Meng-Ju (Raymond) Chuang
B.A. Philosophy and Psychology, Vanderbilt University, 2013
Interests
My interests are currently very broad, but my primary interests are in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Specific areas that engross my attention are the definitional and ethical problems of linguistic deception (e.g., white lies, bald-faced lies, bullshitting, etc.), the nonidentity problem, and the Repugnant Conclusion. I like Russell, Strawson, Quine, Searle, and Kripke. I also enjoy losing sleep over all sorts of paradoxes and hope to try my hand at action theory, moral psychology, and philosophical logic.
Lavender McKittrick-Sweitzer
M.A. Philosophy, University of Missouri - St. Louis, 2015
B.A. Philosophy, University of Missouri - Columbia, 2013
Interests
My primary interest is in political philosophy, specifically issues of global justice. My Master’s Thesis was about an instability I identified in Rawls’ Law of Peoples, and an original Rawlsian remedy to this instability. I also enjoy metaethics, and hope to gain a more comprehensive understanding of it while studying at OSU.
Erin Mercurio
B.A. Philosophy, Drake University 2015
Interests
As an undergraduate, I studied a broad range of fields including English, mathematics, and physics in addition to philosophy. As such, I continue to be interested in areas where these fields intersect in some way: particularly in logic and philosophy of language, though I also enjoy reading philosophy of science. Context sensitivity, metaphysics of fiction, and the relationship between analytical and continental philosophy are among the problems I’m currently interested in.
Daniel Olson
B.A. Philosophy, Northwestern University, 2014
Interests
My main interests are in the history of analytic philosophy and philosophy of math/logic. I'd like to work on mathematical and logical truth, and see how connected the two are. Historically, I'm most interested in Wittgenstein (early and late) and his views on mathematical and logical topics. My interest in Wittgenstein led to a preoccupation with metaphilosophy -- I'm curious about the role of intuition in philosophy and the plausibility of some therapeutic and anti-theoretical conceptions of philosophy itself.
Shaun Whittle
B.S. Philosophy, Western Oregon University, 2015
Interests
My interests are broad: logic, metaphysics, phil. of language, phil. of mathematics and, to a lesser extent, epistemology, metaethics, and aesthetics.
Right now I'm particularly interested in type theory, modality, and the metaphysics of fictional discourse.