Join the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World in a venture that seeks to bring more fun, warm fellowship, and greater originality to philosophy.

For 25 years, the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World has met to share and discuss questions in a friendly, engaging environment. This year, our annual meeting will be held from July 22-26 at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS), and we will be exploring the theme, Responding to the Contemporary World: Wrong Answers Only.

Membership in SPCW is open to all persons with a deep and abiding interest in the future of philosophy in the contemporary world.

O vitae philosophia dux.
Oh philosophy, you leader of life.

—Cicero

Philosophy in the Contemporary World

Journal of the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World

Philosophy in the Contemporary World is a peer-reviewed journal committed to the application of philosophy in understanding and providing potential responses to conceptual and practical questions pertinent to everyday social, cultural, and political life. The journal provides a unique venue for continuing dialogue in applied philosophy, contemporary ethical issues, social and political philosophy, philosophy and public policy, philosophy of the professions, race and gender, environmental philosophy, disability studies, and educational philosophy.

You can access the issue at the Philosophy Documentation Center website.

Annual Conference

July 22-26, 2026 at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS)

This year, the SPCW we will be considering the theme, “Responding to the Contemporary World: Wrong Answers Only.”

Call for Abstracts is open until February 6, 2026.

The phrase “wrong answers only” emerges from internet culture as a playful gesture of irony—an invitation to respond to familiar questions in unexpected, subversive, or humorous ways. Yet beyond its meme-life, the phrase raises a deeper philosophical provocation: What does it mean to respond “wrongly” in an age already structured by mistrust, crisis, and rupture? Can “wrong” responses illuminate what is overlooked, destabilize what is assumed, or open new paths of thought and practice? In a time of fractured institutions, competing claims of truth, and the sedimentation of modernity’s remnants, we ask whether wrong answers might paradoxically serve as generative calls toward beauty, reconciliation, or new guardrails for ethical-social-political life. To answer wrongly might be to resist the false clarity of ready-made analyses, diagnoses, and solutions, to dwell in the ruptures that shape our age, and to risk alternative visions—wise and otherwise.