Over three days, the Mind, Art, Knowledge symposium brought together artistic researchers, philosophers, and psychologists from across 42 institutions to explore how artistic practices yield knowledge and understanding. The programme included 10 keynote lectures, 20 short papers, 13 poster presentations, an exhibition of the work of 7 artists, and a closing roundtable discussion with the keynote speakers. The symposium took place across two fantastic venues – The Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts and Cinematek (The Royal Film Archive of Belgium) – the combination of which was appropriate for the diverse disciplinary perspectives of the symposium’s speakers. Although it is not possible to summarize all of the rich avenues of inquiry opened up at the symposium, certain key questions did emerge around the following themes: similarities and differences between understanding yielded by artistic creation vs artistic appreciation, the relationship between aesthetic experience and understanding, what empirical evidence might be adduced to support aesthetic cognitivism (with a particular emphasis on predictive processing approaches), and the ways in which artistic practice, philosophy, and the psychological sciences might serve complementary roles in developing accounts of the relationship between art and knowledge.

Hans Maes (Vice-Dean Research, LUCA School of Arts/ KU Leuven; ������Ƶ President) opens the symposium

The organising team (Maarten Coëgnarts, Hans Maes, Ted Nannicelli, Tomas Vandecasteele) are extremely grateful for the support of all of our sponsors, including LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven, Film EU, FWO (Research Foundation Flanders), The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, and, of course, the British Society for Aesthetics. The Mind, Art, Knowledge symposium adhered to both the BPA/SWIP Good Practice Scheme and the BPA Environment/Travel Guidelines Scheme. 40% of the keynote lectures were given by women;  50% of the short papers were given by women; 46% of the poster presentations were given by women; and women constituted 57% of the artists featured at the exhibition. Overall, there were 27 male registered attendees and 25 female registered attendees. Information about the event, including photographs, participants, and paper abstracts, can be found at .

Event: Literature in the Age of the Self

On the 16 June 2025, we welcomed more than 330 registered attendees to the free public event we organized as part of our project on the representation of the self in contemporary culture. Entitled ‘Literature in the Age of the Self’, the event brought together philosophers, literary scholars, and highly acclaimed literary authors to discuss the meaning of selfhood in philosophy, in literature and literary criticism, and in history.

First, three academics gave a series of engaging, scene-setting talks:

Prof. Clare Carlisle (KCL Philosophy) is the author of Transcendence for Beginners (forthcoming), The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life (2023), Spinoza’s Religion (2021), Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (2019), On Habit (2014)

considered the self in the history of philosophy.

Dr Eric Langley (UCL English), author of Shakespeare’s Contagious Sympathies (2018), Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2009), and, as a poet, of Raking Light (2017)

gave a talk entitled ‘Being Interesting, Feeling Particular’.

Prof. Tom Stern (UCL Philosophy, A&H Vice-Dean for Interdisciplinarity), author of ������ٳ��������’s&�Բ�����;���ٳ󾱳��� (2019) and Philosophy and Theatre (2013), editor of The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (2019), The Philosophy of Theatre, Drama and Acting (2017); and co-editor of The Proustian Mind (2023)

gave a talk entitled ‘Nietzsche, Self-Creation, and Nietzsche-Creation’.

These talks were followed by an audience Q and A.

The second part of the event was dedicated to a creative roundtable
bringing celebrated writers in conversation with each other and the audience to discuss the experience and representation of selfhood in the twenty-first century. 

Our guests were:

Rachel Cusk, novelist (Parade, 2024, Second Place, 2021, the Outline&�Բ�����;�ٰ������Dz���&�Բ�����;– Outline | Transit | Kudos, 2014-18, Arlington Park, 2006, among many others), memoirist (A Life’s Work, 2001; The Last Supper, 2009; Aftermath, 2012), and playwright (Medea, 2015).

Brian Dillon, memoirist (In the Dark Room, 2005), novelist (Sanctuary, 2011), author of a number of genre-defying books blending the personal and the critical (Affinities, 2023; Suppose a Sentence, 2020; Essayism, 2017; The Great Explosion, 2015; Objects in this Mirror, 2014; I Am Sitting in a Room, 2012; Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, 2009), and curator (Tate and Hayward Galleries).

Vidyan Ravinthiran, memoirist (Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, 2025), poet (�����������, forthcoming; The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here, 2019; Grun-tu-molani, 2014), and Harvard academic (Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose, 2022; Worlds Woven Together, 2022; Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic, 2015).

