Words About Faculty

Ben Caplan has a paper, "Benacerraf's Revenge," co-authored with Chris Tillman at the University of Manitoba, forthcoming in Philosophical Studies. He gave talks at the University of Barcelona, the Canadian Philosophical Association, the Society for Exact Philosophy, and the Western Canadian Philosophical Association, and he commented on talks at the Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association and at the Metaphysical Virtues conference at Western Michigan. With David Sanson at Illinois State, he organized a conference on the ontology of art in Dubrovnik.


Justin D’Arms published a paper, “Value and the Regulation of the Sentiments,” in Philosophical Studies; contributed a paper, “Velleman on Acting and Reacting,” to a symposium on David Velleman’s recent book, How We Get Along, which will be published in Abstracta. His co-authored paper, with Daniel Jacobson, “Wrong Kinds of Reason and the Opacity of Normative Force” has been accepted for publication in the Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. And, with Jacobson, he is editing a collection of new essays for Oxford University Press to be entitled, Moral Psychology Human Agency: Essays on the New Science of Ethics.


Lisa Downing saw two papers come into print this year, "Mechanism and Essentialism in Locke’s Thought,” which appeared in Debates in Modern Philosophy, eds. Antonia LoLordo and Stewart Duncan, Routledge; and “Maupertuis on Attraction as an Inherent Property of Matter” in Interpreting Newton, eds. Janiak and Schliesser, Cambridge University Press. Her “Locke’s Metaphysics and Newtonian Metaphysics” is forthcoming in Newton and Empiricism, eds. Zvi Biener and Eric Schliesser; and  “Malebranche and Berkeley on Efficient Causation” is forthcoming in Efficient Causation, ed. Tad Schmaltz, both to be published by Oxford University Press.  She also gave talks at Hendrix College in Arkansas, at the University of York, England, and was the keynote speaker at the Tenth Annual Intermountain West Student Philosophy Conference, held at the University of Utah this year.


Julia Jorati’s paper, “Monadic Teleology without Goodness and without God,” won the 2013 Leibniz Society of North America Essay Competition and is forthcoming in the Leibniz Review.  Julia’s review of Michael Griffin’s, Leibniz, God and Necessity, also is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Philosophy. She also has given papers at the Leibniz Society conferences in Montreal and in New Haven, the Eastern Division APA meetings in Atlanta, and the Pittsburgh Area Philosophy Colloquium.


Chris Pincock’s book, Mathematics and Scientific Representation, was the subject of two recent symposia: an "Author Meets Critics" session at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division meeting in San Francisco; with Robert Batterman, Otavio Bueno and Thomas Ryckman as critics; and an extended discussion in Metaphilosophy, with comments by Mark Balaguer, Elaine Landry and Sorin Bangu and a reply by Chris. He also gave papers at a Centenary Conference on Russell’s, The Problems of Philosophy, in Oxford, Mississippi; the Philo-STEM 4 conference in Fort Wayne, Indiana; the Indispensibility and Explanation Workshop in Paris; the Fourth Biennial Conference of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice in Toronto; the Second Meeting of the Associate for the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice Conference at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and the Fifth French Philosophy of Mathematics Workshop at the Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France. In addition, Chris read papers at departmental colloquia at the following: Ohio University, Kenyon College, and the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science. Together with William Taschek, Chris is organizing this summer’s Dubrovnik conference—the focus of which will be the History of Analytic Philosophy.


Abe Roth's paper, "Prediction, Authority, and Entitlement in Shared Activity," is forthcoming in Noûs and is available on Noûs Early View.  "Indispensability, the Discursive Dilemma, and Groups with MInds of Their Own" will be published in From Individual to Collective Intentionality: New Essays (Oxford).  "What is it to Accept a Promise?" was presented at the Collective Intentionality Conference in Manchester, U.K., and "The Explanation of Consciousness: Some Questions for the Quantum Mechanical Model" was part of an OSU Mershon Center workshop on Alexander Wendt's forthcoming Quantum Mind and Social Science.


Tamar Rudavsky published “Spinoza, Galileo and Delmedigo” in the Journal of Intellectual History (a special edition on Spinoza and Galileo, ed. Filip Buyse); “Natural Law Morality in Jewish Philosophy” in Reason, Religion and Natural Law: from Plato to Spinoza, edited Jon Jacobs for OUP; and “Sailing Motifs in Medieval Philosophy” in Philosophy and Sailing, published by Blackwell. She also has several papers in press, including: “Heavenly Bodies and Heavenly Movers” for Blackwell History of Medieval Philosophy, ed. John Inglis; “Creation Theories in Maimonides” in The Key Debates of Medieval Philosophy, edited by Jeffrey Hause for Routledge; and “ A Brief History of Skeptical Responses” in A Companion to the Problem of Evil, edited by Justin McBrayer and Daniel Howard-Snyder for Wiley-Blackwell. Tamar also participated in two programs at the Association of Jewish Studies meetings in Chicago and organized a very successful conference at Ohio State on Spinoza.


