The World Congress of Philosophy (WCP), which takes place every five years, convened in Rome earlier this month. The WCP typically has a very large program—around 550 pages long this year—and from what I’ve heard, with over 1000 speakers, the conference was somewhat overwhelming. Also underwhelming.
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According to two WCP participants who wrote to me separately, a surprising number of sessions were unattended—by the very speakers scheduled to speak during them. One of them writes:
Initially, I went to a talk but upon speaking with the session chair, I discovered that the speaker was absent. I brushed it off, thinking this was normal—people fall ill, have personal emergencies, or face other unexpected situations.
However, in the following days, as I spoke with other attendees, I realized that many had similar experiences with speakers failing to show up. I attributed it to the size of the conference, reasoning that it wasn’t improbable to encounter others with similar experience.
What ultimately compelled me to write… was an incident during a two-hour session, where six speakers were scheduled to present. Long story short, not a single one of the six speakers turned up for their talks! The chairs had no information, neither did the conference organizers, and the attendees simply waited in the room for two hours, only to leave without hearing any presentations.
After this incident, I discussed with other participants and I discovered that almost everyone had encountered similar situations, with many speakers failing to appear.
It’s bad enough when conference-goers only attend the session in which they’re giving a talk and skip the rest—that is really poor conference behavior, folks. (Which is not to say that at large conferences nonstop attendance by all is expected or even desirable.) But ditching your own session? On purpose? That’s no longer just obnoxious free-riding but academic fraud.
How common was this at the WCP? Of course I’m more likely to get emails from people with complaints than those without, so it would be helpful if more WCP attendees could comment on it. Discussion of other aspects of the WCP is also welcome.
I had to cancel my talk due to circumstances in the family. I told the organziers weeks in advance but never heard back from them. When I discovered that I’m still on the program I emailed the organizers again as well as the chair of the session, asking to take my name off the program. Again, I did not hear back from them. I wonder what happened there – or did not happen there.
Thanks for this. I’ve long wanted to go to the WCP but haven’t had a chance. This account is making me reconsider whether I want to go. I hope you get many great firsthand responses that will clarify the situation.
I attended a World Congress of Philosophy at the beginning of my career, over 20 years ago. It was in Boston, and it was great. I stayed in a BU residence hall to save money, and I used airmiles to get there. I got to see talks by giants in the field, Alvin Goldman, Dan Dennett, etc. I even got to discuss my research on collective belief with Margaret Gilbert, who I had never met before. I also connected with a few friends from graduate school, including one who was doing a post doc at Harvard.
The quality of papers was very mixed – it is an inclusive conference. There were high school teachers from some European countries presenting paper, along side leaders in the field. I planned to attend other WCPs but I have not had much of a chance for various reasons.
But, I have heard from someone who was on the organizing committee for another one of these BIG conferences that it is NOW typical that 30 % of the people who have their papers accepted either pull out or do not show up. I think it is a real shame. And the behavior has only become more normalized since covid.
Of course, people have to pull out sometimes. I have had family emergencies and health issues (BIG ones) that prevented me form attending conferences I was supposed to present at. But I suspect that some people are quite cavalier about this sort of thing.
I have not gone to any of the meetings of WCP, but my sense is that it is super inclusive. I am from the Global South. I saw from social media that an “amateur” philosopher in my country (I’ve no idea what their real job is) had *three* papers accepted by this year’s WCP. Based on their own announcement, I had to say that those papers were on some very odd, unjustified cosmology/metaphysics that this person develops (or rather, imagines), none of which seemed to meet any academic standard.
I also saw that a lot of professional philosophers were there. While I am happy to see how inclusive the conference was, I am not surprised at the low attendance (or no-show) of some sessions.
I had to pull out of the conference a couple of weeks in advance due to an injury. I emailed the conference organizers and received no answers (I suspect I did not send it to the right address, though). However, I had spoken in the previous months with many people who were supposed to give a talk and were unsure whether to actually go. Many realized that Rome in August is not the easiest place to have such a big conference, both in terms of climate and hotel prices/difficulties in moving around in the city. Compounded on this, the fact that accepted speakers’ sessions had unusually brief timeslots was a further reason to ultimately not attend the conference.
