E.J. Lowe Lecture 2026: Professor Helen Beebee (University of Leeds).

This lecture examines what it means for academic disciplines—in particular the humanities, and especially philosophy—to make progress, arguing that their shared aim is to provide the resources for deepening our understanding of how the world works. While the natural sciences often achieve systematic knowledge, philosophy and many humanities disciplines face questions that are not empirically tractable. As a result, they generate not definitive answers but refined “menus” of viable theoretical options. The lecture defends this as genuine progress: developing, scrutinising, and improving theories provides resources for understanding, even if we are ultimately unable to sift the true from the false and knowledge is therefore unattainable. And these resources are worth having, which is why academic research — again, especially in the humanities — is a public good.