Accomplishments of Faculty

Ben Caplan gave a talk at a workshop on grounding at the University of Agder (Kristiansand, Norway). He was also a critic at an author-meets-critics session on Scott Soames's Rethinking Language, Mind, and Meaning at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association (APA). The papers from the session, including Soames's reply, have since appeared in Philosophical Studies

Justin D’Arms received one of six Battelle Engineering, Technology and Human Affairs (BETHA) Endowment research grants for his project “The Philosophical Problem for Machine Morality.”

Additionally, he co-authored a paper with Daniel Jacobson (University of Michigan), “Whither Sentimentalism? Fear, Fearsome and Dangerous,” which is forthcoming in the edited volume Taking Ethical Sentimentalism Seriously. Justin and Daniel also published a critical précis of Joshua Gert’s “A Fitting End to the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem” on the PEA Soup blog.

Justin also delivered the talk “Emotions and Values” at the NEH Summer Institute on Moral Psychology and Education in Grand Rapids, Michigan; and he participated in a panel on “Gibbard’s Contributions to Ethics” at University of Michigan’s GibbardFest.

In December 2015, Justin was featured in an interview on the website Emotion Researcher.

Justin was very pleased to see two of his PhD students (Owen King and Nathan Smith) complete and defend their dissertations in the past year.

Lisa Downing published “Locke and Descartes” in the edited volume A Companion to Locke. Additionally, Lisa delivered a series of conference presentations last spring: “Locke on the possible materiality of minds, finite and infinite” at Workshop on God and the Philosophers at Harvard University; “Berkeley on the Causal Commitments of Mechanism and of Newtonianism” at Workshop on The Scientific Berkeley at the University of Irvine; “Berkeley and Cartesian Occasionalism” at the Conference on Activity, Spontaneity and Agency in Later Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Toronto (at which Julia Joráti also presented); “A Metaphysics for Newton — Lockean or Leibnizian?” at Exploring the Philosophy of Émilie du Châtelet, a three-day conference at Columbia University held as part of an effort to encourage more work on women philosophers in the early modern period.

Julia Joráti had an article published in an edited volume, and finished her book Leibniz on Causation and Agency (forthcoming in 2017). She also gave presentations at many conferences, including the International Leibniz Congress in Hannover, Germany; the Conference on Activity, Spontaneity and Agency in Later Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Toronto; the New England Colloquium in Early Modern Philosophy; the Spinoza-Leibniz Workshop at Michigan State University; the Pacific Division meeting of the APA; and a conference titled  "Exploring Dispositions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives" at Humboldt Universität in Berlin, Germany. Julia also gave a public lecture at Ohio State as part of the Community Lecture Series of the Center for the Study of Religion.

In December 2016, Julia won the biennial Marc Sanders Prize for an outstanding essay in Early Modern Philosophy for her paper "Leibniz’s Ontology of Force."

Robert Kraut continues to fight the uphill battle for pragmatism. In January, he will present "What Price Pragmatism: Life without Representation" at the University of Helsinki Workshop on Pragmatism, Representationalism and Metaphysics; in April, he presents "Pragmatism and Ontology: Sellars, Norms and Objects" at the Pacific Division APA (Seattle).

Robert will also be a featured speaker at the upcoming Jazz and Philosophy conference in Winslow Arizona in May 2017

Eden Lin had six papers accepted for publication: "Simple Probabilistic Promotion" (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research); "The Subjective List Theory of Well-Being, (Australasian Journal of Philosophy); "How to Use the Experience Machine" (Utilitas); "Attraction, Description, and the Desire-Satisfaction Theory of Welfare" (Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy); "Asymmetrism about Desire Satisfactionism and Time" (Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics); and "Enumeration and Explanation in Theories of Welfare" (Analysis).

In addition, Eden presented at multiple workshops, only some of which had cute acronyms: the 7th Workshop in Normative Ethics (WiNE) in Tucson, Arizona; the Ethics and Explanation conference at the University of Nottingham; the Princeton Workshop in Normative Philosophy; the 12th Syracuse Philosophy Annual Workshop and Network (SPAWN); and the 9th Rocky Mountain Ethics (RoME) Congress at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Tristram McPherson has some forthcoming papers: “What do you Mean ‘This isn’t the Question’?” (with David Enoch) in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy; “How to Argue For (and Against) Ethical Veganism” in The Ethics of Food; “The Ethical Basis for Veganism” in The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics; “Reference Magnetism as a Solution to the Moral Twin Earth Problem” (with Billy Dunaway) Ergo; and two co-authored papers in The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, “The Nature and Explanatory Ambitions of Metaethics” (with David Plunkett) and “Ethical Judgment and Motivation” (with David Faraci). His article “Why I am a Vegan” was published in the edited volume Philosophy Comes to Dinner, and “Engineering Social Justice into Traffic Control for Self-Driving Vehicles” (with Milos N. Mladenovic) was published in Science and Engineering Ethics.