I was at the WCP and went to quite a few panels. I never experienced anything like this (although I heard from a couple of others who did). It is such a massive conference and with participants from all over the world, that I wouldn’t be surprised if there were issues with such things as visas and travel. And because the conference is so large, it wouldn’t be easy to communicate this to all the attendees, especially if such problems arose last minute. I’ll also say that the WCP was fantastic- it’s rare to get the opportunity to see so many different panels in different languages and meet philosophers from all over the globe. The field could use more truly international meetings like this.
I attended the conference and enjoyed many of the papers. That being said, I primarily attended the sessions for a particular society and, for that society, most of the speakers showed up. When it came to hearing talks in the general session, I agree that there were quite a few absences.
Is this the sort of philosophy conference where people submit full papers in advance for peer review, read those papers aloud in their sessions, and then publish in conference proceedings? If so, I can understand why some would treat it as basically a journal paper, and cut out the in-person element.
I have never understood the insistence of some philosopher’s to read their papers at conferences.
WCP events I attended all had speakers. Some were world-class-excellent, others less so. Presentation quality was uniformly uneven, rooms were difficult to find, conference staff misdirected me on more than one occasion. I’m sure most people spent at least some of their time enjoying Rome instead of dutifully attending conference events, but that’s only reasonable. This was the second WCP I have attended. I found it worthwhile overall.
I submitted an abstract to WCP. I was still unsure if I could attend when it was accepted, so I didn’t do anything. I assumed not doing anything would not result in my name being on the schedule (perhaps a bad assumption to make in general). But about a week before the conference, I received an email from an attendee asking if she could read my paper before the talk. I emailed the organisers, who they said they took me off the program. If not for this attendee’s email, I would’ve been a no-show.
So it seems like a lot of the problem would be solved by emailing everyone a month or two before the conference to confirm their attendance?
I too had to cancel my talk, and did so about one month in advance. I even received a confirmation from the WCP secretariat that they had received my notice. Yet, as I just discovered, they never took my talk off the program.
I attended a couple of sessions where several speakers were missing (three out of five in one case, and two out of five in the other). Otherwise, I mostly attended round table sessions organized under a theme, and everyone was there for those. I’ll also mention that not all of the rooms were air-conditioned, and this was Rome in August.
I presented and attended. In one session, the speaker right after me was not present, and there was no chair present. But almost everything else I attended had all the speakers present.
My sense was the organization and communication from the conference organizers was a bit disappointing. The schedule was not posted until 4-6 weeks for the conference. So no one knew which day (out of 9) they were presenting. I heard some presenters didn’t come since they couldn’t find out far enough in advance to know what days to attend (and they couldn’t come for the whole 9 days).
To be fair though, this WCP was supposed to be hosted by another city/university that backed out, so Rome was asked/volunteered to take over. But that meant they were starting from behind and playing catchup the whole time.
This was my first experience of the WCP, and it was a very positive one overall. As others have said, the quality of papers varied considerably in some panels – but isn’t that normal in such large gatherings? I listened to some really engaging and thought-provoking papers. One of the things I enjoyed most was the possibility of attending plenaries and panels on topics that didn’t fall within my research interest, but from which I learnt a great deal. This is an advantage of having such a huge gathering, which was truly diverse in terms of both scholars’ provenance and fields of philosophical inquiry.
As for no-shows, in the panels I chaired and/or attended there were only a couple of speakers who didn’t show up, mostly due to last-minute illness. There was also a keynote I was looking forward to listen to, only to find out a couple of weeks before the Congress that they were no longer on the programme. Also, I know of at least two speakers who couldn’t make it because of visa issues. This is something that ought to be brought into the discussion. For many of us attending (and commenting here), it was just a matter of buying air/train tickets and sorting out accommodation, but for many other colleagues visa regimes act as barriers (the WCP’s overarching theme was ‘Philosophy across boundaries’/borders). I have it from a member of the organizing committee that organizers’ managed to intervene in some individual cases, but for quite a few other colleagues there was no option but to stay home. Incidentally, a panel of philosophers alluded to this issue in the ‘Barletta Declaration‘ on Philosophy and Interculturality, presented to the Italian G7 presented ahead of the WCP (and discussed in plenary of the last day of the Congress).
