Job Placement:  

Adam Potthast has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Missouri - Rolla (umr.edu).  Officially, his title will be Assistant Professor of Professional Ethics, although he anticipates teaching courses in the history of philosophy and metaphysics as well.

(Editor's note:  Potthast's hiring means that the Philosophy Department has placed 100% of its newly minted PhDs for 2005!)

Comings and Goings:

• Peg O'Conner, Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College , was a fellow at the UConn Humanities Institute this spring semester.  She also taught an undergraduate course on Wittgenstein in the Philosophy Department and gave a talk on "Foundation Walls Are Carried by the Whole House:  Rethinking Foundations in On Certainty".  She is the author of Oppression and Responsibility: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002) and is currently working on a new book with the tentative title Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life: Feminist Metaethics.

• Joel Kupperman has been on leave this year with an NEH fellowship, which has allowed him to complete work on two new books.  The first, Six Myths about the Good Life, is being published by Hackett.  The other, Ethics and Qualities of Life, is currently being reviewed by a publisher.  Joel says that the book concerns moral theory in general and concludes with an evaluation of the problems and prospects for consequentialism in particular.  "Given our fragmentary knowledge of the future," Joel suggests, "one might think of the moral portion of an evolving social contract, arrived at by people who are and remain semi-ignorant."

• Sam Wheeler has been on sabbatical leave during the Spring 2005 semester.  Sam traveled to Europe to deliver several lectures (as described below) and is currently working on a plethora of projects.

Colloquia:

This semester, we have had a tremendous slate of speakers for our colloquium series, including four fantastic talks in one month (April).

In February, the Philosophy Department was pleased to host Patrick Greenough of the University of St. Andrews .  Patrick gave a colloquium talk entitled "Phenomenal Continua".  He also held a workshop on knowledge and vagueness and gave a talk on "Truth-Maker Gaps" in Michael Lynch's truth seminar. 

Simon Blackburn of Cambridge University delivered our annual Ruth Evelyn Parcells Memorial Lecture on April 1^st, 2005.  His talk was entitled "The Foundations of Value: Liberalism, Religion, and the Do-It-Yourself Option".

Joseph Raz (Oxford/Columbia) gave a lecture entitled "Human Rights without Foundations?" on April 14^th, followed by a workshop on human rights theory the next day.  His visit was sponsored jointly by the Philosophy Department and the Human Rights Initiative at the University of Connecticut .

Also in April, Christopher Hill of Brown University came for a visit and gave a colloquium talk entitled "OW! The Paradox of Pain".

The semester ends with at talk by Crispin Wright of St. Andrews on April 29.  Wright's talk, entitled "Vagueness and Rule-following", is sponsored by the Philosophy Department Graduate Students (Phil DoGS) and the Graduate Student Senate.

 

FACULTY

Honors and Awards:    

• Susan Leigh Anderson, along with her husband Michael Anderson ( University of Hartford ) and Chris Armen ( Trinity College ) was awarded a $99,861 SGER grant from the National Science Foundation to work on "Machine Ethics" during the 2005 calendar year.  The goal is to make ethics computable by harnessing machine intelligence to develop intuitively correct, consistent and practical decision procedures, generalizing from intuitions about clear cases, for theories that involve multiple prima facie duties.  They hope that making headway in this project will make it possible to use machines as ethical advisors, advance the study of moral theory, and add an ethical dimension to the study of (increasingly autonomous) computational devices.

• In April, Don Baxter received an "Outstanding Educator/Advisor of the Year Award Nomination" from the UConn Undergraduate Student Government.

• Philosophical Psychology devoted a recent issue to Austen Clark's third book, A Theory of Sentience.  The December 2004 issue (vol. 17, no. 4) was guest-edited by Jonathan Cohen and included commentaries by Cohen, Joe Levine, Mohan Matthen, and Georges Rey.  Austen's paper "Feature-placing and proto-objects" appeared as the lead-off article, which also included his "Sensing, objects, and awareness: Reply to Commentators".

• Crawford (Tim) Elder's book Real Natures and Familiar Objects was featured in an author-meets-critics session at the Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association in San Francisco.  Tim faced up against critics William Carter and Amie Thomasson.

