The AIRE Research Collective is delighted to announce the Call for Papers for our upcoming one-day symposium, Seeing Beyond the Human: Attending with Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgley, which will take place on 24 September 2026 at the University of Galway.

The symposium marks the concluding event of our Philosophy in the Wild exhibition and invites scholars to reflect on the enduring significance of two remarkable philosophers and friends, Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgley. Their work on attention, ethics, aesthetics, and community offers powerful resources for thinking through some of the defining challenges of our time: from ecological crisis and species extinction to distraction, isolation, and the future of the humanities.

Rather than understanding ethics primarily in terms of individual choice or human exceptionalism, Murdoch and Midgley invite us to cultivate forms of attention that transform how we perceive ourselves, others, and the more-than-human world. Their philosophical perspectives continue to offer rich possibilities for reimagining our relationships with nature, community, and education.

We welcome proposals from researchers interested in engaging with these themes. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Attention and community: exploring how Murdoch and Midgley conceptualise community and the more-than-human world.
• The other side of beauty and goodness: examining how their work can help us think about evil, ugliness, and moral perception.
• Aesthetics and ethics: critical explorations of the relationship between perception and action.
• Rethinking philosophy: the challenges Murdoch and Midgley pose to dominant traditions within academic philosophy.
• Reimagining academia: considering how their understanding of the university and the humanities can inform future academic practice.

We are pleased to welcome two distinguished keynote speakers:

• Ellie Robson (University of Warwick), whose research explores Aristotelian ethics through underappreciated twentieth-century philosophers, with particular attention to Mary Midgley and Susan Stebbing. Her work contributes to expanding the philosophical canon by foregrounding women thinkers.
• Lucy Oulton (University of Chichester), author of Wild Iris: Iris Murdoch’s Environmental Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), whose research examines landscape, place, and environmental imagination in Murdoch’s fiction.

We anticipate selecting approximately 4–5 papers. Each speaker will give a 20-minute presentation, followed by 30 minutes of discussion with symposium participants, allowing ample time for collaborative dialogue.

Submission Guidelines

We invite paper proposals of 750-1,000 words outlining the main argument of the proposed paper and indicating the avenues for discussion it may open during the symposium.

Submission deadline: 27 July 2026

Please submit your proposal using the online form:
https://forms.office.com/e/qUR5HY4d64

The symposium is organised by the AIRE Research Collective with the support of the School of History and Philosophy, University of Galway.

We look forward to receiving your submissions and to welcoming you to Galway for what promises to be an engaging day of philosophical conversation.