Keynote speakers:

Bill Wringe, Bilkent University

Elizabeth Barnes, University of Viriginia

David Wiens, UC San Diego

Joakim Sandberg, University of Gothenberg

Esa Díaz-León, Universitat de Barcelona

Winner of the Junior Scholar Essay Prize (see below)

Book session on Bernhard Schmid's WE TOGETHER: The Social Ontology of Us, with comments from Glenda Satne and David Schweikard.

The conference will host a reception on Thursday (August 7th) in the Long Room of Trinity College for all registrants, preceded by a formal dinner in the Trinity Dining Hall (for additional fee). There will also be an informal dinner facilitated Friday (August 8th). 

Below is the general call for abstracts as well as two notes for junior scholars - one regarding the Essay Competition and one regarding the pre-conference interdisciplinary summer school.

For Participants

The deadline for abstracts has passed. Notifications have been sent out, so if you have not been notified of acceptance/rejection (from so2025@easychair.org), then please notify Kenneth Silver (kennethmsilver[at]gmail.com).

To register for the conference, please go to https://isosonline.org/event-6074132. For the conference dinner, please go to https://isosonline.org/event-6080724.

The conference welcome is at 10am on August 5th, and the final keynote ends by 6:30pm on August 8th.

There will be a limited number of bursaries available, though the number will depend on external funding to be determined in the next few months. A separate call will go out for bursary applicants once there is a sense of the number available.

For the summer school the day before the conference: Many conference applicants have indicated interest, and so in a few weeks entry will be determined and notifications sent out.

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 money and 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 

Interdisciplinary contributions are strongly encouraged.

Essay Prize:

Junior Scholars are eligible for the ISOS Essay Prize. The prize includes an invitation to present as a keynote at the conference, publication in the Journal of Social Ontology, and a €500 award. For more information about submission and eligibility, see here.

Pre-conference Summer school: Social Ontology goes interdisciplinary!

What: A day long session focused on developing interdisciplinary work involving social ontology.

Who: Open to junior scholars either with interdisciplinary projects they want to develop or who are curious about the best ways to go about developing such projects, taught by several leading social ontologists with a track record of interdisciplinarity.

When: August 4th, 2025, the day before the official conference

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

This conference is supported by the European Research Council, Trinity College Dublin, the International Social Ontology Society, and Fáilte Ireland.

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.