Kevin Scharp’s first book, Replacing Truth, was published in September, with Oxford University Press. His paper, "Truth, the Liar, and Relativism,"which presents the core theory of the book, was published in, The Philosophical Review, in their July 2013 issue.


Tim Schroeder spent the last academic year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where, with co-author Nomy Arpaly, he finished their book, In Praise of Desire, which will come out this winter with Oxford University Press. Too homesick to stay away all year, Tim also came back in the middle of his leave to run a small conference, Order and Disorder in the Moral Mind, hosted by Ohio State.


Lisa Shabel produced, the “Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics” entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  She presented "On the possibility of mathematics: Revisiting Kant's 'argument from geometry'" at a conference on Kant's theoretical philosophy at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. This conference was hosted by Professor Dai Heide, an Ohio State philosophy PhD, whose dissertation was supervised by Lisa. She also gave a paper at Macalester College; and presented comments on a paper by Oliver Thorndike at a North American Kant Society conference at Cornell University. She is co-editing a special volume of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy on Mathematics in Kant's Critical Philosophy, and is continuing to work on a project on Kant's Schematism.


We got to see some of the first fruits of Stewart Shapiro’s longstanding project on indiscernibility in mathematics, with the publication of “An ‘i’ for an i: singular terms, uniqueness, and reference" in the Review of Symbolic Logic. He also published two papers, with Geoffrey Hellman, developing a point-free (or "regions-based") account of continuity.  This is part of an ongoing joint project, which is under contract with Oxford University Press.  Stewart also continues to work on logical pluralism.


Declan Smithies published "On the Unreliability of Introspection" in Philosophical Studies; "The Nature of Cognitive Phenomenology" and "The Significance of Cognitive Phenomenology," both for Philosophy Compass; and "Review of Duncan Pritchard's Epistemological Disjunctivism," which appeared in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Declan also gave papers at Northwestern University, MIT, The Pacific APA, Oxford, Aberdeen, St. Andrews, Edinburgh, SPAWN/Syracuse, and at the New York Institute for Philosophy. He was visiting scholar at the Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, in the summer of 2013; as well as academic visitor for the Templeton Project’s "New Insights and Directions in Religious Epistemology" at Oxford. Declan is spending this academic year as visiting associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT.


Sigrun Svavarsdottir has two papers forthcoming, one, “Having Value and Being Worth Valuing,” will appear in the Journal of Philosophy; and the other, “Detecting Value with Motivational Responses,” will appear in Motivational Internalism, edited by G. Bjornsson et al, Oxford University Press. Sigrun also presented a paper at the University of Vermont, and will give her paper, “Coherence, Integration of the Self, and Integrity in the Context of Reflective Agency,” at the New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility later this year.


William Taschek presented his paper, “On the Tractarian Critique of Frege’s use of ‘⊢’”, this fall at the “Wittgenstein Workshop” at the University of Chicago; and at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytic Philosophy, held this year at Indiana University- Bloomington. He also served as commentator on John Elbourne’s paper, “Pronominalization as NP-deletion,” which he presented at the Ohio State Workshop on Reference. Together with Chris Pincock, William is organizing this summer’s Dubrovnik conference—the focus of which will be the History of Analytic Philosophy. He expects to give a paper there on Frege’s understanding of the normativity of logic.


Neil Tennant has published “Cut for Core Logic” in the Review of Symbolic Logic; “Parts, Classes and Parts of Classes: An Anti-Realist Reading of Lewisian Mereology” in Synthese; and an article on “Logicism and Neo-Logicism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Neil also has a number of works forthcoming: “On Gentzen’s Structual Completeness Proof,” to appear in Dag Prawitz on Proofs and Meaning, ed by Heinrich Wansing); “A New Unified Account of Truth and Paradox,” forthcoming in Mind; “Logic, Mathematics and the A Priori, Part I: A Problem for Realism” and “Logic, Mathematics and the A Priori, Part II: Core Logic as Analytic, and as the Basis for Natural Logicism,” both forthcoming in Philosophia Mathematica; and, “A Theory of Truthmakers and Falsitymakers,” to appear in the Oxford University Handbook of Truth, ed by Michael Glanzberg. Neil also presented papers in Stockholm, Munich, Columbus, and Urbana-Champaign.


Piers Norris Turner has two journal articles forthcoming: "'Harm' and Mill's Harm Principle" in Ethics; and "The Absolutism Problem in On Liberty" in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Another essay, "Rousseau, the Sciences, and our Knowledge of Virtue," was accepted for an edited collection. He is co-editing (with Gerald Gaus) a volume entitled Public Reason in the History of Political Philosophy, to which he will contribute an essay on Mill, due out in late 2014 from Routledge.