Events

Our flagship series of London Lectures deliver accessible evening talks from autumn to spring every year, with a different speaker each week. The 2022-23 series were Words and Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Language and each year the lectures are on a different theme.

Lectures are available on the Royal Institute’s YouTube channel, which attracted over 95,603 in the course of 2022. Papers based on the Lectures are published in annual volumes by Cambridge University Press.

Our annual lectures, which are open to the public free of charge, attract some of the world’s leading philosophers to share their thoughts on a topic of their choice. The lectures are held once a year in Cardiff, Dublin, Edinburgh and London. Recent lecturers include Heather Widdows, C. Thi Nguyen and Linda Martin Alcoff.

Written over 2000 years ago, Plato’s Symposium – literally, a ‘drinking together’ – is the first example in the Western world of what we would now call a round table discussion. Though we don’t serve drinks, each year we continue that tradition by bringing together four philosophers to discuss a topic of fundamental importance today. Symposia are open to the public free of charge. Find out more and watch discussions from previous years.

We offer funding for UK philosophy departments, and philosophy clubs or other organisations to organise an ambitious one day Public Philosophy Event, or a multi-day event aimed primarily at the general public.