Membership Events

On Tuesday, 20 January, Professor C. Thi Nguyen gave an online talk to TRIP members, offering a timely guide to the joy of games and the danger of metrics, and how to rewrite the rules in order to build more creative and joyful lives.

In his new book The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game (Allen Lane, 13 January 2026), Nguyen shows us how our newly gamified world has fundamentally captured our value systems, forcing us to prioritise what can be measured and monetized over what is truly meaningful.

About the Speaker:
C. Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, and a specialist in the philosophy of games, the philosophy of technology, and the theory of value. A former food writer for the Los Angeles Times, Nguyen is active in public philosophy, writing for the New York Times, Washington Post, New Statesman, and elsewhere.

On Tuesday, 9 December, Professor Jo Wolff, President of the Royal Institute, gave a talk on Philosophy’s 100 Papers That Shaped Our Thinking in honor of the Institute’s centenary. He discussed how the papers were chosen and provided in depth analysis and contextualization of several of them.

On Wednesday, November 12, Professor Stephen Law, editor of Think, gave a talk entitled "God, Evil, and the Rationality of Theism: An Atheist Perspective." He overviewed and critiqued the Evil God argument, and answered audience questions.

About the Speaker:
A former postman who entered University as a mature student age 24, Dr Law is known for his popular introductory books on philosophy, including titles for children. He is Director of Philosophy and Cert HE at Oxford University Department of Continuing Education, and researches in philosophy of mind, language, metaphysics, and in philosophy or religion. He has edited Think since 2002.

On 7th October at 6pm, Chair of The Royal Institute of Philosophy and Richard Wollheim Professor of Philosophy at UCL, Lucy O'Brien, gave an exclusive online talk to members, on "Autonomy and control over one's social self-consciousness."

The abstract for Professor O'Brien's talk is as follows:

Other people can make us feel self-conscious, embarrassed, ashamed, and proud. In this talk I want to consider a subject’s relation to her own affective social self-consciousness. Two areas I will consider are (i) a subject’s practical management of their social self-consciousness, and (i) a subject’s appraisals of their own social self-consciousness. I will suggest that the latter concern can be thought of in the context of a general problem of deference. I suggest that our self-appraisals should be understood as allowing for a kind of necessary opacity. In so far as our self-conscious lives are rationally permeated with the appraisals of others, we risk standing in an uncomprehending, but committed, sense of ourselves and our value.

On Wednesday 4th June, our Academic Director Professor Edward Harcourt reflected on the 2023-2024 London Lecture series, ‘Madness & Mental Health’ at a members-only event, answering questions from the online audience and bringing members together to engage in philosophy. Topics included how we should talk about mental illness and the agency that patients should have in their own treatment.