I guess there’s always room for improvement, and perhaps there could have been ways of making some ‘live’ changes to the programme in cases were prospective participants gave notice of their absence, though I’m not sure whether this was possible logistically. Otherwise, my impression was that considering the gargantuan dimensions of the WCP, the logistics were overall very satisfactory.
Just to add some positive anecdata: I presented as part of a 2-day philosophy of action sequence that went really well (thanks to the organizational efforts of Luca Ferrero). I believe all the speakers showed up, and the attendance was strong (so strong, in fact, that a few of the talks were standing-room-only).
I attended the WCP, and it seems the organization of the sessions was highly decentralized. I participated in the sequence of panels in the Philosophy of Action organized by Luca Ferrero, which went quite smoothly overall. But this was clearly because Luca put a huge effort into making sure things stayed on the rails despite the general lack of guidance from the central organizational body. So, shout out to Luca!
I was on the organizing committee for one of the 80 thematic tracks (philosophy of technology). I reviewed about a dozen abstracts for that and also was encouraged to be lenient, so I knew in advance that the quality of presentations would be mixed. In my session, the chair didn’t show up, so I chaired for everybody. I think one reason that a lot of people were no-shows was that there were two versions of the program: a static pdf and an app that updated in real time. Anyone who didn’t manage to say that they couldn’t attend before the pdf was finalized appeared on that program but not the app. In addition, the app also moved a bunch of the talks around (different days, different times, different venues). I was using the pdf and almost missed my talk until someone said, “see you at your talk tomorrow,” and I was like, “No, it’s the next day.” Had to double-check on the app. I also attended a panel where half the panelists went to one building and half to another, because half had used the app and half had used the pdf.
I’m sure there were also people who just ghosted their own talks, but it’s not correct to infer that because someone wasn’t at their talk, that’s because they were being irresponsible.
The next world congress is scheduled for Tokyo. Assuming that it doesn’t get derailed and relocated by a global crisis as this one was (initially scheduled for Australia, then relocated to Rome), I expect the organization will be more diligent.
I attended. All of the presenters on our panel were present, and one person who couldn’t make it to Rome Zoomed in. We also had a decently sized audience. The other sessions I attended also had a fair amount of audience members and most of the panel speakers were present in person. I did try to stop by one panel that ended up being cancelled. One thing I will add is that it was very, very unseasonably hot in Rome that week. And I saw many people struggling to find shade and water and food. That might have contributed to the absences. Some sessions were also in rooms that did not have great air conditioning. Overall I had a very positive experience at the conference and met tons of really cool people. I’m excited to attend again!
Like several of the previous commentators, my paper was accepted, and not removed from the program even though I twice emailed the organizers to inform them that I would not be able to attend the conference.
Some of the sessions were fine (especially those in the main lecture hall were great!), but I experienced a number of sessions where people did not show up as well. My suspicion is some got frustrated by the poor organization. Here are some issues I had: bad communication beforehand, double booking of a seminar room, contradictory or outdated timetables, different languages and no translation within one session, the list goes on. All this with running around campus, constantly switching between extreme heat and heavy climate control. I do by no means endorse this, but it isn’t far fetched to think some folks went “F this, imma check out the Pantheon instead”.
I had similar experiences where some speakers didn’t show up to their sessions, but also some sessions where the moderators never showed up, including the session where I presented my paper as well!
I was there for the full duration of the conference and my experience was not of the sort to motivate submitting a complaint to DailyNous.
Yes, no-shows were common (many, this thread seems to suggest, at little or no fault) and quality was uneven. Both facts are hardly a surprise for such a large conference.
