New Year's Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Winter. Event Types: Academics.
Thursday, January 1, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Departmental Faculty Meeting
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: Savery Hall 408. Accessibility Contact: Liam Blakey. Event Types: Meetings.
Tuesday, January 6, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Departmental Faculty Meeting
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: Savery Hall 408. Accessibility Contact: Liam Blakey. Event Types: Meetings.
Tuesday, January 13, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Virtual Colloquium - Jakob Norberg
More details TBA.
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: Liam Blakey. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, January 16, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:30 PM.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Winter. Event Types: Academics.
Monday, January 19, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Departmental Faculty Meeting
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: Savery Hall 408. Accessibility Contact: Liam Blakey. Event Types: Meetings.
Tuesday, February 3, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Greater Seattle Area Philosophy Symposium
Keynote talk: UW Professor Michael Blake “Sartre, Right-Wing Populism, and Anti-Semitism.”
The symposium will include three sessions, followed by a potluck reception on the third floor of Savery.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Campus room: Room TBD. Accessibility Contact: Liam Blakey. Event Types: Conferences.
Friday, February 6, 2026, 3:30 PM – 6:30 PM.
Departmental Faculty Meeting
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: Savery Hall 408. Accessibility Contact: Liam Blakey. Event Types: Meetings.
Tuesday, February 10, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Katz Distinguished Lecture: Emily M. Bender, "Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of "AI": The View from the Humanities"
The production and promotion of so-called "AI" technology involves dehumanization on many fronts: the computational metaphor valorizes one kind of cognitive activity as “intelligence,” devaluing many other aspects of human experience while taking an isolating, individualistic view of agency, ignoring the importance of communities and webs of relationships. Meanwhile, the purpose of humans is framed as being labelers of data or interchangeable machine components. Data collected about people is understood as "ground truth" even while it lies about those people, especially marginalized people. In this talk, Bender will explore these processes of dehumanization and the vital role that the humanities have in resisting these trends by painting a deeper and richer picture of what it is to be human.
Emily M. Bender is the Thomas L. and Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Professor in Linguistics and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Computer Science and the Information School at the University of Washington, where she has…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE). Campus room: 210. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Tuesday, February 10, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM.
Presidents' Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Winter. Event Types: Academics.
Monday, February 16, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Colloquium: Robert Batterman
More details TBA.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Campus room: 264. Accessibility Contact: Liam Blakey. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, February 27, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:30 PM.
Departmental Faculty Meeting
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: Savery Hall 408. Accessibility Contact: Liam Blakey. Event Types: Meetings.
Tuesday, March 3, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Washington State High School Ethics Bowl
Registration fee: $150 (one team); $250 (two teams); $30 (individual student)
If your school needs a fee waiver, please contact us at info@plato-philosophy.org. PLATO is committed to fees never being a barrier to participation in the High School Ethics Bowl.
Registration Deadline: February 15, 2026
For more information follow this link.
Begun in 2014, the Washington State High School Ethics Bowl is run each year by PLATO and the University of Washington Department of Philosophy. Teams of high school students analyze a series of wide-ranging ethical dilemmas involving topics such as cheating, plagiarism, peer pressure, relationships, and abuse of social media. The event is intended to promote collaboration and dialogue.
Unlike debate, teams are not forced to take adversarial positions or hold fast to an assigned perspective. They can agree with each other and are not required to refute each other’s points, but rather to offer commentary on one another’s arguments.
The Ethics Bowl is intended to be…
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: Liam Blakey. Event Types: Academics. Workshops.
Saturday, March 7, 2026.