Best of Social Ontology 2019

Social ontology, by which I mean a subfield of contemporary analytic philosophy, is a comparatively small enterprise so far. That makes gathering a best-of-2019 list difficult. There just aren’t that many great papers coming out each year, or other notable events. Here are five highlights I could find. Feel free to send me an email and suggest other contributions to the field. I might update this entry later.

Brian Epstein’s paper “What are social groups? Their metaphysics and how to classify them” has been available as forthcoming for a while, but the official publication date has been 2019, which hopefully justifies including it in this list.[0]

The International Social Ontology Society has started a Youtube channel this year and published keynotes from last years conference.

The Social Ontology conference in Tampere, organised by the European Network of Social Ontology. I believe the keynotes have been recorded, so there is hope that they will appear on ISOS Youtube channel at some point.

Finally, there has been a monist issue on the topic of Collective Responsibility and Social Ontology.

BONUS: Arto Laitinen has told me that a book symposium on Ásta’s Categories We Live By will soon appear in the Journal of Social Ontology (and dated as being from 2019).

Footnotes

[0] Two other publications on the ontology of groups deserve honourable mentions, even though they have appeared in 2018 (as forthcoming without a date yet in the first case). The first is Katherine Ritchie’s “Social Structures and the Ontology of Social Groups” and the second is Gabriel Uzquiano’s “Groups: Toward a Theory of Plural Embodiment”.