I was actually surprised at how well-attended most of the sessions were given (1) the large number of synchronous sessions, (2) the hiddenness of many rooms, (3) the temperature discomfort in many rooms, and (4) the fact that we were in Rome. Regarding (3), I sympathize a bit with these complaints, especially since I saw one participant getting treated by medics in a hallway. That said, anyone at all familiar with Rome in August should know that it is hot and air conditioning is not widespread. Of course, not everyone is so informed and I wish the conference organizers had warned everyone in advance. Regarding (4), I love philosophy, sure, but not nearly as much as I love Rome. I attended a fair number of sessions (including my own 😊), but do I regret missing a bunch because I was out doing other things in the city? Not one bit.
Like many others on this thread, I had to cancel for personal reasons, but the program did not get updated. I’m sorry I missed it. Colleagues report how invigorating it was to meet and talk with philosophers from across the world, working in different traditions and discuss different approaches and perspectives, sometimes on the same problems, sometimes on altogether different ones.
at all three world congresses that i’ve been to, the submitted sessions have been hit and miss while the invited sessions have been excellent. all the same, the submitted sessions with talks from all over the globe are a big part of what makes the WCP what it is. it’s not an APA, it’s a chance for philosophers from all sorts of traditions from all over the world to gather. so i’ve always tried to take in some sessions that you wouldn’t find at an APA, as well as more focused invited sessions. the invited plenary sessions in the main hall sometimes have the best of both worlds, with excellent philosophers from all over the globe. for example, in rome i was in a session on AI with nader el-bizri from lebanon and yi zeng from china, chaired by asha mukherjee from india. i also got to take part in a “philosophy under the stars” session in the ancient palatine stadium with the CEO of an italian AI company and language models of plato and confucius. the opening ceremony was on another ancient hillside (caracalla) complete with wonderful arias from tosca, while the closing ceremony turned into a mosh pit of traditional taranta music and dancing. the whole thing was a trip — yes, occasionally chaotic and overwhelming (a more usable program would have made a big difference) — but also inclusive, eye-opening, and inspiring.
I think it might be good to mention a few more things which the organisers did well. They negotiated discounted rates for conference attendees at several hotels, and made some additional options available for students. They organised some events in the evening—a ‘Concert of Philosophical Music’ and a ‘Philosophical Walk Through the Colosseum’. I couldn’t attend these, but they certainly sound great. They included hats and fans in the conference swags, which was probably all they could do to minimize the effect of the heat. This may sound trivial, but a lot of people used the hats and fans, which suggests it made a difference. In one respect, I think the organizers did a very good job with the programming: it seemed like they took a lot of trouble to minimise the number of talks on similar topics taking place simultaneously. I believe that the app had a function allowing people to formulate a schedule of the talks they would attend, using an up-to-date version of the schedule.
There were a lot of staff providing assistance. They probably gave some incorrect directions, but I assume they were generally very helpful (that was my experience). The wifi worked. There were a number of other things which I think the organisers did well.
There were some problems with the program. Overall, though, I thought the organizers did a very good job with a very difficult task.
I emailed the organizers months ago that I was unable to attend and they did not remove my name from the program. I’m on the job market and an accident like this might negatively affect my reputation.
Since I was program chair for the huge Boston World Congress of 1998, I can appreciate the many challenges involved. I was in Rome for three full days of sessions, all of which were packed, at all of which everyone showed up, and we had excellent support from the organizers.
My RT panel on Indigenous Philosophy was attended by many interested Western scholars. As we talked about Southern Appalachian ethnoscape, Indonesian archipelagic worldviews, Ao Maori philosophies, along with Gabriel Markus kind of OOO, in a transcultural comparative context with North-Eastern Indians ethnoscape, the time of two hours was really short and the reverberations of ethnic and tribal philosophy in the hall enthralled all the philosophical minds. It just opened up a new paradigm of doing philosophy by taking into account Unrepresented sites, locales, cultures to drive home the very specific transcultural mode and method if doing philosophy as lived experience of doing epistemic justice outside Eurocentric spaces. Some participants proposed a “World Congress of Indigenous Philosophy” in next one or two years and launch of a Journal of Indigenous philosophy as an initiative from our humble group.