Tristram also gave some talks: “Epistemology of Joint-Carving Normative Realism” at the Fordham Epistemology and Ethics Workshop at the Montreal Disagreement Conference; “Authoritatively  Normative  Concepts” at the Metaethics Workshop at Chapel Hill; and the Varieties of Normativity Workshop in Uppsala, “Morality and Other Mid-­Level Normative Categories” (with David Plunkett) at the Oslo Conceptual Engineering Workshop; “Arguing for Vegetarianism” at Oberlin; and “The Nature and Significance of Metaethics” at Stockholm University.

Chris Pincock wrote several articles for edited volumes: “Neutral Monism” in the Bloosmbury Companion to Russell (forthcoming); “Ernest Nagel’s Naturalism: A Microhistory of the American Reception of Logical Empiricism” in Analytic Philosophy: An Interpretive History (forthcoming); and “Logical Empiricism” in the Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology (2016).

Additionally, Chris published a review of “Ian Hacking’s Why is There Philosophy of Mathematics At All? in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science and contributed to a symposium in the journal Philosophical Studies on Albert Casullo’s Essays on A Priori Knowledge and Justification.

Finally, Chris presented “Abstract Explanations with Idealized Models” at the Pacific Division meeting of the APA and at Leibniz Hannover University in Hannover, Germany and he presented “Scientific Representation without Representationalism” at the Modelling and Representation Conference at the University of the Basque Country in San Sebastian, Spain, and at the Semantics of Theories Conference in Munich, Germany.

Abe Roth's paper “Intention, Expectation, and Promissory Obligation” was accepted for publication in Ethics, and his “Interpersonal Obligations in Joint Action” is forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook on Collective Intentionality. In November 2015, Abe presented “Reasons Explanation in the Context of Shared Activity” at the New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility at Tulane University.  Moreover, he gave two international talks in late summer 2016: a talk in a workshop on agency and time at the Center for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo, and a talk called “Directed Duties and Shared Agency” at a conference on Collective Action and the Law at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain.

Tamar Rudavsky has several forthcoming chapters in books: “Medieval Jewish Theories of Time and Space” (Space and Time: Medieval Philosophy); “Medieval Jewish Ethics” (Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy); and “Heavenly Bodies and Heavenly Movers” (Blackwell History of Philosophy in the Middle Ages). In addition, Tamar presented “Medieval Views of Time” at an invited symposium at the Central Division meeting of the APA.

Also in the past year, Tamar was appointed Director of the Melton Center for Jewish Studies.

Amy Shuster co-authored “The Pacifism in Plato’s Republic,” which recently came out in the journal History of Political Thought.

Declan Smithies is on sabbatical for the 2016-17 academic year, funded by a grant from the Templeton Project, New Directions in the Study of Mind, based at the University of Cambridge. During spring semester, he’ll be a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.

Declan has several papers and book chapters forthcoming: “Belief and Self-Knowledge: Lessons from Moore's Paradox” (Philosophical Issues); "Reasons and Perception" (The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity); and "Access Internalism and the Extended Mind" (Extended Epistemology). Last year, Declan gave presentations last academic year at Columbia and Pittsburgh.

William Taschek gave a paper called “Frege on Sense Identity, Equipolence, and the Normativity of Logic” at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytic Philosophy (SSHAP), which was held this year at Metropolitan State University in Denver, Colorado. This autumn, he participated in the conference “The Relational Nature of Thought” at the University of Illinois at Chicago Institute for Humanities, where he presented a version of his paper “Locating Richard’s Puzzle.”

Neil Tennant has a new book, Core Logic, forthcoming on Oxford University Press. His paper “Rule-Irredundancy and the Sequent Calculus for Core Logic” was published in Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, and “On Some Mistaken Beliefs about Core Logic and Some Mistaken Core Beliefs about Logic’” is forthcoming in the same journal. His “Normalizability, Cut Eliminability and Paradox” is forthcoming in a special edition of Synthese on substructural approaches to paradoxes.

Additionally, Neil gave several invited talks: he delivered the keynote address at the 2016 Logica Symposium organized by the Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and he spoke at the Conference on the Emergence of Structuralism and Formalism in Prague and Logic Group at the University of Cambridge.

Piers Norris Turner has been finishing work on a volume that he has been editing with Gerald Gaus (University of Arizona): Public Reason in Political Philosophy: Classic Sources and Contemporary Commentaries (Routledge Press), to which Piers is contributing the chapter on John Stuart Mill. The volume also will have new edited selections from Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Rousseau. Piers has other articles on Mill in the works, including pieces on Mill’s views on luck and the Benthamite roots of Mill’s thought.

Meanwhile, Piers continues as one of the main leaders of the Center for Ethics and Human Values, which was recently established as an official university center, and as an organizer of its COMPAS (“Conversations on Morality, Politics, and Society”) program.