• Likewise, Michael Lynch's book True to Life was the subject of an author-meets-critics session at the Pacific APA, where Michael had to defend himself against critics Gila Sher, Marian David, and Matthew McGrath.  (The proceedings will be published in Philosophical Books.) 

• Sam Wheeler has been offered, and has accepted, a second 3-year term as editor of Public Affairs Quarterly, through January 2008.

Publications:

• Don Baxter's paper "Altruism, Grief, and Identity" was published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (vol. 70, March 2005).

• Thomas Bontly's article "Exclusion, Overdetermination, and the Nature of Causation" appears in the new issue of Journal of Philosophical Research (vol. 30, 2005).

• Austen Clark published "Feature placing and proto-objects" and "Sensing, objects, and awareness: Reply to Commentators", both in Philosophical Psychology (vol. 17, 2004).

• Crawford Elder 's "Undercutting the Idea of Carving Reality" came out in Southern Journal of Philosophy (vol. 43, 2005).

• Diana Tietjens Meyers published "Decentralizing Autonomy -- Five Faces of Selfhood" in Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism, edited by Joel Anderson and John Christman ( Cambridge University Press, 2005).

• Michael Lynch and Heather Battaly (Cal State  Fullerton) co-edited a volume entitled Perspectives on the Philosophy of William Alston, which Rowman & Littlefield published in April 2005.  In addition, Lynch's article "Liberalism and Objectivity" appeared in the Chronicle Review on April 14^th, and a Spanish translation of his book True to Life is on its way from Ediciones Iberica of Barcelona .

• Ruth Millikan has several new papers in print, including "Some Reflections on the Theory Theory - Simulation Theory" appears in Susan Hurley and Nick Chater (eds.), Perspectives on Imitation:  From Mirror Neurons to Memes (MIT Press); "The Son and the Daughter: On Sellars, Brandom and Millikan" can be found in Pragmatics and Cognition 13:1; and "On reading Signs: Some Differences between Us and The Others" is printed in Kim Oller, Kim Plunkett and Ulrike Griebel (eds.), The Evolution of Communication Systems: A Comparative Approach (MIT Press).  Also out is Ruth's "Vom Ausgeblichen siegeszug der Gene und der Meme" ["On the Rumored Takeover by the Genes and The Memes"] in Gene, Meme, und Gehirne:  Geist und Gesellschaft als Natur Eine Debatte, edited by A. Becker, C, Mehr, H. Nau, G. Reuter, and D. Stegmuller (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003).  The paper, which has never been published in English, was translated by Hajo Greif.

• Sam Wheeler's paper Wittgenstein mit Davidson uber Metaphern appeared in Wittgenstein und die Metapher, edited by Arnswald, Kertscher, and Kross (Parerga Verlag, Berlin, pp. 195-219).

Presentations:

• Susan Leigh Anderson served as invited panelist for the "Workshop for Philosopher-Citizens: How to Write for the Op-Ed Pages" at the Pacific APA in San Francisco in March.  These workshops have been an incredible success.  This was the second time Susan had participated, and she has been invited to do so again at next year's Pacific APA in Portland

• Paul Bloomfield delivered comments on a symposium paper, "A Darwinian Dilemma for7 Realist Theories of Value" by Sharon Street (NYU), at the Pacific Division meetings of the APA in San Francisco in March.

• Thomas Bontly commented on a paper entitled "Can an Appeal to Constitution Solve the Exclusion Problem?" by Alyssa Ney (Brown/Rochester), also at the Pacific APA.

• Austen Clark spoke on "Cross modal links and selective attention" at the "Distinguishing the Senses" conference in Glasgow , December 2004, with participants from the US (John Heil and AC), England (Michael Martin, Charles Spence) and Scotland (Fiona MacPherson et al).  Austen was also invited to speak at the Zenon Pylyshyn Conference at the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada .  His paper is called "Location, location, location".  (Other invitees include Melvyn Goodale, Susan Carey, Brian Scholl, Stevan Harnad, John Bickle, Brian Cantwell-Smith.  The conference program can be found at http:\\www.zencon.ca. 

