Royal Institute of Philosophy Cardiff Annual Lecture 2023
– Professor Paul Taylor (University of California, Los Angeles) –

Tuesday 17th October, 8.30pm - 10.00pm (UK time)
The lecture recording can be watched on YouTube (here).
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On the eve of World War I, Virginia Woolf wrote these words: “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be….” It is tempting to assume that darkness simply hides the unknown and the threatening. It is more challenging to think of it as Woolf did: rich with possibility in even the most desperate times. As Howard Thurman put it, the darkness may be luminous.

We live in what many would readily describe as dark times. These times have brought (among much else) a once-in-a-century public health crisis, the continued redemption of toxic white supremacy and autocratic leadership, declining trust in and support for public institutions, and growing evidence of impending climate devastation. What luminous possibilities await in this gloom?

“Dark Futures” will consider some scenes of devastation that define our desperate times, and mine them for insights into our predicaments and our prospects.


​Everyone is welcome! This event is produced by Cardiff University and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Royal Institute of Philosophy Cardiff Annual Lecture 2022
– C. Thi Nguyen, University of Utah –

Monday 17th October, 8.30pm - 10.00pm (UK time)
The lecture recording can now be watched on YouTube.

Something seems to go wrong when we take on, as our goals in life, some extremely explicit metric. As individuals, the metric might be making a lot of money, or getting the best grades, or getting into the top-ranked law school. Organisations do something similar with profits, pageviews, or, in education, learning outcomes.

How can such metrics cause problems?

Here’s one possibility: overly clear values enshrine an attitude of closed-mindedness towards value. Values drive attention: what we look at, and how carefully and intensely we look. Values control what we investigate. Hyper-clear values set firm boundaries on what matters. Those values narrow our attention, and make us less willing to pay attention to things outside those bounds. Hyper-clarity represents a value as finalized -- and the world as if there were nothing else to learn from it about what really matters.

​Everyone is welcome! This event is produced by Cardiff University and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

What are the attitudes, skills and values needed to navigate the unpredictable challenges of our rapidly changing world?

Setting out to provide some answers to this question, Values and Virtues for a Challenging World is a new book of essays published by Cambridge University Press.
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At this event, the book’s authors will explore their ideas with education and public policy professionals to investigate how we can prepare ourselves to respond to unpredictable events in ways that promote flourishing human lives.

Session 1: Good Taste and the Experience of Value 
– Experiencing Environmental Value – Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University) 
– The Importance of Beauty and Taste – Panos Paris (Cardiff University) 
Chair: Laura D’Olimpio (University of Birmingham)

Session 2: Polarisation, Mental Health, and Misinformation on Social Media 
– Group-Based Anger on Social Media – Alessandra Tanesini (Cardiff University) 
– Status Competition and Mental Health – Hugh Desmond (University of Antwerp) 
– Deepfakes and Digital Sensibility – Taylor Matthews (University of Nottingham) 
Chair: Auriol Miller (Institute of Welsh Affairs) 

Session 3: Curiosity, Integrity, and Self-Regulation 
– Cultivating Curiosity in the Information Age – Lani Watson (Oxford University) 
– Ethical Integrity as the Goal of Character Education – Jonathan Webber (Cardiff University) 
– Self-Regulation and Political Confabulation – Kathleen Murphy-Hollies (University of Birmingham) 
Chair: Julian Baggini (Royal Institute of Philosophy) 

Session 4: Wisdom and Collective Decision-Making 
– The Need for Wisdom in a Changing World – Kristján Kristjánsson (University of Birmingham) 
– Group Wisdom and Cognitive Diversity – Anneli Jefferson (Cardiff University) and Katrina Sifferd (Elmhurst University) 
– Group Responsibility as a Virtue – Mandi Astola (Delft University of Technology) 
Chair: Wendy Thomas (Autism Wales) 

Session 5: Uncertainty and Polarisation 
– Polarisation and the Need for Interpretive Charity – Nadine Elzein (University of Warwick) 
– Living with Wild Uncertainty in a Pandemic – Nicholas Shackel (Cardiff University) 
Chair: Catherine Fookes (Women’s Equality Network) 

There is no registration fee. Event includes refreshments. Everyone is welcome!

To register your interest in attending, please email Susan Bowen.

This event is a collaboration between Cardiff University and the Royal Institute of Philosophy
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Cardiff Annual Lecture 2021
– Professor Richard Moran, Harvard University –

Monday 18th October, 8.30pm - 10.00pm (UK time)

The lecture was given live on YouTube. The recording is now available to watch. It includes discussion with Dr Sophie Archer and responses to audience questions.


