CFP: 9th Annual Chapel Hill Normativity Workshop

We invite submissions of abstracts for the 2027 Chapel Hill Normativity Workshop, to be held on March 26-27, 2027. (Please note that this year's workshop, unfortunately and unavoidably, conflicts with the Pacific APA.) Abstracts should be between 750-1000 words (inclusive of footnotes but exclusive of any bibliography) and should summarize a paper that can be presented in no more than 40 minutes. The title of the paper should be included within the document above the abstract. Please prepare your abstract for anonymous review, and submit it in .pdf or .docx form to [email protected] by October 7th, 2026.

We will consider papers on any aspect of normativity, construed broadly to include:

• The traditional questions of metaethics
• The nature of other (possible) kinds of normativity (prudential, epistemic, aesthetic, political, legal, etc.)
• More abstract and general questions within first-order normative theory
• Theories of reasons, rationality, and reasoning
• The semantics and pragmatics of normative language
• The psychology of normative judgment

Those who presented papers at the last two Normativity Workshops (the 8th annual workshop, held in 2026; and the 7th annual workshop, held in 2025) are not eligible to submit papers this year. Those who chaired/commented at the last two workshops, or who presented at previous workshops, are eligible to submit. There is a limit of one submission per person; co-authored papers count toward this limit.

For the eighth workshop running, papers accepted to the workshop will be eligible for publication in a special issue of Philosophical Studies. Authors of accepted papers are encouraged, but not required, to submit their papers to the special issue.

The authors of the seven best abstracts not selected for the workshop will be invited to chair a session at the workshop and, as part of that, to act as a "mini-commentator", asking an extended (3-5 minute) first question. In order to facilitate this, we will ask authors of accepted papers to send their chair-commentators a draft of their full paper by March 1st.