This conversation, chaired by Scarlett and Alice, was full of surprising insights and fascinating revelations about these authors’ respective creative practices and perceptions of the place of the self in their writing.

It was followed by audience Q and A.

We are preparing a short film featuring the highlights of the event, and plan to release a lightly edited version of the authorial roundtable as a special bonus episode of Selfy Stories.

Podcast: Selfy Stories

Having previously set up a Literature and Philosophy Reading group UCL, we applied to the ������Ƶ for financial support for the production of a podcast which would disseminate the group’s discussions to a far wider extramural audience of interested readers and thinkers.

The podcast we produced comprises twelve episodes, including one 15-min trailer and one 90-minute special episode. In each episode, we ponder how literary representations of the self relate to what philosophers say about it. The literary focus of the first five episodes is Outline (2014), the best-selling novel by Rachel Cusk. The literary focus of next five episodes is The Years (2008), by the Nobel-Prize winning French author Annie Ernaux. Each week, chapters of these books are discussed alongside relevant twentieth or twenty-first-century interventions in philosophy.

The trailer and first five episodes of Selfy Stories were released in May and early June. Since then, we’ve received a lot of interest, five-star ratings only on Apple Podcasts, and extremely positive feedback from our listeners. The next six episodes are in now production and are due for release at weekly intervals in August and September. Three of these involve brilliant and engaging guests – philosophers Prof. Clare Carlisle (KCL) and Prof. Lucy O’Brien (UCL) and philosophy graduate student Emmanuel Campion-Dye (UCL). The bonus episode will consist of a recording of the authorial roundtable conversation held under the auspices of the Literature in the Age of the Self event we organized, also thanks to ������Ƶ funding, on 16 June 2025.

BPA/SWIP

Our project followed the BPA/SWIP good practice guidance.

Literature in the Age of the Self: Involving 4 women (including the two host organizers), the event achieved gender parity. (NB: We had intended to host another woman, Eline Arbo, as one of our speakers; she accepted our invitation, but later had to cancel on health grounds; she was replaced by Brian Dillon).

Selfy Stories: The podcast hosts and the two authors whose works we focus on are women. Six out of ten of the philosophers we focus on are women. Two out of three of our guests on the show have been women.

Conclusion and Thanks

The grant we were awarded by the ������Ƶ last year has been invaluable. We could not have recorded the podcast or held the Literature in the Age of the Self event without it. From our point of view, both have been a great success. Our personal research has benefited immensely from our work on the project, and, much more importantly, we feel we have been empowered to share it with a much wider audience than it ever would have reached without the ������Ƶ’s support. Selfy Stories has found an enthusiastic and appreciative audience and Literature in the Age of the Self was a high-profile sell-out event which drew in hundreds of members of the public, many of whom have expressed their gratitude to us for organizing it. We believe our efforts have had a substantial positive impact on those it was intended to reach, and for that, and for its positive impact on our own work in the field of aesthetics, we are enormously grateful.

The workshop took place on June 10^th, 2025 at the University of Nottingham. It brought together philosophers working on various topics which could be considered meta-aesthetic, including the analogues of traditional meta-ethical concerns, i.e., the language, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind behind aesthetics, as well as questions as to whether the methodologies we employ in aesthetics are fit for purpose.

The first talk was delivered by Celia Coll (University of Nottingham) and argued that our understanding of cognitivism about literary value is unduly limited because of an overwhelming tendency to use nineteenth-century novels as case-studies. The second talk was delivered by Mark Silcox (University of Central Oklahoma) and proposed that the problem which stems from didacticism in works of art for standard ethicist and moralist accounts of artistic value can be resolved if we embrace fictionalism about moral value. The third talk was delivered by Clothilde Torregrossa (University of St Andrews) and argued that both externalist and internalist accounts of aesthetic experience have difficulty accommodating works of sequential art—e.g., serialised television shows, reading a novel over several evenings. The fourth talk was delivered by Jinhui Wang (University of Oklahoma) and it argued that whilst convergence on first-order aesthetic judgements is neither possible nor desirable, we have reason to be hopeful about convergence on second-order aesthetic judgements insofar as we are able to make our perspectives on aesthetic objects intelligible to others who do not converge with us on our first-order aesthetic judgements. The closing talk was given by Alex King (Simon Fraser University) and it notes that analytic aesthetics generally distinguishes between two questions: (a) what demarcates the aesthetic domain? and (b) what explains the value of what we find within the aesthetic domain? and tends to proceed to answer (b) whilst remaining silent on (a). King argued that remaining silent on (a) cannot give us a complete account of the aesthetic and proposed that we can begin to answer (a) by thinking about aesthetic experience.

