The meeting will be hosted by the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, Slovakia, June 7-13, 2026. The Forum was founded in 2000 to bring together scholars in pragmatism from North America and Europe. As co-founders John Ryder and Emil Višňovský have explained: “The idea was simply to enable communication and the mutual enhancement of one another’s thinking in the style of a ‘summer school’.” In 2026, 15 participants from Europe will be joined by 15 speakers from outside Europe to discuss their work. The theme of the meeting is “Pragmatist Environments”, which is intended to support a wide range of related topics.
The keynote speaker for 2026 will be Dr. Trevor Pearce, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His recent book is Pragmatism’s Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2020), explores how developments in the life sciences at the end of the nineteenth century shaped the ideas of American philosophers such as William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Pearce received his PhD in Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science from the University of Chicago. He also received a Master of Science degree in Evolutionary Biology and an MA in Philosophy also from Chicago. His latest project focuses on the role of human sciences in the philosophy of Alain Locke.
The theme of the 2026 meeting is Pragmatist Environments, framed by this general statement: Emil Višňovský, a co-founder of CEPF and to whose anniversary the 2026 meeting is dedicated, in his 2010 book of essays Človek by mal žiť v záhrade (We Should be Living in the Garden), argues that philosophical pragmatism provides a means to understand the intersection of nature and human culture and the means to recognize the role of these environments in addressing the problems of the present world. Several contemporary developments – for example climate change, AI, challenges to neoliberal dominance, rising nationalisms – pose challenges to both our understanding of the relations of culture and nature and to our capacity to frame a desirable future. Pragmatist Environments seeks to provide scholars the opportunity to reflect on pragmatism, its conceptions of environment, place, and possible futures in which nature and humanity can flourish.