Upcoming Events
George Pavlakos (University of Glasgow) – Democratic Law in the State of Nature: A Kantian Framework
Univeristy College London, Friday, 6 March 2026, 16.00-18.00
I argue that democratic law exists even within the state of nature, challenging the common view that pre-political claim-rights must precede democratic law. The traditional perspective regards democratic law as merely implementing individual rights, thereby generating conflicts between personal claims and the collective democratic will. In contrast, this paper suggests that rights can exist as juridical claims only when embedded within democratic law, thus preventing such irreconcilable conflicts.
This, however, raises the concern that rights might become contingent upon consent or convention. The paper addresses this by introducing the concept of pre-institutional democratic law – a form of law grounded in the morality of external freedom rather than in formal legal institutions. Drawing on Kant’s Doctrine of Right, the argument develops a version of radical non-positivism, which maintains that juridical rights can be autonomous from legal institutions while still rooted in external freedom. Ultimately, the conclusion dissolves the notion of a purely pre-political state of nature, replacing it with a pre-institutional condition in which democratic norms exist independently of established legal institutions.
Along these lines, the paper presents itself as contributing to legal theory, democratic theory, and the further development of Kant’s legal and political philosophy.
Past Events
Summer Workshop 2025: Spontaneity
University College London 4th-5th July
Emily McTernan (University College London) – ‘Don’t Google me: Freedom, Spontaneity, and the Right to an Open Future’
Pablo Fernandez Velasco (University of Stirling) – ‘The Aesthetics of Being Lost: Spontaneous Freedom and Environmental Experience’
Karl Schafer (University of Texas) ‘The Principle of Insufficient Reason and the Possibility of Freedom’
Tom Whyman (University of Liverpool) – ‘Fanon, Violence, and Spontaneous Freedom’
Ting Fung Ho (Duke University) ‘Spontaneous Freedom in Perception: Mindfulness Beyond Categorization’
Elena Holmgren (University of British Columbia) ‘Group Flow as Spontaneous Collective Agency: A Phenomenological Account’
Brian O’Connor (University College Dublin) – ‘Idleness as Spontaneity without Autonomy’
Eric Yang (Santa Clara University) ‘Ritual and Spontaneity’
Xiaochen Zhao (Independent Scholar) ‘Freedom as Ontological Spontaneity: Heidegger’s Aesthetic-Phenomenological Recasting of Kant’
With comments from Amin Ebrahimi Afrouzi (UCLA), David Chandler (UCL), Ayesha Chakravarti (UCL), Isabel Herburger (Rutgers), Lizzy Holt (UCL), Kirstine la Cour (UCL), Ethan Nowak (Stanford) and Charles Petersen (Stanford)
The Spontaneity of Freedom Lecture Series
Federica GregoraTto (Universität Luzern) – Unlove and Its Reasons
Univeristy College London, Friday, 13 February 2026, 16.00-18.00
Abstract: In the Western tradition, philosophers have discussed at great length the question What is love? Not only many different accounts of the nature of love, including romantic or erotic love, have been provided and debated. Also the question of the reasons of love – whether we can rationally grasp why we fall in love, and decide to stay in and cultivate relationships, or whether love can be in itself a source of reasons – has been amply discussed. Very little, however, has been said so far on the nature and the rationality of the end of love. If some work has been done in recent years on the phenomenology and the existential experience of romantic break-ups and divorces, it seems arduous, if not impossible, to come up with explanations for them. We might understand what happens to us when we experience the event, or go through processes of separation from the persons we love or have loved (e.g. a reconfiguration or transformation of our personal identities), but why does this happen?
In the talk, I delineate four possible hypotheses. The first appeals to morally apt rage, namely rage prompted by wrongdoing, as a potential cause of unlove. Serious wrongdoing, such as violence or abuse, may not only destroy love but also undermine the target’s capacity to establish themselves (again) as a proper subject of love. The second hypothesis flashes out a double failure of desire. If the dynamic of desire unfolds through oscillations between absence and presence, lack and fulfilment, closeness and distance, then unlove emerges when this dynamic is blocked, when one pole, namely, comes to dominate and effectively cancel the other. The third hypothesis foregrounds social, political, and economic structures. Patriarchal gender norms, neoliberal imperatives of self-optimization, the so-called “loneliness economy,” and forms of forced migration driven by economic or climate anxiety, among others, constitute objective forces that can pull lovers apart.The fourth and final hypothesis understands the end of love as a choice: the choice not to commit to the practice of love. On this view, the end of love reflects both an individual, private failure and a political, collective failure of commitment.
Inaugural Lecture: Berislav Marušić (University of Edinburgh) – The Ethicist and the Ontologist: On Self-Prediction in Practical Reasoning
21 March 2025
Sometimes there is something problematic about self-prediction in practical reasoning. For example, the smoker who reasons that, since they are likely to smoke in the future, they should not take steps to quit as they are likely a wasted effort, is making a mistake. But what sort of mistake is it? The Ethicist holds that the mistake is fundamentally ethical: it’s an objectionable opportunism that excuses the satisfaction of a questionable preference. Thus, the smoker who refuses to quit on the grounds that he is likely to smoke again is finding an excuse for his bad habit. The Ontologist holds that the mistake is fundamentally ontological: it’s a mistake about the nature of freedom. Thus, the smoker who refuses to quit on the grounds that he is likely to smoke again treats his smoking as something that is not up to him but as a mere outcome, like the drawing of a lottery.
In this paper, I examine the depth of the disagreement between the Ethicist and the Ontologist. I argue that, despite various arguments against the opposing position, they are not fundamentally inconsistent. My main thesis is that mistakes about freedom are mistakes of freedom: An ontological mistake about our freedom is an ethically mistaken instance of choice. This is why, despite differences in emphasis, the Ethicist and the Ontologist can be reconciled.
The Spontaneity of Freedom 