Ben Caplan published "Serial Fiction, Continued" in British Journal of Aesthetics and, with Cathy Muller (PhD, Ohio State, 2012) at Marist College, "Against a Defense of Fictional Realism" in Philosophical Quarterly. Ben and Cathy also have a paper on fictional characters forthcoming in an Oxford University Press anthology. Ben also gave the keynote address at the Second Seoul Philosophy Graduate Student Philosophy Conference at Seoul National University; commented on a paper at the Pacific APA; and gave talks at the Central APA, Denison, Kansas State, Tokyo, UC Davis and Yonsei University in Seoul.
Justin D'Arms began a four year term as chair of the department in July 2014. His articles "Velleman on Acting and Reacting" and "Wrong Kinds of Reason and the Opacity of Normative Force" (with Daniel Jacobson) were published this year, in Abstracta and Oxford Studies in Metaethics, respectively. He edited (with Jacobson) a volume called Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics that was published this year by Oxford University Press. That volume includes an introduction and a new paper by the editors.
Justin delivered a keynote address at the Workshop on Philosophy of Emotion at Georgetown University in April. His other talks this year included: a Symposium presentation on "Fittingness Without Cognitivism" at the APA in Chicago; a lecture on "Practical and Pathetic Reasons to Feel" at the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions in Lisbon; a Philosophy Department Colloquium at Washington University in St. Louis; a workshop on Naturalism and Normativity at New York University, and a conference on Sentimentalism at Holy Cross. He also participated in a workshop at the University of Michigan on his book manuscript with Daniel Jacobson, Rational Sentimentalism. He was a "Featured Philosopher" on the Ethics blog “PEA Soup” in February. He was especially pleased to see one of his advisees, Alison Duncan Kerr, complete her PhD this summer, and another, Owen King, win the Fink Prize for best graduate student paper.
Lisa Downing gave many prominent talks during the last year, nationally and internationally. She visited Seoul National University in March 2014 and gave two talks: a philosophy department colloquium (“Locke contra Descartes’s Dualism”) and a paper delivered as part of the Seoul Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy (“Malebranche: Causation, Volition, Impact”). She also was a keynote speaker at the Conference on Berkeley’s Three Dialogues at Trinity College Dublin in April 2014, where she gave the paper “Sensible qualities and secondary qualities in the First Dialogue.”
Lisa spent two weeks in June 2014 as a faculty member at the Rotman Summer Institute at the University of Western Ontario. There she gave two talks: “Boyle and Locke on Powers and Qualities” and “The prioritization of laws of nature in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.”
She visited Belgium in October 2014 and gave two talks: “Clarke, Bentley, Whiston, and Gravity as God's action” at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and “Qualities, Powers, and Mere Powers in Locke” at the workshop Secondary Qualities: the transition from quality to quantity hosted by Ghent University.
Also in October 2014, Lisa gave a colloquium talk at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Department of Philosophy: “Are Body and Extension the Same Thing?: Locke vs. Descartes (vs. More)”
Finally, two of Lisa's recent articles have appeared in print (“Locke’s Metaphysics and Newtonian Metaphysics” in Newton and Empiricism and “Malebranche and Berkeley on Efficient Causation” in Efficient Causation) and two more are now forthcoming.
Julia Jorati published “Three Types of Spontaneity and Teleology in Leibniz” (forthcoming in Journal of the History of Philosophy), “Leibniz’s Twofold Gap between Moral Knowledge and Motivation” (forthcoming in British Journal of the History of Philosophy), “Divine Faculties and the Puzzle of Incompossibility” (forthcoming in the volume Leibniz: Compossibility and Possible Worlds, edited by G. Brown and Y. Chiek), and “Gottfried Leibniz: Philosophy of Mind” (published in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Her professional travel included the University of California at Irvine, Western Michigan University, the Southwest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy (University of New Mexico), Sentiment and Reason in Early Modern Ethics (SUNY Buffalo), the Midwest Early Modern Philosophy Conference (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), and the Baylor-Georgetown-Notre Dame Philosophy of Religion Conference (Georgetown University).
Robert Kraut, with Kevin Scharp, completed "Pragmatism Without Idealism" (forthcoming in The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods); this is the first of several collaborative efforts between Robert and Kevin to spell out the costs, benefits and formal details of a thoroughgoing pragmatism.
Abe Roth published “Prediction, Authority, and Entitlement in Shared Activity” (forthcoming in Noûs), “Practical Intersubjectivity and Normative Guidance: Bratman on Shared Agency” (forthcoming in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Social Ontology), and “Indispensability, the Discursive Dilemma, and Groups with Minds of Their Own” in the volume From Individual to Collective Intentionality edited by Chant, Hindriks, and Preyer (Oxford University Press, 2014).