There were about fifteen attendees at the event (around 10 in-person and 5 online) and there was a good mix of students (undergraduate and graduate) and philosophers at various career stages. The discussion at the workshop, both in Q&A sessions and during breaks was extremely enjoyable and productive in that it helped the speakers strengthen the views put forward in their talks. We are very grateful to the ������Ƶ for their generous funding of this event.

BPA-SWIP/Best Practice

Selection of Speakers: The organisers chose to invite two women speakers—one early in her careers and one more established. Both of our first invitees accepted (Alex King, Clothilde Torregrossa). In addition to this, one of the organisers, also a woman and early in her career, Celia Coll was also a speaker. The CfA was advertised twice on PhilosL and circulated on various social media platforms. The ������Ƶ was mentioned at each instance of our advertisements of the CfA and later in our calls for registration to the workshop.

We received 18 submissions which were anonymised and reviewed by the organisers and four other colleagues in the department. Each submission was double blind reviewed and given a score out of 5. We invited the two highest scoring submissions (from Mark Silcox, University of Central Oklahoma, and Jinhui Want, University of Oklahoma) to give a talk at the workshop. We are pleased to say that 60% of the speakers were women and at an early stage of their careers.

Structure: The event followed BPA-SWIP guidelines on chairing. After each talk we offered a five-minute comfort break and used proactive chairing to avoid dominance/aggression in the discussion (of which none occurred, attendees praised the event for its warm atmosphere and productive discussion). All speakers were given 70 minutes (roughly 35 to present and 35 for Q&A) and there were no structural differences between the timings of the talks of invited and selected speakers’ talks. The talks were advertised in order of appearance. In addition to this, all speakers were offered assistance with childcare, mobility, and other issues and the event was hybrid to accommodate all speakers.

The two-day conference on ‘Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Gender-Based Violence’
sought to explore not only the question of what gender-based violence is but also the more
difficult, and more necessary, question of why it persists. Papers presented at the conference
examined violence as spectacular as well as ordinary. We considered the ways violence is
embedded in systems and structures as well as present in everyday conversations, gestures and
images. The conference addressed questions that refused to be resolved: Why, despite centuries
of literature, testimony, and activism, do the same patterns of harm continue? Why is it that
language—meant to disclose and disrupt—so often conceals? Why is it that in our collective
fatigue, we allow stories to turn into silence?

Day One opened with a keynote—or rather a collaborative performance. Alison Freeman
and Gordon Bearn (LeHigh University) shared their co-authored story, ‘The Housewife, the
Witch, and the Wardrobe.’ Through its slow unfolding of scenes of domestic abuse, the
presentation raised philosophical questions about losses of identity; it also tested the audiences’
‘affectionate attentiveness’, that is, our capacities to listen to the stories of others without closing
them off with resolution or categorisation.

As part of a panel of papers on ‘Recontextualising Violence’, Rowena Azada Palacios
(University of Edinburgh and Atendo de Manila University) examined narratives of masculinity,
femininity and violence from a non-Western perspective. Drawing on Filipino traditions, she
explored how public statues of women are often read as symbols of reverence, yet are also laden
with ambivalence. Palacios asked whether these representations offer a richer conception of
womanhood—or whether they re-inscribe another form of containment.
In another keynote presentation, Paul Standish (IoE-UCL) examined philosophical
questions of voice and the aftermath of trauma. Taking Susan Brison’s ‘Aftermath’ as a starting
point, Standish juxtaposed philosophical analysis with a discussion of Agnès Varda’s
‘Vagabond’. Standish examined how the film’s protagonist, Mona, remains a mystery to the
audience—her story pieced together through fragmentary encounters. Standish explored how
such a narrative structure resists voyeurism and forces us to ask what it means to ‘account for’
another’s pain.

Day Two began with a provocative talk from the artist Chantal Meza, whose visual artwork bears
witness to the femicides in Mexico. Meza’s talk complemented the keynote from Brad Evans on
Day One, which drew attention to the politics of disappearance: the ways violence disappears not
by accident but by design. Meza’s practice was offered not as illustration but as a method: a way
of asking, documenting, and resisting. She presented images not as answers but as openings—
each brushstroke a kind of insistence that the lives of disappeared women must not be lost to
abstraction.

