ethics
  • Paul Horwich, NYU: Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy
  • Hans Sluga, UC Berkeley: From Normative Theory to Diagnostic Practice
  • Kevin Cahill, University of Bergen, Norway: Some Reflections on the Dreyfus-McDowell Debate
  • Jose Ruiz, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain: On Two Types of Evidence of Something Necessary
  • Eugen Zelnack, Catholic University, Ruzomberok, Slovakia: Who Should Characterize the Nature of History?

2009-2010

  • Doug Hutchinson, University of Toronto: Socrates in prison, again: a second ‘Second Apology’ in P.Köln205
  • Alyssa Ney, University of Rochester: Mass, Charge, and the Rest
  • Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir, San Francisco State University: Human Kinds as Conferred Kinds
  • Kirk Sanders, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana: Further reflections on Socrates’ trial (and guilt), with special reference to Xenophon as a source
  • Elaine Landry, University of California, Davis: Recollection in Plato’s “Meno”: Method, Myth or Necessary Hypothesis?
  • David Carr, Emory University: On the Concept of Experience
  • Justin Tiwald, San Francisco State University: The Confucian Stance on the Practice of Rights-Claiming
  • Sally Sedgwick, University of Illinois at Chicago: Reason and History: Kant versus Hegel
  • Peter Hylton, University of Illinois at Chicago: Ideas of a Logically Perfect Language in Analytic Philosophy
  • Thomas Ricketts, University of Pittsburgh: Inference, Semantics, and Formal Rigor in Frege
  • Adam Sennet, University of California, Davis: Defining Unarticulated Constituents
  • Krista Lawlor, Stanford University: Assurance as Action: Themes from Austin and a suggestion from Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty”

The campus community and interested public are welcome at all Philosophy Department sponsored colloquia, conferences and workshops.

Last modified: Sep 06, 2025