I think this was an extraordinary moment in this world Congress at Rome. Hope we follow up and move from strength to strength.
Hi. Just discovered your discussion thread as I googled for reports on the wondrous Congress. If it is any interest, here is my own report, done for a university blog. If anyone spots any inaccuracies in it, please point them out.
Conference Report – XXVth World Congress of Philosophy: Philosophy across Boundaries, Rome, 1-8 August
I was very fortunate to receive partial funding to attend the World Congress of Philosophy, the ‘philosophical Olympics’, which took place this year at Sapienza University in central Rome. In all honesty I had barely heard of Sapienza prior to the conference, but it turns out that it is the largest university in Europe! It is also one of the oldest, although its main campus is ultramodern.
It proved to be the best-attended congress to date (they began in 1900), with 5,723 participants from 109 countries, and probably therefore the largest gathering of philosophers in history. For number-crunchers among you, here are some other official stats: 8,626 abstracts (in fact, short papers) received, 4,309 accepted; and 89 topics ranging from the philosophy of food and the philosophy of childbirth to metaphysics, metaethics and game theory (making its first appearance). The organisers, namely the International Federation of Philosophical Societies, were particularly pleased that circa 1000 PhD students participated. Incidentally, what is the collective noun for a gathering of philosophers? I have heard several amusing suggestions. A quarrel of philosophers? A ponder of philosophers? A plato-on of philosophers? A large Aris-total? A cogitation of philosophers? A bunch of ’tinkers? (Don’t worry, I’ll see myself out.)
Over the seven days, I attended 33 presentations of varying quality in a range of thematic sections, primarily in social and political philosophy and ethics. A great advantage of these immense conferences is that one has time to explore a bit. I went to a fascinating session on the philosophy of physics. One paper made what I thought was a basic error, namely, setting up a rigid distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’, putting physical objects like the sun in the former category and describing everything else as relative. I asked the speaker whether inertial frames (Einstein) are absolute or relative; he said relative. I am not sure about that. But I am pretty certain on my limited reading of theoretical physics that stars and other physical objects are not absolutes in the sense he meant, being merely blips in curved spacetime. I was encouraged that an experimental physicist in the audience (it was not only professional philosophers who attended) took up my point in his own question.
I was asked to chair the Philosophy of Information and Digital Culture session on August 6 (see photo), during which I also presented my own contributed paper on ‘Rawlsian information egalitarianism’. Building on John Rawls’s work, the paper explored the rationale for treating accurate information as a requirement of distributive justice in the Information Age (live recording available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_b-bOEYhMc&t=828s). The audience suggestions I received were of a high quality (as you can hear on the tape), hopefully setting me in good stead to turn the ‘dross’ of a conference paper into the ‘gold’ of a journal article. The session was deemed particularly successful, with several participants saying it was the best they had attended. (Several have been in touch since.) This was probably because there was plenty of time for discussion. Perhaps also Zeus smiled on us. The sun certainly shone throughout; thankfully, most rooms had air-conditioning.
The Congress, which featured a very grand opening ceremony at the Baths of Caracalla (see photo), succeeded admirably in fulfilling its aim of taking philosophy across disciplinary, subdisciplinary and national boundaries. The remarkable range of nationalities present is not uncommon at international conferences, and this is one reason why doctoral candidates and academic staff should be encouraged to attend them. Some sessions were in Italian, but most were in English. I can never forget how privileged we are to speak a language which our peers abroad have to learn and are gracious enough to use.
Rome 2024 will be a hard act to follow. However, it was announced at the closing ceremony that Tokyo would host the XXVIth Congress in 2028. This is already in preparation. One can expect the Japanese to do a fantastic job. And given the large number of Japanese, Chinese and other Asian participants in Rome, it is not impossible that Tokyo will set new records. Perhaps Glasgow, surely as great a city as Rome and Tokyo, needs to start working on a bid for 2032?