A panel of papers on ‘Expressing Violence’ took further questions of the power of art,
drama, and film for thinking and resisting violence. This thread was further examined in the
keynote from Eileen John (University of Warwick), who reflected on the value and achievements
of fiction in relation to gender-based violence. John’s talk posed important critical questions
about fiction’s capacity to distort as well as represent violence and enable gender-based violence
to register.

The conference culminated in the panel ‘Seeing Violence’, which asked what we fail to
see, and why. The most dangerous forms of violence are those that become aestheticised into
normality. Final keynote talks from Anna Pagès (Ramon Llull University) and Catherine
Wheatley (King’s College London), encouraged us to turn our attention to the micro-encounters
through which harm is delivered and denied.

This conference sought to bring philosophy, art and politics together to reckon with
violence; we sought to understand gender based violence not as a problem to be solved, but as a
question that is always already unfolding.

Adoption of Good Practice Guidelines

We are pleased to report that the conference formally adopted the British Philosophical
Association (BPA) and Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) Good Practice Guidelines.
These were used as guiding principles to ensure equality, inclusion, and diversity in
participation, discussion, and representation. We followed these practices by:
Speaker Selection: We featured nine female speakers, including five keynote speakers.
Unfortunately, two of our female speakers were unable to travel due to family
commitments, so we made the conference hybrid to accommodate their needs.
We ensured that our speakers came from diverse cultural backgrounds and represented
various stages of their careers to provide a range of perspectives.
We encouraged everyone to participate in social gatherings, fostering an atmosphere of
inclusivity and support.

Speaker Participation

The conference featured a total of nine women speakers, five of whom delivered keynote
lectures. The speakers represented a wide range of institutions and disciplines and were selected
to reflect international and intersectional perspectives on gendered violence.

Accessibility and Dissemination

To promote greater accessibility and inclusion, all keynote sessions were recorded. These
recordings are being made available to enable attendees and interested parties who were unable
to join due to other commitments to access the content. This decision reflects our commitment to
making philosophical and artistic discussions on violence against women and girls more widely
available and inclusive.

Next Steps and Publication Plans

Following the enthusiastic reception and powerful presentations across the two days, we are now
exploring publication opportunities to further disseminate the work of the conference. All
speakers have expressed interest in contributing to a collected volume. We are currently
exploring potential academic publishers and would welcome a conversation with the ������Ƶ team
about how best to pursue and support this next phase.

Appreciation and Acknowledgements

We extend our sincere thanks to all the speakers, attendees, and organisers whose dedication and
insight made the event such a success. The conference offered a powerful testament to the value
of bringing philosophical inquiry, aesthetic practice, and gender justice into conversation. We are
extremely grateful for this grant which has certainly provided a space to discuss this vital and
pressing topic in our current times. Thank you.

The event featured the performance [a house made of water] by Bhanu Kapil and Blue Pieta. Their work offered a powerful opening to the discussions on empathy, embodiment, and violence, engaging attendees in a visceral and emotional experience.

The following day, the symposium continued, beginning with a thought-provoking interdisciplinary panel discussion. Experts from various fields, including critical migration studies, philosophy, and the arts, delved into the complexities of empathy. Taking multi-sensorial, creative practices as a crucial point of departure, the conversation centred on the ‘slipperiness of empathy’ (Hartman, 2018) – both as an ethical imperative and a mechanism of control that often centres the observer while erasing the experiences of those it purports to empathise with.

Through powerful visual representations, the exhibition brought together a diverse selection of creative outputs – from the abstract and sublime to portraiture, documentary, and sound. The artworks invited attendees to critically engage with the witness-spectator-dynamics, the aestheticisation of violence, and themes of presence, absence, (in)visibility, and erasure. These works confronted the viewer with complex ethical questions about how suffering, displacement, and injustice are represented.

The event was a deeply reflective experience and offered a rare space for the continual interrogation of empathy as a concept. Bringing together a range of perspectives from the arts and academia, the discussions raised important questions about the limitations of empathy, the need for more radical forms of action, and whether empathy, as a concept, is still what we need in the face of deep-rooted social and political injustices.