He also delivered the following talks: invited symposium paper on Social Explanation, at the Collective Intentionality IX conference, Indiana University, September 2014; invited symposium paper on Shared Agency by Michael Bratman, at the Collective Intentionality IX conference, Indiana University, September 2014; “The psychology and ‘language’ of Identity in Hume’s Treatise: Unity, Number, or Something in Between?”, 41st International Hume Society Conference, July 2014; “What Is It to Accept a Promise?”, Northwestern University Society for the Theory of Ethics and Politics Conference, March 2014; “Team Reasoning, Shared Intention, and Non-Evidential Warrant for Belief”, European Network on Social Ontology (ENSO) conference, Helsinki, Finland, October 2013.
Kevin Scharp published a book, Replacing Truth (Oxford University Press, 2013; ISBN 978-0199653850), and several chapters and articles, including “Tolerance and the Multi-range View of Vagueness” (forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), “Truth, Revenge, and Internalizability” (Erkenntnis, 2014), and “Truth, the Liar, and Relativism” (The Philosophical Review, 2013). He also co-authored “Pragmatism without Idealism” (forthcoming in The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods, edited by Christopher Daly) with Robert Kraut, and “When is the Cure Worse than the Disease?” (forthcoming in The Relevance of the Liar, edited by Bradley Armour-Garb) with Stewart Shapiro. Kevin presented “Celsius and Kelvin” at a workshop on conceptual revisionism at the University of Oslo, Norway (October 23, 2013) and Simon Frasier University, Vancouver, British Columbia (August 9, 2013).
Stewart Shapiro published a new book Varieties of Logic (Oxford University Press, 2014) in addition to some articles: “Pluralism, relativism, and objectivity” (in The Metaphysics of Logic, Cambridge University Press), “Proving theses?” (in Church’s thesis: logic, mind and nature, Copernicus Center Press), and “Structures and logics: a case for (a) relativism” (in Erkenntnis).
Stewart also gave talks in Tubingen in February ("Functions and proofs"), at the University of Connecticut in April ("Points as abstracts"), in Oslo in May ("Intuitionistic Frege's theorem"), at the Dubrovnik conference in June ("Frege on the real numbers"), at a conference in the Czech Republic in June ("The metaphysics of points"), and at the University of Minnesota in November ("The metaphysics of points").
Declan Smithies was a visiting associate professor at MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy during the 2013-14 academic year and a Professorial Fellow at the London Institute of Philosophy in summer 2015.
Declan published "The Phenomenal Basis of Epistemic Justification" in New Waves in Philosophy of Mind, edited by Mark Sprevak & Jesper Kallestrup (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and "Can Foundationalism Solve the Regress Problem" in Current Controversies in Epistemology, edited by Ram Neta (Routledge, 2014). He also gave talks at MIT, New York University, the University of Toronto, Notre Dame, Syracuse, UMass Amherst, Rochester, Northwestern and Tulane.
He also served as associate editor at Episteme.
William Taschek spent most of his time last year on duties associated with his role as interim chair of the department. Also, together with Chris Pincock, he organized this past summer’s Dubrovnic Conference. This year’s topic was the History of Analytic Philosophy. At this conference, William presented a paper on “Frege on the Normativity of Logic.”
Neil Tennant published a book, Introducing Philosophy: God, Mind, World and Logic (Routledge, forthcoming), the edited volume Foundational Adventures: Essays in Honor of Harvey M. Friedman (College Publications, London, 2014; Volume 22 in their Tributes series), and four papers: "Cut for Classical Core Logic" (forthcoming in Review of Symbolic Logic), "Rule-Irredundancy and the Sequent Calculus for Core Logic" (forthcoming in Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic), "The Logical Structure of Evolutionary Explanation and Prediction: Darwinism's Fundamental Schema" (Biology and Philosophy 29, No. 5; DOI 10.1007/s10539-014-9444-0), and "Aristotle's Syllogistic and Core Logic" (History and Philosophy of Logic 35, No. 2, 2014; DOI 10.1080/01445340.2013.867144).
Neil also delivered a presentation at the Workshop on the Semantics of Cardinals, sponsored by the Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy at Ohio State in March 2014, and he presented "Proofs that and proofs why" at the Institut d'Histoire et Philosophie des Sciences in Paris in November 2013.
Piers Norris Turner has several forthcoming articles, including “Rules and Right in Mill” (Journal of the History of Philosophy), “Punishment and Discretion in Mill’s Utilitarianism” (Utilitas), “Mill and the Liberal Rejection of Legal Moralism” (History of Philosophy Quarterly), “More Democracy is not Better Democracy: Cain’s Case for Reform Pluralism” (Election Law Journal), and “Mill and Modern Liberalism” (Blackwell Companion to John Stuart Mill). He now is beginning work on a book on Mill’s moral and political philosophy, as well as co-editing (with Gerald Gaus) a volume entitled Public Reason in Political Philosophy: Classic Sources and Contemporary Commentaries (Routledge Press) to which he will contribute an essay on Mill.
Piers also is an active member of the Center for Ethics and Human Values and a co-organizer of COMPAS (“Conversations on Morality, Politics, and Society”). The next COMPAS program in 2015-2016 will be devoted to sustainability.