Home Registration Program

Introduction

In the last decade there has been an explosion of literature on conspiracy theories in Philosophy. This work has largely built upon earlier work from the late nineties, work which was pioneered by Charles Pigden in "Popper Revisited, or What Is Wrong With Conspiracy Theories?" and Brian L. Keeley's "Of Conspiracy Theories." Scholars who responded to this work in the first decade of the 21st Century - including David Coady, Lee Basham, Neil Levy, Steve Clarke, and the like - built upon the early work, which has lead, in the words of Patrick Stokes, "[A] small but illuminating literature has emerged over the last decade, focusing almost entirely on the status of conspiracy theory as an epistemic problem and attempting to determine whether and under what conditions conspiracy beliefs might be warranted. Quite astonishingly, something like a broad consensus has emerged: regarded simply as explanations, conspiracy theories are not intrinsically irrational, and believing in conspiracy explanations is not necessarily unwarranted."

Now, at the start of the third decade of philosophical work on conspiracy theory, we are seeing work which either builds upon the consensus, or seeks to challenge it by arguing that there really is something wrong or irrational with belief in conspiracy theories.

This conference seeks to not only present the best of this new work, but also draw attention to the early work which motivates it through paper presentations and panel discussions by established scholars in the field.

Conference details

The conference will held solely online, and the language of the conference will be English.

The conference will be a mix of paper presentations (25-30 minutes per talk, plus time for Q&A afterwards) and panel presentations.

Due to the international nature of the conference, the conference timetable (which is in UTC -08:00) has been created to suit the presenters' various timezones.

Organizer

The conference is being hosted by Pitzer College, with Prof. Brian L. Keeley as the conference host. Prof. Keeley has had some help from Ass. Prof. M R. X. Dentith (Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai) in arranging the conference schedule.