BPA/SWIP guidance

Funding received for the event, including support from the ������Ƶ, enabled us to cover travel and accommodation costs for all contributors. The speakers, artists, and performers represented diverse age groups, occupations, and backgrounds. Of the eight contributors, seven were women. The symposium was led by two female PhD students, who prioritised collaboration and inclusivity throughout the planning process. The organisers consulted female speakers early in the planning stages and actively involved them in the conceptualisation of the event. Their insights, perspectives, and vision played a crucial role in shaping the symposium’s themes and structure.

The event was free and open to all, reflecting the organisers’ commitment to accessibility and inclusivity. To ensure a broad and diverse audience, they actively encouraged attendance from individuals outside the university community through targeted promotional materials and partnerships with local charities. This open-access approach helped engage a wider public and enhanced the impact of the discussions.

Link to event webpage:

Co-convened by Caroline Breeden (University of Cambridge) and Marianna Patat (King’s College London)

This year we had a full schedule of in-person seminars, 13 in total. The attendance per talk averaged to 19 per session, with some as high as 38 attendees. The LAF has 1921 followers on Twitter, and the website received 4082 unique visits in the past year. We continue to upload our podcasts onto the LAF website. Our podcasts enable more people to engage with the Forum, including listeners from outside the United Kingdom.

One of the LAF’s aims is to benefit students who are working in aesthetics or related areas, providing opportunities for postgraduate researchers to engage with cutting-edge work and meet other academics working in the area. We were delighted to include an early career researcher (Christopher Earley) as well as a professional working artist (Claire Anscomb) within our range of speakers this year.

Our team this year has primarily consisted of PhD students who have organised the speaker list, chaired and facilitated the sessions, and helped with various organisational tasks. The posters, website, and podcasts are overseen by the student team.

We are appreciative of the funding from the ������Ƶ which has allowed us to put on a fantastic programme of seminars this year. We aim for gender diversity in inviting speakers, and, same as last year, achieved near-parity, with 6 women and 7 men (2 of the speakers were POCs).

The comprehensive Speaker Programme 2023-2024 is as follows:

Catharine Abell (Oxford): “Art, Medium and the Challenges of the Conceptual”
Wednesday, 11 October 2023

Elisabeth Schellekens Dammann (Uppsala): “Thinking the Aesthetic: The Noetic Conception of Aesthetic Experience”
Thursday, 02 November 2023

Aaron Ridley (Southampton): “Sketchbooks of Genius”
Wednesday, 29 November 2023

Stacie Friend (Edinburgh): “Fiction, Fact and Value”
Wednesday, 13 December 2023

James Wilson (UCL): “Symbolism and Art”
Wednesday, 17 January 2024

Christopher Earley (Liverpool): “Co-Producing Art’s Cognitive Value”
Wednesday, 07 February 2024

Claire Anscomb (De Montfort): “Understanding and Appreciating Uses of AI in Image-making Practice”

Wednesday, 28 February 2024

Eileen John (Warwick): “What Is the Point of Evaluating Art?”
Wednesday, 20 March 2024

Katherine Thomson-Jones (Oberlin): “Rule-Bound Creativity in AI Art”
Wednesday, 10 April 2024

Nikhil Krishnan (Cambridge): “The Rights of Texts”
Wednesday, 24 April 2024

James Grant (Oxford): “Does It Matter If Beauty Is Objective?”
Wednesday, 08 May 2024

Patrik Engisch (Geneva): “Locked-In and Expandable Creative Domains”
Wednesday, 22 May 2024

Jonathan Gingerich (Rutgers): “Kantian Genius Reconstructed”
Wednesday, 05 June 2024

In addition to our programme, we hosted complementary events:

LAF Special Event: “The Ethics of Arts Funding” (Collaboration, Royal Institute of Philosophy)
Monday, 30 October 2023

Diarmuid Costello (Warwick): “Wrongful, Degrading, or Merely Indecent? Exploitation in Three Works by Santiago Sierra” (Collaboration, Birkbeck Philosophy Society)
Thursday, 07 March 2024

Going forward:

We are delighted that our team will carry on in their current roles, with continued oversight from Professor John Hyman (UCL) and Dr Alex Grzankowski (Birkbeck, Institute of Philosophy). The student team includes: Sailee Khurjekar (PhD Student, Birkbeck); Oscar Hillyer (Undergraduate Student, Birkbeck); Alice Harberd (PhD Student, UCL); and Taylor Enoch (PhD Student, UCL).

