Klarman Hall

Dorit Abusch

Professor Abusch's research is concerned with the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. She has worked on the semantics of tense in various clause types, including issues of sequence of tense, the representation of futurity, the semantics of infinitives, and the semantics of verbal participles. She has also written about presupposition triggering, the scope properties of indefinite noun phrases, modality, and interactions between aspect and causation. Currently she is working on superlinguistics, a project of applying linguistic methodology in semantics and pragmatics to visual narratives and other non-linguistic materials. In the area of visual narrative, she has written about co-indexing, temporal progression and aspect, free perception constructions, descriptions of pictures in language, and multi-media narratives. Among the tools applied are possible world semantics, DRT/dymamic semantics, and implicature.

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Professor Karolina Hübner

Human, All Too Human

Karolina Hübner, Associate Professor in the Sage School of Philosophy as well as the Himan Brown Fellow for the Jewish Studies Program at Cornell, is a leading scholar in Early Modern Philosophy.

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Goldwin Smith Hall in the spring

Note from the Chair

As the days lengthen, trees green, and lilacs scent the air on the Arts Quad, Sage School of Philosophy students have been taking their final exams and submitting term papers. Some are posing for graduation photos and getting ready to move to a new phase of life.  Faculty and graduate students are grading and getting ready for a summer of reading, writing, traveling again.

Spring semester has been busy and exciting, with the introduction of a new proseminar on the history of philosophy led by Professors Michelle Kosch and Scott MacDonald, Professor Karolina Hübner and Justin Steinberg’s research seminar “Mind and Action: Then and Now”, and Professor Karolina Hübner’s recently announced New Frontiers Grant, “Reinventing Sentience”. You can read about some of our historians of philosophy in our undergraduate writers’ interviews below.  We put funds unused due to Covid in 2020-21 to use by creating a two-year postdoctoral fellowship and we will welcome Qiu Lin (PhD Duke 2022), philosopher of science and historian of early modern science and Chinese philosophy, in 2022-23. Below you can also find news about our graduating PhD students and recent PhDs who found new positions, about our undergraduate club Logos’ activities, about faculty and graduate student projects and accomplishments, and about the long term support the Sage School of Philosophy has received from the Karp fund.
Sculpture

Philosophy undergraduates Zelai Xu '22 and Jae Rhee '23 recently interviewed three Sage School faculty who are historians of philosophy. Their stories: Karolina Hübner, Human, All Too Human, Scott MacDonald, Philosophize Like Jazz, and Tad Brennan, Dead men tell no tales.
Sage Chapel in the spring

The Sage School's Ancient Philosophy program includes faculty and graduate students from the Philosophy and Classics Departments. Jack Karp '58 established the Joseph and Eva Karp Fund in Ancient Philosophy to support this program. In Who was Jack Karp? Behind the Karp Fund for the Study of Ancient Philosophy at Cornell Pamela Hanna, the Sage School's Graduate Field Assistant and Undergraduate Coordinator, writes about Jack Karp and what inspired him to establish this important endowment.

Next year the department will begin another chapter of the Karp Fund, the Karp Fellow Program. We are excited to have Dr. Monima Chadha from Monash University join us for the fall semester.

Philosophy undergraduates

At the invitation of Logos, the Undergraduate Philosophy Club, NYU philosopher Dave Chalmers gave the Norman Kretzmann Lecture, “Sentience and Status” in February.  Informally, the club watched “Inception”, in the Klarman auditorium.  They have been hard at work on the next issue of the journal Logos—look out for it this summer!

The incoming board for AY 2022-23 is:

Jacqueline Allen, President; Sophia Gottfried, Vice President; Ben Dever-Mendenhall, Editor in Chief; Alkis Boukas, Treasurer; and Ben Knepper, Secretary

 

New and recent PhD graduates

Many of our recent PhDs have been hired by a variety of prestigious institutions ~ including coming back to Cornell:

  • Brandon Conley (PhD ‘18) was hired as a lecturer at Clemson University
  • Yuna Won (PhD ‘18) will be the Philosophical Review Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell, in 2022-23
  • Kim Brewer (PhD ‘18) will be Visiting Assistant Professor at the Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell, in Spring 2023
  • Fran Fairbairn (PhD ‘19) was hired to a tenure track position at Cal State Bakersfield
  • Augie Faller (PhD ‘20) was hired as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr
  • Dean DaVee (PhD ’21) will be lecturer at the Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell, in 2022-23
  • Matt Paskell (PhD '22) will be lecturer at the Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell, in 2022-23
  • Amy Ramirez (PhD '22) will  be a lecturer at National University Singapore, in the Fall 2022

 

Faculty and Graduate Student Notes

Members of the Sage School have been conducting research, writing, and presenting - please enjoy reading through the Faculty Notes and Graduate Student Notes.

 
Produced by Dorothy Vanderbilt, Administrative Manager for the Sage School of Philosophy

The College of Arts & Sciences

218 Goldwin Smith Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
United States

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Professor Scott MacDonald

Philosophize Like Jazz

Scott MacDonald, Professor at the Sage School of Philosophy and Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, loves jazz, and he finds philosophy to be similar to jazz.

Professor Tad Brennan

Dead men tell no tales

Tad Brennan, Professor of Ancient Greek Philosophy at the Sage School of Philosophy as well as Professor of Classics, is morally invested in allowing ancient thinkers, such as Plato and Aristotle, to be heard more clearly.

Faculty Notes ~ Spring 2022

Sage School Faculty writing, conferences, and collaborative activity.

Graduate Student Notes ~ Spring 2022

Sage School Graduate Students writing, conferences, and collaborative activity.
Black and white image of a rally; people around a flag

Bartels lecturer speaks out on rising threats to democracy

"Home may have become a dangerous place for democracy to flourish now," said Nobel prize–winning economist Amartya Sen, this year’s Bartels World Affairs Fellow. His May 5 lecture was hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

A.D. White House, home of the Society for the Humanities

Humanities students share wide variety of research in spring event

More than 30 students who have conducted research will present their work in a virtual conference May 6-7. One panel investigates the ideas of Goldwin Smith, while other presentations focus on migrant workers in Singapore, political violence in Africa and other topics.

Amartya Sen

Nobel laureate Sen to lecture on protecting democracy

Amartya Sen, professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, will give the annual Bartels World Affairs Lecture on May 5. His talk, “Attacks on Democracy,” is Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies; this year’s virtual lecture is part of the center’s democratic resilience global research priority.

Interior of a self-driving car, looking out at palm trees

Event examines the ethics, politics and future of AI

Three leading Cornell scholars discussed governmental, social and moral ramifications of artificial intelligence in “Politics, Policy & Ethics of the Coming AI Revolution” on April 15, an Arts Unplugged event sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences and moderated by Andrew Ross Sorkin ’99, of CNBC and The New York Times.

Klarman Hall

Matthew R. Paskell

Matt Paskell is the Philosophical Review Postdoctoral Fellow in Cornell’s Sage School of Philosophy. His primary research interests include ethics and metaphysics, with a special focus on a topic at the intersection of these two areas—free will and moral responsibility. He earned his PhD from Cornell in 2022, completing a dissertation titled Freedom, Action, and the Conditions for Blame and Praise. Matt also has a wide range of teaching interests, including various topics in applied ethics, social & political philosophy, and philosophy of law.

/matthew-r-paskell
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