• Margaret Gilbert has given a number of talks recently, including invited colloquia on "Authority and Practical Reasoning" at both Miami University in February and Columbia University in March.  Also in March, Margaret was the keynote speaker at the Columbia University Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable, where she delivered a lecture entitled "Rationality and Collective Action".  At the Pacific APA in San Francisco , she gave a symposium talk called "Three Dogmas about Promises".

• Early this summer, Margaret will be giving several talks in Europe, including invited lectures at Zurich University on May 31 and at the conference on Rituals of Reconciliation (interdisciplinary) at University of Konstanz on May 27-8.  On June 8, she will speak on "Rationality and Collective Action" at Frankfurt University 's Philosophy Department.  On June 13, she will speak in the Oxford Moral Philosophy Series, and on June 14 at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Conference.

• Joel Kupperman presents a new paper called "Facts and Values in the Analects" at the Ninth East-West Philosophers' Conference in Hawaii this June.

• Gary Levvis ( Torrington ) organized an author-meets-critic Session for the Society for Realism/Antirealism Discussion during the December 2004 APA Meetings.  The focus was on Thomas Morawetz' Law's Premises, Law's Promise: Jurisprudence after Wittgenstein.  Levvis contributed a paper "Between Theory and Practice:  A Dilemma for Wittgenstein-Morawetz Jurisprudence".  Other speakers included Thomas Eisele ( University of Cincinnati , School of Law ) and Dennis Patterson (Law and Philosophy, Rutgers/Camden), with Thomas Morawetz (UConn School of Law) responding.

• Michael Lynch delivered a lecture on "Truth, Power and Democracy" in March at the United States Mint, in Washington , D.C. as part of their "Noted Author Series".

• Diana Meyers gave a talk entitled "Who's There? Selfhood, Self-Regard, and Social Relations" at Emory University for the Women's Studies Department Colloquium Series.

• In November, Ruth Millikan gave the Philosopher's Holiday lecture at Vassar College and the Alastair Macintyre lecture at Duke.  (The latter is an annual lecture commissioned by the graduate students.)  In March, she gave a talk called "Representations in Mind" to the Cadets at Westpoint.  Our own William Cornwell (as well as her former TA at the University of Michigan , Richard Schoenhaven) were her hosts.

• John Troyer will once again be an invited participant in the Rutgers Epistemology Conference (May 2005).

• Last summer Sam Wheeler traveled to China , where he gave two talks: "Davidsonian Rationality and Ethical Disagreement between Cultures" at a conference on Davidson at the Chinese Institute for Philosophy in Beijing , and "Deconstruction's Affinities to Quine, Davidson, and Wittgenstein" at Beijing University .  In January 2005, Sam traveled to Vienna to speak on "Truth, Metaphor, and Indeterminability", at the Alte Schmiede conference on Metaphor in Vienna .  He also commented on papers by Severin Schroeder (Oxford ) and Wolfgang Kunne ( Hamburg ) at a conference on the Poetics of Franz-Josef Czernin, sponsored by the city of Murzzuschlage, in the Styrian Alps.

• In February, Sam gave a keynote paper at the Yeshiva University Cardozo Law School Derrida Memorial Conference, on What Davidson could have learned from Derrida.

   

Forthcoming and Ongoing:

• Since December, Susan Leigh Anderson and her husband Michael Anderson (University of Hartford) have been working hard on three papers three papers to be presented at three different conferences this summer and early fall:  "Toward Machine Ethics: Implementing Two Action-Based Ethical Theories", "MedEthEx: Towards a Medical Ethics Advisor", and "Developing a Computable Decision Procedure for an Ethical Theory with Multiple Prima Facie Duties". Their work is supported by the aforementioned NSF grant, which has provided Susan with funds for travel and a reprieve from summer teaching.  It also allowed her to hire three undergraduate students for the Spring semester to do research on this project under her supervision. The students have been creating a database of ethical dilemmas and have attempted to analyze them using Ross's Theory of Prima Facie Duties and the theoretical framework of Beauchamp and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics. They presented the results of their work at the Frontiers of Undergraduate Research Poster Exhibition at Storrs on April 15th.  

• Susan is also devoting considerable time to the APA's stated aim of making philosophers and their work more visible in American society.  She has created a course, " Issues in the News", which is now part of the lower division honors program at the Stamford Campus, and she wrote an Op-Ed piece for the class that was subsequently published in the Stamford Advocate (Monday, April 11th.)  Susan also gave a lecture on Nietzsche and Existentialism (Sartre in particular) to another new lower division honors course on "Intellectual Themes in History".