The LAF would like to thank the ������Ƶ for their continued support.– Sailee Khurjekar On behalf of the LAF’s 2023-24 organising group

Day 1

Alice Hilder Jarvis (Cambridge) began the conference with a discussion of when it is permissible for political protestors to attack artworks, followed by comments from Thomas Sinclair (Oxford), before Emily Kay Williamson (Central European University) gave a talk on discrepant affect – how our emotional responses to artworks and imagined contexts might differ from those towards real situations we are confronted with – with a response from Stephen Mulhall (Oxford). Anna Hotter (CUNY) examined how a comedian’s standing and personal history affects the permissibility of their joking about events such as sexual assault, with a response from organiser Zoe Walker (Oxford). Anna Morse (Virginia) then discussed how aesthetic properties of public art and architecture can undermine virtuous perception through obscuring morally significant features in the world, followed by a response from Michael Martin (Oxford). Ella Whiteley (Sheffield) concluded the first day with her keynote presentation, “Imaginings and Salience”, which argued that in aiming to overcome Philosophy’s systematic tendency to see women as women first, and philosophers second, socially progressive initiative like ‘Women in Philosophy’ can end up replicating the very salience structures they are trying to combat. A pub dinner at The Gardener’s Arms followed.

Day 2

Sam Rogers (NYU) began the second day by examining how works of fiction resolve an important conflict between ethics and epistemology, presenting an ethically acceptable body of public information about the private side of life, with a response from Robbie Kubala (UT Austin). Tareeq Jalloh (Sheffield) offered an examination and of the claim that drill music incites violence, which is frequently espoused by the Metropolitan Police in their extreme policing of young black musicians, with comments from Lucy McDonald (KCL). Caroline von Klemperer (Rutgers) turned to examine how respect for others incurs ethical demands on our imagination – both to imagine certain things and to refrain from imagining others – followed by comments from James Laing (Oxford). Maisie Luo (Rutgers) then discussed how fine art representations of animal suffering can be especially effective through softening its portrayal compared to more explicit documentary depictions, with a response from Alison Hills (Oxford). James Grant (Oxford) was unable to give his keynote talk entitled “Does it matter if beauty is objective?”, and so Zoe Walker closed the conference with a talk entitled “Dark Comedy: The Strange Relationship between Immorality and Funniness”, which argued that comedy can be immoral when it distracts our attention away from morally significant features of what is represented – and that this form of immorality facilitates funniness.

The organisers are especially grateful to each of their commentators for providing insightful and constructive feedback to speakers, and thank the Aristotelian Society, the ������Ƶ, the Mind Association, the Society for Applied Philosophy, and Trinity College, Oxford for financial support of this conference.

Adherence to BPA/SWIP good practice guidelines:

The organisers took various steps to adhere to the BPA/SWiP Good Practice Scheme and Guidelines for Accessible Conferences:

• They ensured that they invited a female keynote speaker – Ella Whiteley – and set the conference dates around her availability so she was definitely able to attend.
• In assessing submissions, each organiser read them all blind to author details before making decisions. The submissions we had assessed as to be accepted ended up containing more female speakers than male speakers (6 female, 2 male).
• They issued their Call for Papers and acceptance notifications in good time so as to allow speakers to organise travel.
• They included a link to information about childcare in their Call for Papers for speakers/attendees who might need it – there are a number of options available in Oxford.
• They did not charge an attendance fee and provided lunch on both days to make the conference more accessible to those without institutional funding. They further ensured that various options were available to those with dietary requirements, which they asked all participants to make us aware of.
• When chairing each talk’s Q&A, the conference organisers tried to ensure that all attendees got an equal chance to ask questions and no one dominated the discussion. 
• They publicised the accessibility information for the conference, such as that the conference meeting room is wheelchair accessible, so that potential speakers could ascertain whether they would be able to attend.

The programme had a roughly 50/50 gender balance across organisers (1M 1F), invited keynote speakers (1M 1F), accepted speakers (2M 6F) and commentators (5M 3F). The attendees also comprised a balanced gender distribution.

The event was led by ������Ƶ member Jason Leddington (Bucknell) and included eleven submitted talks spread across four sessions: (1) The Experience of Magic; (2) The Enjoyment of Magic; (3) Magic and Beyond; and (4) Illusion and Depiction. Each of these sessions was paired with a talk by one of the four keynote speakers: Magician Jeanette Andrews; philosophers Robert Hopkins (NYU) and Bence Nanay (Antwerp); and psychologist Jasmina Stevanov (Bristol). A ������Ƶ Small Grant covered travel, food, and lodging for the keynote speakers, artist performance fees, and a portion of the venue costs. The remaining venue costs, as well as lunch for all participants, were covered by The Magic Circle and The Science of Magic Association, which collaborated in the organisation of the event. The day also included a tour of The Magic Circle museum, a conversation with visual artist Patrick Hughes (one of whose paintings hangs in The Magic Circle headquarters), and an evening magic performance by Jeanette Andrews in The Magic Circle theatre.

