I’m relieved to report that philosophy has won the most recent Apocalypse Debate. Thanks to Julia Markovits for her winning defense of our discipline, and to the members of Logos for organizing this perennially popular event (and many other philosophy-related activities – more details follow).
Dr. Alimi, currently a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in Classics and Philosophy, will join the Sage School as Assistant Professor in fall 2024. Also joining us in fall 2024 is Professor Justin Steinberg, currently at Brooklyn College/CUNY, who works on early modern philosophy with an emphasis on Spinoza. (Look for a faculty profile on Professor Steinberg in next year’s newsletter.) Dr. Trystan Goetze, director of the Sue and Harry Bovay Program in the History and Ethics of Professional Engineering, has also joined us as a faculty affiliate.
In January the Sage School welcomed Melissa Totman as our new department manager. Melissa replaces Dorothy Vanderbilt, who had been with the department since 2007 and is now enjoying a well-earned retirement.
Below, you will find some recent academic accomplishments of our faculty and graduate students. A highlight: in the past year Kate Manne topped the humanities in public media outreach, with hits reaching an audience of 4.6 billion.
Finally, a reminder that the memorial conference for Professor Emeritus Richard Miller will be held on April 27, 2024 (details here). We encourage former students of Professor Miller who might be in the area to join us in celebrating his career.
Michelle Kosch Stanford H. Taylor ’50 Chair
Below: Logos Students Playing Trial by Trolley
Logos Notes:
As per usual, Logos is working hard to edit our undergraduate philosophy journal under the auspices of Editor-in-Chief Ethan Kovnat. We have a robust team of editors this year, boasting a total of twenty-five readers in total (for comparison, the Logos Editorial Staff of 2023 was seventeen and 2022 was eighteen). Many of these editors are enthusiastic underclassmen, who have a wide diversity of specialties ranging from Buddhist mereology to modal logic to environmental ethics.
In addition to the journal, Logos has also been hosting social and educational events to build comradery among the members of Cornell’s philosophical community. We recently hosted a game night where we played social deduction games, chess, and Trial by Trolley. Logos has also begun a new buddy program that matches senior editors with first-time editors based on interests. This program a) connects Logos members with a potential friend that shares philosophical interests, b) gives underclassmen a member of the philosophical community that they can reach out to for advice. In early March, our club will host a philosophical peer-review session, in which undergraduates can submit extra-curricular philosophy research papers for feedback from other undergraduates.
Finally, for our big activity of the semester, we are expanding the annual Kretzmann Lecture into a conference. The Kretzmann Undergraduate Philosophy Conference will be held on March 23rd in Klarman Hall. It will feature the meta-ethicist Michael Smith and our very own Dave Shoemakeras the professorial speakers, in addition to five undergraduate colloquia speakers, and a research poster gallery. Forty undergraduate attendees from universities all across the East Coast have already registered, so we are anticipating a strong turnout.
Stay tuned for more, Sophia Gottfried | Logos President
Logos put on a staged reading of Sartre’s play No Exit. The actors are Benjamin Dever-Mendenhall as Valet, Stella Dang as Garcin, Jordan Richards as Inez, and Sabina Schrynemakers as Estelle.
Faculty:
Kate Manne’s third book, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (Crown) came out in January, and was reviewed here, here, and named one of the best books we've read (so far) in 2024 by The New Yorker. She also went on a book tour around its publication, did various interviews (e.g., this and this one), and had extracts/essays based on its content run in The New York Times (twice), Time Magazine, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Her original essay that the book was based on also received an APA award for the best op-eds in 2022.
Willow Starr and Alejandro Vesga’s co-authored paper 'Non-Literal Communication and Practical Coherence' is now forthcoming in Coherence in Discourse with Oxford University Press.
Carlotta Pavese delivered a colloquium talk at Stanford in November, titled ‘Intelligence Socialism’. The corresponding paper has now been accepted by Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Mind. She delivered a talk at the Oxford Workshop on Collective Agency in December, and the paper the talk was based on (‘Collective Skills, Practices, and Cultural Innovation’) will feature as the final chapter of her forthcoming book. She kept working on her book, The Practical Mind: Skills, Knowledge, and Intelligence, which she plans to submit to Cambridge University Press at the end of April.
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Morgan Kelsey Thompson has accepted a tenure-track position at Northwestern University.
Graduate Students:
Gus Turyn presented ‘Bigoted beliefs and the safety condition’ at the Eastern Division APA, ‘Hurt feelings and excuses’ at the Central Division APA, and ‘Gaslighting, knowledge norms, and knowing that we know’ at the Brown University graduate student conference and the Duke-UNC graduate student conference.
Migdalia Arcila Valenzuela’s co-authored paper, ‘The Emotional Impact of Baseless Discrediting of Knowledge: An Empirical Investigation of Epistemic Injustice’, was accepted at Acta Psychologica. She presented ‘Laugh it off: Moral Admiration and Humorous Humility’ at the New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility and ‘The Impossibility of Momentary Exemptions: A Comparative Analysis of Hegel and P. F. Strawson’ at the Eastern Division APA.
Lanxin Shi’s paper, ‘Ignorance, Frailty, and Defiance: the Anxiety of Freedom’ was conditionally accepted at Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook; and she presented ‘Individuality in Sin and Curse: On the Demonic Paradox in Fear and Trembling’ at the Eastern Division APA.
Itay Melamed presented ‘On the Rationality of the Religious Believer’s Grief’ at the Eastern Division APA.
Vikram Kumar’s paper, ‘Disciplina et Veritas: Augustine on Truth and the Liberal Arts’ was accepted by Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy.
Bianca Waked was awarded a Mellon Graduate Fellowship at the Society for Humanities for 2024-25.
Maria Camila Castro Maldonado’s co-authored paper, ‘Cognición moral’, was published in Introducción a las Ciencias Cognitivas, and she received a Mellon fellowship for participating in the Urban Justice Lab seminar, ‘Sound, Music, Public Space’.
The Japanese Garden, Johnson Museum
Cornell University Photography
Giving Day
The College of Arts & Sciences is preparing for Giving Day on Thursday, March 14 and we hope the whole Cornell community can join in to support the work and growth of our students and faculty.
Your gifts help support many aspects of the Sage School of Philosophy and its mission.
