News & Events

External Fellowships Won By Our Distinguished Faculty

Mug and books, mug marked dream, photo by Janel Hall.

Neil Tennant has been awarded an NEH Fellowship for his interdisciplinary book project 'Rational Belief Revision'. The book will set out a computationally implementable account of belief revision, using dependency networks to represent the belief-systems of ideally rational agents. It will bring together and extend into one unified theory the various epistemological, logical, computational, and complexity-theoretic strands of Neil's work on belief-contraction and belief-revision.

Awards & Recognitions

Sukjae Lee Awarded the 2008 Turbayne Berkeley Essay Prize

Sukjae Lee has been awarded the 2008 Colin and Ailsa Turbayne Berkeley Essay Prize. The prize was established by Professor and Mrs. Colin Turbayne in cooperation with the Philosophy Department at the University of Rochester. This brings to three the number of OSU faculty members who have won the Turbayne since 1990, when it was first awarded. Lisa Downing, who was then at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was awarded the prize in 1992 and George Pappas was honored with it in 1993. The winner of the Turbayne Prize receives a cash award and copies of winning essays are sent to the George Berkeley Library Study Center located in Berkeley's home in Whitehall, Newport, RI.

New Faculty Appointments

2009 - 2010

Piers Turner PhD, University of NC

Piers received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 2009 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He did his undergraduate work at Yale, and received an M.Sc. in the history and philosophy of science from the London School of Economics and Political Science. His current research is in political philosophy and ethics, and focuses on the work of John Stuart Mill. He has co-edited (with Jeremy Shearmur) a volume of previously unpublished social and political writings by the 20th century social democrat Karl Popper, After The Open Society (2008). He has a side interest in the rich philosophical history of the Adirondack Mountains, in New York State, near his hometown of Syracuse.

First Year Graduate Students

John Hurst

B.A. Hon. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto '09

My main areas of philosophical interest concern human action: how to give an adequate account of what it means for an agent to act for a reason; whether there are objective values that agents ought to act in accordance with; whether agents can be held morally responsible for their actions. In terms of actual philosophical branches, then, my interests lie in practical reason, ethics, and freedom of the will.
Within practical reason I am particularly interested in akrasia and the strengths and weaknesses of Davidson's account of intentional action - and the related implications the belief-desire model of acting for a reason has in the free will debate. Recently I have been very intrigued and excited by naïve action theory. In ethics, I enjoy meta-ethics and moral psychology and am interested in broad and narrow conceptions of ethics. I am also very interested in freedom of the will and moral responsibility (but you'll have to talk to me about it). That being said, I enjoy other areas of philosophy too, but these ones get me particularly excited.

Kate McFarland

B.S. in Applied Mathematics, Ohio University, 2006
M.S. in Applied Statistics, The Ohio State University

My main area of interest is philosophy of language. I also like philosophical logic and epistemology. My academic background is in applied mathematics (BS) and applied statistics (MS); this is not in any interesting way related to my pursuing philosophy.

Brian McLean

B.A., Philosophy major with Math and History minors, Central Michigan University

Broadly speaking, my main interests are in moral and political philosophy. Recently I've been doing a bit of reading in meta-ethics, and I have budding interests in philosophy of mind and action, particularly models of intention and autonomous action.

Raleigh Miller

M.A. Philosophy Georgia State University 2009
B.A. Philosophy, English and Theater, Drake University, 2006

My recent work has been on German philosophy, especially Kant, and philosophy of mind. Additionally, I have worked on metaethics, moral semantics, moral psychology, and philosophy of language. I stubbornly adhere to several philosophical positions that are probably false, such as conceptualism, compatibilism, and two-dimensionalism. I enjoy cooking, opera, and politics.

Joe Reich

B.A. in Philosophy, Macalester College, 2008

I'm interested primarily in philosophy of language (inferentialism, causal theory of reference) and philosophy of logic (the justification of deduction, inferentialism). Other interests include general philosophy of science (theory change, the unity of science), epistemology (contextualism), and, to keep myself off-balance, the Averroes-Aquinas debate over the unity of the intellect in Aristotle.

Eric Snyder

B.A., English, Piedmont College
M A., Philosophy, University of Georgia

My primary interests are in philosophy of language and logic. My master's thesis concerned vagueness and the sorites paradox. I am fascinated by this and the other semantic paradoxes as well as the creativity, rigor, and fruitfulness of theorists working toward their resolution. I have various interests in the intersection of formal semantics and phil. of language, but mainly in context-sensitive phenomena: indexicals, quantifier domain restriction, vague expressions, anaphora, etc. My main interest in logic is its application to formalizing natural languages. To this end, I'm mostly interested in intensional logics (e.g. Kaplan's). Also, I have a broad interest in Gricean pragmatics (e.g. Stalnaker's). Finally, I have general interests in metaontology, philosophy of physics, and game theory / decision theory.

Department of Philosophy