DATES AND VENUE

Conference dates: 21-24.07 (i.e. we expect people to arrive on Monday 20.07 and leave Krakow on either 25.07 or 26.07)

Venue: Jagiellonian University, Law and Administration Faculty new building, ul. Krupnicza 33a [https://share.google/Fwsi8k2kndR1F5rxK]

Host: Jagiellonian Center for Law, Language, Philosophy (https://pjf.uj.edu.pl/) is the host, in cooperation with Faculty of Law and Administration and Institute of Philosophy

Main organizers: Paweł Banaś and Adam Dyrda; Klaudyna Horniczak, Bartosz Biskup & Bartłomiej Brzozowski

Conference Registration here [closed]

Conference Dinner Registration here

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Robin Dembroff, Yale University - The Macho State: Fascism as Gender Politics

Jennifer Lackey, Northwestern University - Coerced Narrative Continuity and Legitimacy in the U.S. Criminal Legal System

Nurbay Irmak, Boğaziçi University - Static and Dynamic Kinds: The Case of Artifacts 

Krzysztof Poslajko, Jagiellonian University - The Fiction of Corporate Mentality

Kenneth Silver, Trinity College, Dublin - Implications of Corporate Privilege: Metaphysical and Moral

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME & BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

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.)

This edition of ISOS conference hosts a number of Special Workshops and symposia which may follow a different structure

Pre-conference SUMMER SCHOOL: Social Ontology - organized by Brian Epstein

[APPLICATIONS CLOSED!]

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: July 20th, 2026, the day before the official conference

Schedule:

Faculty:
The sessions this year will be led by Brian Epstein (Tufts), Kendy Hess (College of the Holy Cross), Jade Fletcher (Leeds), and Kirk Ludwig (Indiana). Each leads a 75-minute seminar-style session.

8:45 Registration starts! Here is the VENUE

9:00 – 9:30 Welcome and introductions
9:30 – 10:45 Session 1 — Brian Epstein
10:45 – 11:05 Coffee break
11:05 – 12:20 Session 2 — Kendy Hess
12:20 – 1:20 Lunch
1:20 – 2:35 Session 3 — Jade Fletcher
2:35 – 3:25 Breakout session (small-group discussions)
3:25 – 3:45 Coffee break
3:45 – 5:00 Session 4 — Kirk Ludwig

7:45 GET-TOGETHER (drinks&food included)

This edition of Social Ontology aims to focus on interdisciplinary research, including application of ideas from social ontology in solving problems of legal and political philosophy in the following areas:

• Metaphysics & Law
• Ontology of legal & political institutions
• Legal entities, subjects and objects of law

We invite, however, submissions of abstracts covering all topics relevant for contemporary research in social ontology, including:

• Methods and problems of social ontology
• The ontology of social structures, social kinds and social facts
• The nature and existence of social phenomena
• The nature and existence of institutions
• Collective intentionality
• Collective or shared beliefs, intentions, and emotions
• Shared, joint or collective action
• Shared, collective, and corporate responsibility
• Social foundations of language and linguistic phenomena
• Linguistic or mental representations of social phenomena
• Social skills, habits and practices
• The nature, evolution, and functioning of social norms
• The ontology of money and economics 
• Critical social ontology
• Ontology and injustice and oppression

If you have further questions, please send an email to Pawel Banas at p.banas[at]uw.edu.pl

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, Stockholm University, Duke, and Dublin.