The Ninth Triannual International Congress of the German Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie (Society for Analytic Philosophy, GAP) was held at Osnabrück University at September 14–17, 2015. The title of the GAP.9 congress—»Philosophy between Armchair and Lab«—reflects our conviction that any kind of »pure« philosophy, so detached from the empirical sciences that it cannot give its conceptual analyses a fundamentum in re, would be no more desirable than the opposite extreme, the attempt to do science in a »philosophy-free« way, without reflecting on its conceptual foundations. Rather, philosophers and empirical scientists alike should strive for a fruitful combination of both aspects.

The five articles collected here are the main papers presented at that congress. They can be divided into two groups. First, there are Kirsten Meyer’s opening lecture about The Claims of Future Persons, Jennifer Lackey’s Erkenntnis Lecture about Group Assertion which was sponsored by Springer Publishers, and Martine Nida-Rümelin’s closing lecture on Freedom and the Phenomenology of Agency. Second, there are two papers which are related to the author’s symposium held in honor of Wolfgang Spohn, who received the 2015 Frege-Prize of the Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie for a distinguished German analytic philosopher. The symposium contributions comprise the talk given by Wolfgang Spohn about How the Modalities Come into the World and Nancy Cartwright’s address Big Systems versus Stocky Tangles: It Can Matter to the Details, in which she critically relates her own work to that of Wolfgang Spohn.

On behalf of the GAP we would like to thank all the speakers at GAP.9 for their contributions, especially those who contributed to this issue, and the editors of Erkenntnis for supporting our plans to publish these papers.