C O G I T A M U S

New Faculty

We are pleased to welcome JC Beall to our department as an Assistant Professor. JC won't begin teaching until the Spring of 2001, but he has already moved in and started to enliven our Wednesday brown bag talks. JC received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts in 1998 and joins us after a teaching stint in Tasmania. He writes on logic, standard and otherwise, and publishes at a pace that alarms those interested in preserving old growth timber.

Publications

• JC Beall's "Minimalism, Gaps, and the Holton Conditional" appeared in the October issue of Analysis, and Analysis has also accepted his "A neglected minimalist response to the liar" and "Is Yablo's paradox non-circular?". "Logical Pluralism", a joint paper with Greg Restall, appeared in the December AJP, and "Heaps of Gluts and Hyde-ing the Sorites", written with Mark Colyvan, will soon appear in Mind JC's Stanford Encyclopedia entry, namely Curry's Paradox, has also (finally!) appeared.

• Austen Clark's A Theory of Sentience is now available from OUP-USA; Oxford University Press selected the first chapter of the book to display in its "Philosophy Reading Room" at http://www.oup.co.uk/readingroom/philosophy. Austen also has a chapter ("Perception: Philosophical Theories about") in the forthcoming MacMillan Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, edited by Lyn Nadel.

• Joel Kupperman's "Metaphysics as Prolegomenon to Ethics" is the lead article in the current volume of Midwest Studies in Philosophy (vol. 24, pp. 1-16); one of his older papers, "The Supra-Moral in Religious Ethics: The Case of Buddhism" has been reprinted in a collection of articles on Indian Philosophy, edited by Roy Perrett and published by Garland; and his Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts has just been published by Oxford University Press.

• Ruth Millikan's On Clear and Confused Ideas has just been published by Cambridge University Press. Her "Reading Mother Nature's Mind" appears in Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment (ed. Ross, et al., MIT Press), while "The Language-Thought Partnership: A Bird's Eye View" appears in a special issue of Language and Communication (December, 2000), and "Naturalizing Intentionality" is in Volume 9 of The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy.

Presentations

• JC Beall has been invited to give the first "Logic Program Lecture" at Smith's College; it will be on so-called positive theories of truth (and why all positive theorists should be dialetheists).

• Margaret Gilbert gave a seminar paper entitled "A Social Ontological Approach to Political Obligation" at the Sorbonne on December 1^st.

• Sam Wheeler read a paper entitled "Consumer Protection in Social Contracts" at the San Francisco meetings of the American Criminological Society (Nov. 18). He also presented a paper on gun control at an invited session of the Eastern Division APA meetings in New York.

  C A L E N D A R

  Wednesdays at noon: our regular Brown Bag Series of informal philosophy talks continues.

  Please see our complete listing of colloquia scheduled for spring at our Colloqium Series page.

  

  Other News

  Don Baxter participated in an M.A. examination given to a student in the Medieval Studies Program.

  Virgil Whitmyer successfully defended his dissertation and is currently a post-doc in Esther Thelen's developmental psychology lab at Indiana University.

  The department hosted, for the second year, a reception at the Eastern Division meetings of the APA to celebrate recent and forthcoming books by our faculty. This year the list included:

  • Susan Anderson Kierkegaard, Wadsworth, 1999; John Stuart Mill, Wadsworth, 1999; Dostoevsky Wadsworth, 2000.
  • Paul Bloomfield, Moral Reality, Oxford, 2001.
  • Austen Clark, A Theory of Sentience, Oxford, 1999.
  • Margaret Gilbert, Sociality and Responsibility, Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
  • Joel Kupperman, Value and What Follows, Oxford, 1999; Learning from Asian Philosophy, Oxford, 1999.
  • Diana Meyers, Gender in the Mirror: Imagery that Confounds Us, Oxford, 2001.
  • Ruth Millikan, On Clear and Confused Ideas, Cambridge, 2000.
  • Samuel Wheeler, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy, Stanford, 2000.

  We were pleased that so many of our former graduate students were able to attend, as well as many friends of the department, among them: Andrew Ariew (U. of R.I.), William Bechtel (Washington U.), John Biro (U. of Florida), Phil Buckley (McGill U.), Otavio Bueno (Cal. State, Fresno), Mark Colyvan (U. of Tasmania), Michael Devitt (CUNY), Hartry Field (NYU), John Greco (Fordham U.),Terry Horgan (U. of Memphis), Hilary Kornblith (U. of Vermont), Mike Lynch (Conn, College), Eugene Mills (Virginia Commonwealth), Peter Momtchiloff (Oxford U. Press), David Rosenthal (CUNY), David Schmidtz (U. of Arizona), and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Dartmouth College).

  

  This newsletter is designed by the Philosophy Department's Program Assistant, Shelly Burelle. Please visit our website at: http://vm.uconn.edu/~wwwphil where this Newsletter is located for miscellaneous links, including links to abstracts, and colloquium updates.

  Any questions or comments should be directed to Shelly at philos1@uconnvm.uconn.edu.

  

  
  Department of Philosophy
  U-2054, 344 Mansfield Rd.
  Storrs, Connecticut 06269-2054
  Telephone: 860-486-4416
  Fax: 860-486-0387
  Email: philos1@uconnvm.uconn.edu
  Website: http://vm.uconn.edu/~wwwphil