The organisers followed the BPA/SWIP guidance and made sure that they had a gender balance among the invited speakers. (In fact, they nearly had 75% women.) In the male-dominated field of magic performance, they invited a young, female performer with theoretical interests, Jeanette Andrews, rather than the stereotypical older white male magician. They also invited a young female psychologist, Jasmina Stevanov, to give a keynote, when they could easily instead have invited one of the prominent male psychologists who ended up giving a submitted talk. Finally, they invited a female philosopher who works on illusion, Fiona Macpherson (Glasgow); but while she was interested, she was in the end unavailable.

To foster greater diversity and inclusion, the organisers reviewed submitted abstracts anonymously and decided to accept all of them, including some of uncertain quality.

Topics like ideology, propaganda, persuasion and epistemic injustice, previously largely the domain of continental political theory, have relatively recently emerged as central themes within Anglophone philosophy. Gathered around the field of “political epistemology”, these approaches acknowledge the role played by contingent cultural influences in political reasoning, knowledge formation and emancipation. This conference was organised with the view that the philosophical study of such phenomena can be enhanced through a conversation with work in aesthetics and philosophy of art.

The conference opened with Paul C. Taylor (UCLA) offering a close reading of John Houston’s classic film In Our Life (1942). Starting with Stanley Cavell’s readings of Hollywood comedies of remarriage as an exemplar of how philosophical material can be teased out from Hollywood’s golden age, Taylor’s reading of key scenes from Houston’s film offered an enriched understanding of racialised epistemic injustice. Political scientist Gemma Bird (Liverpool) shared her fieldwork in Athens, where she investigates the graffiti left by evicted squatter and activist communities. In the Q&A, we explored links between her fieldwork and philosophical concerns, such as the work of Quill Kukla on city living. A talk by C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) concluded the first day; he spoke on how overly clear statements of (ethical) values encourage close-mindedness. Making values explicit can narrow our attention to only some aspects of an activity; aesthetic experience may represent a counterpoint to that flawed approach.

The second day started with Rachel Fraser’s (Oxford) talk on narrative activism: political engagement centred on personal narratives. Exploring both the limits and advantages of first-person narrative, Fraser emphasised the role these can play in the emergence of shared knowledge, especially in relation to the history of women’s emancipation. The theme of narrative continued into the talk by Emilia L. Wilson (St Andrews), which showed how narratives of eroticised refusal by women create harmful social scripts. Wilson’s close reading of a scene from Goldfinger, like Taylor’s talk, showed how political epistemology can be enhanced through close analysis of artworks. Just Serrano-Zamora (Málaga) presented a paper co-authored with Lisa Herzog (Groningen) on democratic practices of the oppressed. Tying in with Fraser’s concerns, but arriving at them from Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, the paper explored how such aesthetic activities as dancing flashmobs can overcome obstacles that oppressed groups face in learning from each other. The final paper, by Lauren Ware (Royal Horticultural Society), was a foray into philosophy from a gardening perspective, exploring how curious plants like the ginkgo can inspire us to question gender binaries.

The third day began with Allan Hazlett (Washington University in St Louis), who discussed different forms of knowledge-what-it-is-like, and to what extent such knowledge can be obtained from imagination. The Q&A connected his talk to philosophy of literature, where knowledge-what-it-is-like is a central concern, while Hazlett also emphasised how such knowledge can motivate knowers to bring about a better political situation. Alice Harberd (UCL) spoke on the aesthetic causes of epistemic injustice. While most discussants foregrounded the power of art or imagination in improving understanding, Habrerd argued that aesthetic properties can also bring about forms of (epistemic) oppression. Alexandra Plakias (Hamilton) spoke on awkwardness, which according to her arises in situations when somebody breaks a social script. Awkwardness therefore becomes important for co-ordinating behaviour, which has both aesthetic and social implications. Finally, Sarah Fine (Cambridge) concluded the conference with a talk that blurred the genre boundaries between art and philosophy. Staging a talk with lighting, music cues, and metafiction, hers was so far the only performance lecture that I’ve seen in a philosophy context: and it got me thinking about the kind of epistemic obstacles that only performance can overcome.

