Events
Recent highlights
Our Programmes
Annual City Lectures
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.
Annual Symposium
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.
London Lectures
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.
Local Partnerships
Discover events in your area hosted by our local partner organisations from across the UK. Events shared here promote access to the ideas, knowledge and experience of philosophy and are open to all.
Promote your Event
Hosting a philosophy event in your area? We are happy to feature events not funded by the Royal Institute on our website calendar and in our newsletters to help spread the word.