ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú

The Edgington Lectures are a biennial pair of lectures held in the School of Historical Studies at ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú, University of London. These public lectures are free to attend and open to all, and each pair is accompanied by a graduate workshop in philosophy devoted to, and led by, the work of that year's Edgington lecturer. The lectures are named in honour of Professor Dorothy Edgington.

If you would like to find out more about the Dorothy Edgington Lectures, please email the organising committee.

Dorothy Edgington

Dorothy Edgington is a Senior Research Fellow at ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú. She was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics at Oxford, 2003-2006, where she was also a professor from 1996-2001. The rest of her career has been at ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú, after reading PPE and doing a B.Phil. in Philosophy at Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, was President of the Aristotelian Society 2007-2008 and President of the Mind Association 2004–5. She is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford, and has held visiting positions in Canada, United States, Mexico and Italy.

Dorothy works mainly in philosophical logic, particularly on conditionals, counterfactual reasoning, probabilistic reasoning and vagueness. She was recently involved in a project on Probabilities, Propensities and Conditionals at the Institute of Philosophy.

Recent lectures

This year's sixth Dorothy Edgington Lectures will be given by (University of Edinburgh) on 14-15 May 2025 and her lectures are entitled 'Fiction and Reality'.

Lecture abstract: I have argued elsewhere that it is a mistake to reduce the distinction between works of fiction and non-fiction — between, for example, novels/short stories/fiction films, and histories/biographies/documentaries — to a distinction between fiction on the one hand and fact or reality on the other. Instead, I maintain that works of fiction, like works of non-fiction, are about the real world, though they ask us to imagine the world differently from how it actually is. In these talks I develop the implications of this view for the significance of fiction. Why do we care about people who never existed and events that never occurred? How can their stories shed light on our lives and the world around us? I argue that answering these questions requires understanding the ways in which works of fiction presuppose a basis in ordinary facts, and I use this idea to explain why works of fiction matter to us.

Past lectures