CFP: 2027 University of Kentucky Graduate Philosophy Conference: Language and World

We invite you to submit to this year's installment of our annual graduate conference, held in person at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY on Saturday, February 27, 2027. Our conference theme is Language and World.

Conference Details:

Our theme is to be broadly construed, and we welcome submissions from all philosophical traditions, including but not limited to ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy; non-Western philosophy; and continental philosophy, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy. Topics of interest for the event include (but are not limited to) the nature of the gap between our concepts and the world, whether the world fixes the meanings of our words, how we navigate the world in light of breakdowns of meaning, how our linguistic practices affect the world, and how language discloses being. The event is open to a wide variety of subfields, including feminist philosophy, deconstruction, history of philosophy, metaethics, phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of religion, and so on.

We are happy to be joined by keynote speaker Dr. James Conant. Dr. Conant's many titles include Chester D. Tripp Distinguished Service Professor of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at University of Chicago, co-director of the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism in Leipzig, and director of the Center for German Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Submission details:

Papers should be no longer than 3,500 words (excluding footnotes and references) and suitable for a 20-30 minute presentation. Presentations will be followed by 15-30 minute Q&A sessions.

Please send anonymized submissions via email to James[dot]Chadwell[at]uky[dot] edu. Head your submission with an abstract of no more than 250 words. Please include your paper title, abstract, and word count in your submission email. Papers should be attachments in Word or PDF format.

Submission deadline: December 19, 2026. We will notify authors of acceptance by January 16, 2027. 

For more information, contact James[dot]Chadwell[at]uky[dot]edu.