Al Duff, Visiting Fellow in Digital Society and Economy
I was under the impression that the congress is run by a predatory company (Triumph Group, https://www.triumphgroupinternational.com/en/) that provides minimal service, defers most of the work to volunteers, and charges disproportionate conference fees (to then pocket them themselves – never have I seen these prices with nonexistent service in return). It’s like our messed up publication system all over again: we work for free and get charged to generate profit for private corporation at the expenses of public funders.
I hope these disservices can be a wake up call for the next years!
We are not powerless to change things. People involved in the organisation can push to move away from this system (volunteers do most of the work anyway), and volunteers and speakers can refuse to be exploited to generate private profit.
Hello everyone, with many thanks for your feedback re the WCP 2024. I might provide some figures concerning attendance — we had ca. 5,300 registered participants, with 4,950 badges actually delivered. This means ca. 300 no-shows, i.e. about 6% of the overall number of registered participants. This is in line with previous Congresses, although I do agree that additional efforts shall be made to minimize these figures.
Several critical remarks refer to the gap between the pdf (classic) version of the programme and the app. This is certainly a difficulty that has been noticed, and I do hope that critical reviews will be taken into due account for the future. Concerning panelists who pulled out, informed the Secretariat, and yet had their names left in the programme — these may certainly be seen as mistakes, probably due to the overwhelming number of incoming papers that the local secretariat had to process in the months preceding the Congress. Apologies are due for such cases, which luckily seem to be very limited in number.
One remark about registration fees. WCP fees have not changed since Istanbul 2003. FISP has consistently made a point in not raising them, even if their current level is now below other international Congresses. This policy is meant to facilitate the participation of as many scholarly and academic communities as possible, with colleagues coming from all areas of the world. Please note that fees in Rome were collected by the managing agency on behalf of the Italian Philosophical Society and as part of its organizing duties; it is therefore incorrect to say that the agency pockets the fees. Registration fees are used to pay WCP-related costs, and usually cover about one one third of the overall budget of the Congress. The rest is raised by the hosts on a national or local basis, which is a considerable part of the organizing commitment.
There were only 19 volunteer students on campus. They helped participants on a half-time basis, and used the rest of their time to attend sessions and meet with scholars from all over the world. Thanks to existing training programmes, their travel to Rome and local accommodation expenses were paid by their University; registration fees were waived; and some of them qualified to receive academic credits for their participation in the Congress. All other staff was working on a professional basis.
I hope this helps.
luca
I went to only one WCP, 2013 in Athens; I submitted a paper to Rome 2024, but pulled out later deciding it wasn’t worth it. It was great to see Athens, but the conference itself felt like it was too massive, with low standards both for paper acceptance and organization. This was particularly clear in the opening and closing ceremonies. The first was in an impressive classical theatre with no restroom facilities, inside or outside; once I realized this, I simply had to leave after 5 minutes to find one at a nearby restaurant, knowing I could not possibly stay for the 1-2 hour event. I have no idea how they thought they could accommodate the many attendees in the early evening without toilets, especially when drinks were available in the waiting area outside. The second was followed by a outdoor line buffet, but there was one line for thousands of people; it was obvious to me that this would be a disaster, so I left the ceremony early and waited outside for the line to open, filing my plate once knowing no one could possibly go through a second time, and indeed saw many hungry philosophers get nothing but fruit over an hour later. I don’t know if other WCP events had similar problems, but it did strike me that asking a completely new team to manage each one, given its size, might lead to problems like this.
As far as the philosophical content went, I thought it was noble to try to get the world to talk to each other. But this often proved difficult; after one paper, I saw two people speaking perfectly plain English but clearly talking past each other in a Q&A session for several minutes, in a way which suggested to me that it was less language than different cultural assumptions which posed a barrier to mutual understanding. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t try to cross such barriers, but left me wondering if such a massive forum was the best way to do it. I also found that the other papers in my 2013 session had little to do with each other, or with mine; and the same was true for my scheduled 2024 session, so I had few regrets about dropping out of this. This is not to say that I will never attend another WCP, but I will do so warily, with modest expectations.