On Getting It Right

We are pleased to announce the workshop On Getting It Right, taking place at the Department of Philosophy at Lund University on June 12th - 13th, 2026. The theme of the conference has its origin in a dispute where Bernard Williams accuses Richard Rorty of failing to respect that, in philosophy, there must be something that counts as getting it right. The central question of the workshop is: what does it mean to get it right in philosophy? Or, more specifically, what can count as getting it right if we take worries about anti-foundationalism and the contingency of our concepts seriously? Of course, these worries might turn out to be misguided or not provide any obstacle to making sense of what it is to get things right.

Friday, June 12th
8:50 Welcome and Coffee
8:55 Matthieu Queloz (University of Bern) - Is the Contingency of Our Concepts an Obstacle to Getting It Right?
10:25 Break
10:30 Niklas Dahl (Lund University) – Explanatory Unity as a Sense of Reality
12:00 Lunch
13:15 David Owens (University of Oxford) – The Method of Cases
14:45 Break
14:50 Martin Gustafsson (Åbo Akademi) – Philosophy as a Crisis Phenomenon
16:20 Break
16:40 Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth College) – Yeah to Truth: Or, the Functions of Truth Talk
18:10 End of Day
19:30 Dinner

Saturday, June 13th
10:30 Anton Emilsson (KU Leuven) – On the Deepest Sense of Style
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Huw Price (University of Cambridge) – The Hand-Made Mirror: Rorty, Davidson, and Brandom
14:30 Break
14:35 Tom Kaspers (University of Chicago) – TBD
16:05 Break
16:30 Sophie Grace Chapell (The Open University) – The Sense of a Difficulty
18:00 End of Day
19:00 Dinner

The workshop aims to shed light on these questions by bringing together a variety of perspectives, such as pragmatism, conceptual ethics, and a broadly post-Wittgensteinian tradition, as well as views more critical to the underlying assumption that our concepts are sufficiently contingent for there to be any serious worry about what it can mean to get it right.

Additional guests are more than welcome to attend, but we ask that you fill out the following form: https://forms.gle/qBu2aYrMzzECosHJ9

We will, however, not be able to cover dinner and lunch costs for non-invited participants and cannot guarantee that there will be space at the conference dinners.

Hope to see many of you there!

The organisers, Niklas Dahl, Anton Emilsson, and Elsa Magnell.