We’re also grateful to curator James Harper from Liverpool Biennial, who gave us a tour of this year’s exhibition on the second day. Curated by Khanyisile Mbongwa, this year’s edition artistically reimagined narratives of transatlantic slave trade, matching the conference theme very well. The conference dinner was held at The Reader restaurant on Mount Pleasant, a social enterprise that supports the homeless in Liverpool. The food was excellent, so check them out if you find yourself in Liverpool.

Leading on from the conference, the Panpsycast podcast are conducting two episodes on our themes, interviewing C. Thi Nguyen and Rachel Fraser.

Conference report by Vid Simoniti
Organisers: Katherine Furman, Robin McKenna, Vid Simoniti

This year we had a full schedule of in-person seminars, and attendance per talk was also higher this year than last (averaging 15-20 per session). The LAF has 1975 followers on Twitter, and the website received 3931 unique visits in the past year. (We have decided to drop Facebook.) We continue to post podcasts of our talks on iTunes. Our podcasts enable more people to engage with the Forum, including listeners from outside the UK, and have a substantial number of monthly downloads.

One of the LAF’s aims is to benefit students who are working in aesthetics or related areas, providing opportunities for postgraduate researchers to engage with cutting-edge work and meet other academics working in the area. Students at the University of London also play a central role in organising the Forum’s activities, and in the 2022-23 year, this has included help on various organizational tasks, as well as participating actively in discussions.

Thanks to the funding from the ������Ƶ, we’ve been able to put on a good programme of seminars this year. We have aimed for a diverse programme, including talks by early career philosophers as well as by those more established in the field. The LAF also aims for gender diversity in inviting speakers, and this year we achieved near-parity, with 7 men and 6 women. (The original schedule included an additional woman who had to drop out late.) We were particularly delighted to welcome back Andrew Huddleston. Our speakers were as follows:

Programme 2022-23

John Kulvicki (Dartmouth): “Understanding Broken Colours”
Tuesday, 18 October 2022

Diarmuid Costello (Warwick): “Aesthetic Judgement After de Duve: Or, What, Exactly, did Kant ‘Get Right’?”
Wednesday, 02 November 2022

Genoveva Martí (Barcelona): “Testing the Antinomy of Taste”
Wednesday, 16 November 2022

Chiara Brozzo (Barcelona): “On the Proper Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature in Design”
Wednesday, 07 December 2022

Daisy Dixon (Cardiff): “On Immoral Artists”
Wednesday, 18 January 2023

Françoise Lavocat (Sorbonne Nouvelle): “Paradoxes of Character”
Wednesday, 01 February 2023

Sonia Sedivy (Toronto): “Aesthetic Properties: Heterogenous, Historical and Hard to Explain”
Wednesday, 22 February 2023

Andrew Huddleston (Warwick): “Abstracting the Divine: The Rothko Chapel”
Friday, 10 March 2023

Justin D’Ambrosio (St Andrews): “Imagining What Things are Like and the Paradox of Fiction”
Wednesday, 22 March 2023

Shaun Nichols (Cornell): “Aesthetic Dumbfounding”
Wednesday, 26 April 2023

Paloma Atencia-Linares (UNED): “How to Understand Fiction in Photography”
Wednesday, 10 May 2023

David Sosa (UT Austin): “The Passion of the Critique”
Wednesday, 24 May 2023

Christopher Peacocke (Columbia): “The Content of Music: Its Nature and Significance”
Wednesday, 21 June 2023

Going forward:

Stacie Friend and Tim Stoll are both leaving Birkbeck, Stacie for the University of Edinburgh and Tim for Warwick University, so they are stepping down from their roles as organizers of the LAF. Three students will take over as the main organisers, with oversight from Alex Grzankowski (Birkbeck/Institute of Philosophy). These are Sailee Khurjekar (Birkbeck), Alice Harberd (UCL) and Oscar Hillyer (Birkbeck).

The LAF would like to thank the ������Ƶ for their continued support.

–Stacie Friend

On behalf of the LAF’s 2022-23 organising group: Stacie Friend (Birkbeck), Alex Grzankowski (Birkbeck), Tim Stoll (Birkbeck), Sarah Kiernan (PhD, Birkbeck), Taylor Enoch (PhD Student, UCL)