Professor John Haldane: The Most Permanent Interests of the Human Spirit

It’s 100 years since the first Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures were held in 1925. To mark the centenary, the 2025/6 London Lecture Series focuses on the theme Philosophy in Retrospect and in Prospect. Distinguished philosophers have been invited to reflect on where their area of the discipline has got to over the last hundred years, and/or where it might go – or should go – over the next hundred.

All lectures include a post-lecture "in conversation" session with our Academic Director Edward Harcourt, followed by audience Q&A.

In the course of the century since the establishment in 1925 of the then Institute of Philosophy, the most obvious development within academic philosophy has been its movement towards professionalisation, and within that to specialisation. Along with this has been a tendency to view philosophical issues as continuous with broadly empirical-cum-scientific ones. Hence the rise in diverse fields of quasi-scientific theories of reality and of practical rationality. While a few of the founding members of the Institute would have viewed this as hoped-for progress, others would have seen it as changing the subject, and (as we might now say, ‘losing the plot’). This lecture will provide a historical overview but also argue for a kind of philosophical humanism that was more prominent a century ago than it is today.

John Haldane is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of St Andrews, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University, USA, Professor of Philosophy at the Angelicum University in Rome, and former Chair of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

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