• Paul Bloomfield is editing a volume of new papers entitled Morality and Self Interest.  Contributors include Julia Annas, Stephen Finlay, Terry Irwin, Richard Joyce, Christopher Morris, Thomas Nagel, Mathias Risse, Samuel Scheffler, David Schmidtz, Michael Stocker, Ralph Wedgewood, and, of course, our own Joel Kupperman .  In addition, Paul's paper "Two Dogmas of Metaethics" has been accepted for publication in Philosophical Studies.

• Austen Clark's "Attention and Inscrutability: A Commentary on John Campbell's  Reference and Consciousness" is forthcoming in an issue of Philosophical Studies dedicated to papers presented at the 2004 Pacific APA.  (The paper was presented at a 2004 Pacific APA author-meets-critics session on Campbell 's book.)  And his paper "Painfulness is not a quale" is soon to appear in Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study, Murat Aydede, ed.  (MIT Press, to appear some time in the fall of 2005).

• Tim Elder's latest, "Conventionalism and Realism-Imitating Counterfactuals", has been accepted for publication at Philosophical Quarterly.

• Besides completing two books mentioned above, Joel Kupperman 's paper "A New Look at the Logic of the 'Is'-'Ought' Relation" is forthcoming in Philosophy, and another entitled "Classical and Sour Forms of Ethics" will appear in Paul Bloomfield 's volume Morality and Self Interest.  Finally, Joel has agreed to prepare a second edition of his Classic Asian Philosophy:  A Guide to the Essential Texts for Oxford University Press.  One of the changes will be the addition of a chapter on a Sufi text, Ibn al-'Arabi's The Bezels of Wisdom.

• Ruth Millikan's new book Language:  A Biological Model will be published this summer by Oxford University Press.  She also reports that the Japanese publisher Keiso Shobo has purchased Japanese language rights to Varieties of Meaning.  The translation should be out within a year.

Graduate Program News

Ph.D. Defenses:

Adam Potthast will defend his dissertation, tentatively entitled "Reductionism about Personal Identity and Moral Theory", on approximately June 1^st, 2005.  As mentioned above, Adam has already accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Missouri  Rolla.  Congratulations to Adam!

• Patrick Fleming presented his paper "Hume on Weakness of Will" at the Columbia/NYU Graduate Philosophy Conference in early April 2-3, and he presents a paper entitled "Is Wholeheartedness a Species of Practical Irrationality?" at the Central Division meetings of the APA in late April.  In addition, Pat's paper " Berkeley 's Immaterialist Account of Action" is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Philosophy (likely 2006).

• Lynn Mardon presented her paper "Geographical Restrictions on Divorced Primary Caregivers" at the University of Connecticut's 17th Annual Conference on Women and Gender (April 2, 2005).

• Thane Plantikow co-authored (with Jason Scott Robert) "Genetics, Neuroscience, and Psychiatric Classification".  The paper is now forthcoming in Psychopathology.  (And a correction:  the entry on Thane in the previous issue of Cogitamus listed her as holding a BA from the University of Minnesota, but if failed to note that she received an MA from Dalhousie University in 2003.)

• Steven Todd presented "Unmasking Multiple Drafts" at the University of Western Ontario's graduate conference in Philosophy of Mind, Language, and Cognitive Science (April 2 - 3, 2005).  The conference program, including an abstract of Steven's paper, is available at: http://publish.uwo.ca/~clacroi4/philmilcog5/.

Alumni News:

• Loren Lomasky (Ph.D. 1975) has moved to the University of Virginia .  He is now Cory Professor of Political Philosophy, Policy and Law and Director of the Political Philosophy, Policy and Law Program.

• Gordon Stevenson (Ph.D. 2001) is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Trinity College in Hartford . 

This newsletter was designed by the Philosophy Department's Program Assistant Shelly Burelle. Please visit our website at: "http://www.philosophy..uconn.edu" for miscellaneous links and colloquium updates.

Any questions or comments should be directed to Shelly at shelly.burelle@uconn.edu.