As climate change brings 60 degree highs in mid-February, it’s time to look warmly back at the last six months in department news about research, presentations, and honors.
Faculty
Emad Atiq’s paper “I Feel Your Pain: Acquaintance & the Limits of Empathy,” co-authored with Matt Duncan, was accepted for publication in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind. He presented a paper on the metaethical foundations of constitutional theory at the annual PPE conference in New Orleans, and at the Fordham Law and Philosophy Colloquium. His paper on negligence and risk aggregation was selected for presentation at the North American Private Law Theory workshop at UCLA. And he will be presenting his paper on neo-expressivism and the rationality of normative exchange at Rhode Island College. Additionally, Emad continues to make progress on a manuscript titled “Contemporary Non-Positivism” under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Tad Brennan published a new paper on Plato's Republic in the Winter 2022 edition of the journal Phronesis, entitled "Cephalus, Patêr tou Logou." It's about payoff matrices. He also moonlighted by zoom this autumn, co-teaching a course on Boethius, the 6th century Roman philosopher, at the LMU in Munich, which will soon result in a paper.
Rachana Kamtekar published ‘Plato on Intelligent Agency’ in F. Buddensiek and S. Odzuck (eds.) Praxis-Handeln und Handelnde in Antiker Philosophie. Akten des 6. Kongresses der Gesellschaft fur Antike Philosophie 2019 (De Gruyter), 33-56. She also gave a few talks:
- Author-Meets-Critics on Josh Wilburn, The Political Soul: Plato on Thumos, Spirited Motivation, and the City, APA Eastern Division Meeting, Montreal (1/4/23).
- ‘What is compatible with what? Moral responsibility and Stoic determinism’, Oxford Moral Responsibility workshop, October 6, 2022
- ‘Rule of Law, Conventions, Constitutions’ (panel with Kaushik Basu). Philosophy, Politics, Economics meeting New Orleans, November 4, 2022.
- ‘What makes right acts right? A Stoic response to Ross’s Question’. Institute for Classical Studies, London, November 21, 2022.
Kate Manne is finishing up the manuscript for her third book, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, which is forthcoming with Crown in the US and Penguin in the UK in January 2024. She’ll be giving the second annual invited lecture in applied ethics at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities in March, followed in April by a keynote lecture in the Miami University Humanities Center's 2022-2023 Altman Fellows Program on “Contesting Authority,” a keynote for the WGSS Symposium at Illinois State University, and a public lecture at Kent State. She will also be presenting her paper, “Moral Gaslighting,” at the next Aristotelian Society meeting, in London in July, which will then come out in their Proceedings in 2024.
Andrei Marmor’s book Foundations of Institutional Reality was published by Oxford University Press.
Shaun Nichols continued his series of papers on Buddhist philosophy of mind with Monima Chadha. Their latest entry, “Vows without a Self” was just published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. He also continued the series of work on statistical learning and moral judgment. The latest entry, with Scott Partington & Tamar Kushnir, is “Rational Learning and Parochial Norms,” forthcoming in Cognition. And his first paper in ancient philosophy, with Rachana Kamtekar—“Two Concepts of Cause in Antiphon’s Second Tetralogy”—was published in Phronesis.
Carlotta Pavese had three new papers accepted for publication:
- “Meaning without Gricean Intentions” (with Alex Radulescu) forthcoming in Analysis.
- “Epistemic Luck, Knowledge-How, and Intentional Action” (first author, with Paul Henne) forthcoming in Ergo.
- “Factive Mindreading in the Folk Psychology of Intentional and Skilled Action" forthcoming in Putting Knowledge to Work (Arturs Logins, ed.) Oxford University Press.
Derk Pereboom co-authored Moral Responsibility Reconsidered with Gregg Caruso (Cambridge Elements Series, 2022). In this book they examine the concept of moral responsibility as it is used in contemporary philosophical debates, and explores the justifiability of the moral practices associated with it, including moral praise and blame, retributive punishment, and the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation. They argue against a backward-looking, desert-based notion of responsibility, and advocate instead a forward-looking conception grounded in objectives such as protection from wrongdoing, reconciliation in relationships, and moral formation. The book concludes by addressing the consequences of the rejection of desert-based moral responsibility for personal relationships and treatment of criminals.
David Shoemaker presented two papers in November 2022: “The Point of Personal Identity” (with Shaun Nichols) for a Zoom conference “in” Madrid, and “Now it’s Personal: From Me to Mine to Property Rights” (with Bas Van Der Vossen) at the New Orleans PPE Conference. That latter paper was also published at the end of the year in Law and Philosophy. His paper, “Empathic Control?” was published in a special issue of Humana.Mente edited by Oisin Deery, and is available for free on-line here. He also completed two book manuscripts: The Architecture of Blame and Praise, and Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life.
Nico Silins is presenting a project about memory and consciousness in Buddhist philosophy at the Columbia University Comparative Philosophy Seminar, and he’s publishing a spin-off from this project in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind. He’s also teaching a seminar about connections between the philosophy of art and the philosophy of mind, and he’s especially excited to host the artist and MacArthur Fellow Trevor Paglen in the session about AI images.
Benjamin S. Yost published “Standing to Punish the Disadvantaged” in Criminal Law and Philosophy. Emerging out of his work on the morality of punishing socially disadvantaged offenders, he shows why we should reject philosophically popular explanations of the problem with punishing the advantaged and disadvantaged alike. He also made good progress on a paper that attempts to define parental punishment.
Graduate Students
You can read about all of our graduate students by visiting our Current Graduate Students page.
Urna Chakrabarty is a Telluride Scholar, moving into the Telluride House this fall. She has also had a paper accepted for presentation at Boston University's Philosophy Graduate Conference.
Itay Melamed had two papers accepted for presentation, one at the Lund/Gothenburg Responsibility Project (in April 2023), and the other at the Princeton Center for Human Values as part of their Philosophy and Religion Project (in March 2023).
Gus Turyn presented (or will present) several new papers:
- “Emotional Knowledge of Modality” at the Michigan Mind and Moral Psychology Graduate Conference
- “Agency and Counterfactual Knowledge” at the Eastern Division Meeting of the APA
- “Homonymous Humor” at the Central Division Meeting of the APA
- “Internalism About Testimonial Injustice” at the Pacific Division Meeting of the APA
Migdalia Arcila Valenzuela, with co-author Andres Paez, had her paper “Testimonial Injustice: The Facts of the Matter” published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology.
Hannah Winckler-Olick presented papers at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy conference in October, and the Eastern APA in January, and she’ll be presenting one at the Pacific APA in April.
Lyu Zhou’s paper “Specious Present, Phenomenal Extension, and Mereological Inversion: A Problem for Physicalism about the Mind” was accepted and is now forthcoming in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. This January he was selected as a recipient of the Hsien Wu and Daisy Yen Wu Scholarship at Cornell University.