For Applicants

Conference dates: 21-24.07 (i.e. we expect people to arrive on Monday 20.07 and leave Krakow on either 25.07 or 26.07)

Venue: Jagiellonian University, Law and Administration Faculty new building, ul. Krupnicza 33a [https://share.google/Fwsi8k2kndR1F5rxK]

Host: Jagiellonian Center for Law, Language, Philosophy (https://pjf.uj.edu.pl/) is the host, in cooperation with Faculty of Law and Administration and Institute of Philosophy

Main organizers: Paweł Banaś and Adam Dyrda

Important deadlines:

- call for papers available/abstract submission opens: 5th of November 2025 

- deadline for abstract submission: 18th January 2026 [as usual, 300-500 words]

- notification of acceptance: 15th February 2026

- registration [early]: 15th February - 31st March 2026

- registration [late]: 1st April - 30th June 2026

- the final conference program will be published no later than 7th July 2026.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Robin Dembroff, Yale University

Jennifer Lackey, Northwestern University

Dan López de Sa, Universitat de Barcelona

Krzysztof Poslajko, Jagiellonian University

Kenneth Silver, Trinity College, Dublin

Session Logistics

All concurrent sessions are either 1 hour for 2 talks or 1.5 hours for 3 talks. Chairs should begin each session at the scheduled time and aim to have each talk within the session begin when scheduled. To facilitate conference-goer planning, chairs and speakers are advised to order the talks as on the schedule. 

For the speakers - You are assigned a 30 minute slot, and the time is yours to use in whatever way you feel will be most productive for your project. It is recommended (and descriptively expected) that the talk will be around 20 minutes, leaving 10 minutes for q&a. Slides or a handout are of course permitted (and encouraged). Closer to the conference, it will be communicated how slides will be facilitated, if you plan to use them. We will not have the facility to print handouts, but there are print shops around city centre if necessary. (Though, be advised, they may be closed on Monday for the bank holiday.)

Pre-conference Summer school: Social Ontology

What: A day long session focused on developing interdisciplinary work involving social ontology.

Who: Open to junior scholars either with interdisciplinary projects they want to develop or who are curious about the best ways to go about developing such projects, taught by several leading social ontologists with a track record of interdisciplinarity.

When: July 20th, 2026, the day before the official conference

Organized by Brian Epstein (more information to follow)

Call for Abstracts

The call for abstracts is now open for Social Ontology 2026. The conference will be held in-person in Krakow, Poland.

We invite submissions of abstracts of papers/talks suitable for 20 minute presentations. Abstracts must have 300-500 words and be prepared for anonymous review.

Use this submission link from Microsoft CMT service to submit your abstract: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ISOS2026/ 

The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.

This edition aims to focus on interdisciplinary research, including application of ideas from social ontology in solving problems of legal and political philosophy in the following areas:

• Metaphysics & Law
• Ontology of legal & political institutions
• Legal entities, subjects and objects of law

We invite, however, submissions of abstracts covering all topics relevant for contemporary research in social ontology, including:

• Methods and problems of social ontology
• The ontology of social structures, social kinds and social facts
• The nature and existence of social phenomena
• The nature and existence of institutions
• Collective intentionality
• Collective or shared beliefs, intentions, and emotions
• Shared, joint or collective action
• Shared, collective, and corporate responsibility
• Social foundations of language and linguistic phenomena
• Linguistic or mental representations of social phenomena
• Social skills, habits and practices
• The nature, evolution, and functioning of social norms
• The ontology of money and economics 
• Critical social ontology
• Ontology and injustice and oppression

We also invite proposals of special workshops: if you are interested in organizing one, please, send its short description and suggested participants to p.banas [at] uw.edu.pl no later than December, 14^th 2025.

If you have further questions, please send an email to Pawel Banas at p.banas[at]uw.edu.pl

Social Ontology is the internationally leading philosophical and philosophy-related interdisciplinary conference series on social and collective phenomena held under the auspices of the International Social Ontology Society (ISOS). Previous conferences in this series have been held at the Universities of Basel, Helsinki, Konstanz, Leipzig, Lund, Munich, Manchester, Neuchâtel, Palermo, Rome, Rotterdam, Siena, Stockholm, and Tampere, as well as the University of California San Diego and Berkeley, Delft University of Technology, Tufts University, Indiana University, Bloomington, the University of Vienna, Stockholm University, Duke, and Dublin.