Social Ontology 2024 

Dates: July 22-25, 2024

Place: Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Organizing committee: Kevin Richardson and Ásta

Program committee chair: Elanor Taylor

Keynote speakers:

Johan Brännmark, Brian Epstein, Sally Haslanger, Katherine Ritchie, Michael Tomasello

Book session on Åsa Burman's Nonideal Social Ontology

Contributed Papers

There will be numerous parallel sessions of 30 mins. Please see the call for abstracts below.


For Participants

Conference registration opens on March 1, 2024. The rates will be $150 for full-time faculty and $100 for part-time faculty and students.

For more information about the conference, visit our conference website.

If you have further questions, please send an email to socialontology2024[at]gmail.com

Call for Abstracts - Social Ontology 2024

Deadline for abstracts: January 1, 2024.

Submit an abstract only, 300-500 words, prepared for anonymous review

The presentation at the conference should be 20 mins.

The easy chair link is here: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=isos2024

Interdisciplinary contributions are strongly encouraged.

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • The ontology of the social world; the nature and existence of social phenomena 
  • Collective intentionality 
  • The ontology of social kinds (e.g. race or gender or class)
  • Social structures and opaque kinds of social facts
  • Shared, joint or collective action
  • Shared, collective, and corporate responsibility
  • Collective or shared beliefs, intentions, and emotions
  • Linguistic or mental representations of social phenomena 
  • Social skills, habits and practices
  • Trust, cooperation, and competition
  • The concept of social power and stratification 
  • The nature, evolution, and functioning of social norms
  • The structure of institutions, firms, and organizations
  • The ontology of economics including unintended effects
  • The method(s) of social ontology 
  • Approaches to the metaphysics of the social world
  • Critical social ontology
  • Social norms
  • Ontology and injustice and oppression
  • Ideal and non ideal social ontology 


Social Ontology is the internationally leading philosophical and philosophy-related interdisciplinary conference series on social and collective phenomena held under the auspices of the International Social Ontology Society (ISOS). Previous conferences in this series have been held at the Universities of Basel, Helsinki, Konstanz, Leipzig, Lund, Munich, Manchester, Neuchâtel, Palermo, Rome, Rotterdam, Siena, Stockholm, and Tampere, as well as the University of California San Diego and Berkeley, Delft University of Technology, Tufts University, Indiana University, Bloomington, and the University of Vienna.


"International Social Ontology Society" is registered as a non-profit organization in Austria.

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