Certain philosophies (both Western and Eastern) describe us as prone to forms of attachment that are illusory, and promise to indemnify us against the hazards of life by exposing such illusions. The more we can conceive of what really matters in life as something purely internal to ourselves, the less we will see ourselves as hostage to fortune.

One such hazard is that of transience and temporal life itself, and it is sometimes urged that since the Present is the only genuine Reality, attachments to the Past or the Future are forms of illusion we can and should be free of.  This talk raises some questions about the ideal of “living in the present” and escaping the contingencies and loss that are part of temporal life.



This event was produced by Cardiff University and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

​​In this talk, Havi Carel argues that recent restrictions aimed at preventing the transmission of covid-19 have had a profound impact on our personal and social worlds. Using key phenomenological ideas, such as being-in-the-world, being-with, the intelligibility of our shared world, and the centrality of touch and embodiment in our experience, Carel suggests that our everyday experience has been deeply disrupted by social distancing, causing significant changes to the ways in which we inhabit our social and physical world. She closes by characterising these changes as a global uncertainty: the loss of a once pre-reflective trust or confidence that envelops one's experience of the world as a whole.


Havi Carel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, where she teaches both philosophy students and medical students. Her book Illness was shortlisted for the 2009 Wellcome Book Prize and is now published in its third edition.

She is also the author of Phenomenology of Illness (2016) and Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (2006), and co-editor of Health, Illness and Disease (2012), New Takes in Film-Philosophy (2010), and What Philosophy Is (2004). She has been a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, and a Leverhulme Fellow.

This lecture was given online on ​Tuesday 3rd November 2020, followed by answers to audience questions. The whole event is available to watch now at the Royal Institute of Philosophy YouTube channel. 

This event is produced by Cardiff University and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Royal Institute of Philosophy Cardiff Annual Lecture 2019


HARD CHOICES

Professor Ruth Chang
Chair of Jurisprudence
University of Oxford


Thursday 16th May at 7pm 

Wallace Lecture Theatre
Cardiff University Main Building

Park Place, Cathays, Cardiff CF10 3AT

Free! No need to book. Doors open at 6.30.

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HARD CHOICES
Professor Ruth Chang (Oxford)


We all face hard choices. What career should I pursue? Should I marry? Have children? How much should I give to charity? Should I give up my car and go vegan in order to help alleviate global warming? In this talk I explain what hard choices are, and what, in particular, makes them hard. It turns out that how we relate to the world in the decisions we make is fundamentally askew. By thinking about our place in the world differently, we uncover a distinctive way of thinking about our hard choices and what to do in the face of them. 

Ruth Chang is Chair of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at University College Oxford, having previously been Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey and a law associate working on a (pro bono) death penalty case and several (non pro bono) product liability and medical malpractice cases.

Professor Chang's current academic work concerns the nature of values and reasons, decision-making and reasoning, love and commitment, and the nature of the self. Her research has appeared in the media as far afield as Taiwan and Brazil, as well as across Europe and the English-speaking world. She has worked with a variety of industries, including video gaming, pharmaceuticals, head-hunting, banking and finance, and a variety of institutions, including the U.S. Navy, the CIA, National Geographic, and the World Bank.
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Professor Loredana Polezzi
of Cardiff University

interviews 

Professor Christopher Bertram
of the University of Bristol

on his new book

Do States Have the Right to Exclude Immigrants?

at Waterstones in The Hayes, Cardiff
which is the biggest bookshop in Wales

​on Tuesday 7th May at 6.30pm

Tickets are £ 3. The book will be available at the event with a £ 3 discount.

Places are limited. So it is advisable to book in advance.
Tickets are available online or in the shop or by phone: 029 2066 5606

​This is a Royal Institute of Philosophy event. Everyone is welcome!

Now available! Resource for AS-level and A-level Philosophy on the AQA syllabus.

Experience and Knowledge contains six short original articles with questions and exercises designed to help students develop their own thought on key syllabus topics.

The booklet is free to download and share unchanged for non-commercial purposes under the Creative Commons 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

Full information and the booklet itself can be found on our A-level page.

Tickets are still available for Machines, our afternoon festival of philosophy of technology on Tuesday 15th May.

The festival includes a keynote lecture, five smaller talks, and eight roundtable discussions, all for the bargain price of £4, or just £1 for students.

Full information about the festival.

Ticket sales.