Keynote speakers:

Bill Wringe, Bilkent University,   

"Non-Agential Groups and Political

Philosophy: A Manifesto"                                                       

                                                

Elizabeth Barnes, University of Viriginia, "Is Hysteria Real?"

Joakim Sandberg, University of Gothenberg

"Corporate Moral Responsibility as a Normative Rather Than a Metaphysical Issue"

                                      

David Wiens, UC San Diego, "Idealistic Models in a Non-Ideal World"

Esa Díaz-León, Universitat de Barcelona, "Social Constructionism Revisited"  

Ying Huang, Winner of the Junior Scholar Essay Prize

"Let's Talk about the Metaphysics of Intersectionality—bet Let's Take It Slow"

Book Symposium 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 in the Long Room of Trinity College for all registrants (on Wednesday the 6th), as well as a formal dinner in the Trinity Dining Hall (for additional fee) on Thursday the 7th.

Below is information for Participants and for Junior Scholars in particular.

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, the registration deadline has passed.

Note - all mass communications from here out are sent out only to those registered.

The conference welcome is at 10:30am on August 5th, and the final keynote ends by 6:00pm on August 8th. Below is the conference schedule:

Trinity Campus Map

Points of interest...

Trinity Business School: All talks are scheduled in the Trinity Business School (TBS) in the northeastern quadrant of the map. The building is accessible from the inside of College or via Pearse Street (though, for all summer school attendees, this entrance will not be open on Monday because of the bank holiday that day).

Dining Hall: This is the location for the separate conference dinner. This building is in the northwestern quadrant of the map. The only entrance to the building is from the main square within College (Parliament Square). The dining hall is just straight in this building just after the entrance.

Old Library: This is the location for the Reception. This building is in the middle on the lefthand side of the map. The entrance is on the south side of the building facing Fellows' Square. The reception will be upstairs in the Long Room, and there will be signs to take you there.

Printing House Square and Trinity City Hotel: Many conference-goers or keynotes may be staying at these accommodations. They are located in the center north of the map. Printing House Square is best accessed from within College.

Entrances: There are a number of gates into College. Front Gate, to the west on the map, is the main entrance and scenic. It's reliably open even when other gates are closed. Some other gates are also indicated on the map, though they may be closed depending on the time (especially on Monday, if that matters for you). 

Session Logistics

All concurrent sessions are either 1 hour for 2 talks or 1.5 hours for 3 talks. Chairs should begin each session at the scheduled time and aim to have each talk within the session begin when scheduled. To facilitate conference-goer planning, chairs and speakers are advised to order the talks as on the schedule. 

For the speakers - You are assigned a 30 minute slot, and the time is yours to use in whatever way you feel will be most productive for your project. It is recommended (and descriptively expected) that the talk will be around 20 minutes, leaving 10 minutes for q&a. Slides or a handout are of course permitted (and encouraged). Closer to the conference, it will be communicated how slides will be facilitated, if you plan to use them. We will not have the facility to print handouts, but there are print shops around city centre if necessary. (Though, be advised, they may be closed on Monday for the bank holiday.)

Junior Scholars

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.

This year, the winner is Ying Huang!

Bursaries: There was a call for and allocation of bursaries for junior scholars.

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

Many registered interest, and notifications of acceptance have been sent out.

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, the University of Vienna, the University of Stockholm, and Duke.