Philosophy Department Newsletter - February 2023 - Hofstra University

Hofstra Philosophy Department Newsletter

From the Chair's Desk

Amy Baehr

This spring I finish up my third year chairing the department. Learning to chair in a pandemic was a bit of a baptism by fire. Throughout, though, I was heartened to see the campus community come together to keep everyone safe and continue the work of teaching, learning and research. Our longtime and very beloved secretary, Joanne Herlihy, retired in August. We thanked her for her many years of service with a lovely party on the quad with faculty, students and staff in attendance. Our new secretary, Erica Bosco, joined us in September and is doing a wonderful job. The Heger Lounge is looking lively these days with a new coat of paint and other improvements. The lounge is now even more welcoming to faculty, staff and students for parties, informal conversation and the sharing of a meal The lounge fills up and comes alive especially on Wednesday evenings when our student-run Philosophy Club (Veritas) hosts discussions of philosophical issues both timeless and timely Fall 2021 saw the inauguration of a new president of the university, Susan Poser. Fall 2022 she was joined by a new Provost (chief academic officer), Charlie Riordan. In response to a call for proposals from President Poser and Provost Riordan, the campus is now abuzz with proposals to enhance Hofstra’s reputation and the success of our students.

Faculty Updates

Alumni & Student Updates

You're Invited!

The department will be hosting a conference on Friday, March 10, 2023, 1:00pm-5:30pm both live and via zoom to celebrate the publication of Amy Karofsky’s recent book, A Case for Necessitarianism. Professor Karofsky defends the view that absolutely nothing about the world could have been otherwise in any way, whatsoever. Most philosophers believe that necessitarianism is open to question and presume that some things could have been otherwise than what they are. Professor Karofsky argues that necessitarianism is true and the view that some things in the world are contingent is false. Join us for an afternoon of discussion and thought-provoking responses to Professor Karofsky’s arguments as we celebrate the work of one of our colleagues.

Speakers

Simone Gozzano, Università Degli Studi Dell'Aquila, L'Aquila, Italy

Stephen Maitzen, Acadia University, Nova Scotia, Canada

Antonella Mallozzi, Providence College, Rhode Island, United States

FRIDAY, MARCH 10, 2023, 1:00PM-5:30PM

EASTERN TIME (US AND CANADA)

JOIN ZOOM MEETING: (CLICK ME)

MEETING ID: 932 7607 9765

PASSCODE: 975708

From Our Faculty

Ralph Acampora: Amy Baehr:

I presented a keynote address to a conference on the link between multi-species epistemology and inter-species ethics; it was about semiosis as a marker of transhuman moral status In March I will present another keynote talk, this one about inter-species philosophy of body as a way beyond Thomas Nagel's notorious agnosticism about other animals' worlds Last year I wrote a paper on phenomenology and critical hermeneutics of the livestock industry and animal sanctuaries This year I am working on a paper about the affective turn in animal ethics away from exclusively rationalistic approaches.

Anthony Dardis:

My own writing and research has slowed down a bit since becoming chair I continue working with the New York Society for Women in Philosophy, now serving in an advisory role In July 2021, I contributed to a symposium on the very concerning challenge of right wing populism in the International Journal of Constitutional Law; and in 2022 I reviewed a book on the fascinating conservative historian and social theorist Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in the Catholic Historical Review. Summer 2022 I attended a faculty workshop at Northeastern University on teaching Africana Philosophy; I look forward to integrating what I learned in the Philosophy and Race course (recently added to our offerings) I’ll be teaching fall 2023.

It's been a complicated and busy year or two. I was away from campus for a year and a half starting at the beginning of the pandemic. I taught for two semesters entirely on line (one a regular zoom session, one a "reverse zoom" where I zoomed into the classroom) I taught my first in person class in Fall 2022 ("Philosophy of Mind") This was absolutely terrific The discussions were lively and penetrating, and I got to know our group in a very different way than works in zoom I've been writing on aspects of the free will problem I was invited to do a presentation at the American Philosophical Association in April of 2022 on dispositions and abilities and free will I presented a portion of that work at the Northwest Philosophy Conference in Portland, OR in October The bottom line: Frankfurt's famous argument, that the ability to do otherwise is not required for moral responsibility, doesn't work I've also been following through on a part of an older project about what properties are A lot of current debate about metaphysics, and about the metaphysics of abstract objects (like properties, numbers, possible worlds, propositions), starts with a 1950 paper by Rudolf Carnap called "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" I've got a contribution to this conversation, on whether metaphysics is a kind of semantics (building language systems) or a kind of explanation (building the best theory of everything, including abstract objects where we need them for the theory) A philosophy student at Hofstra once asked me, many years ago, whether I could prove anything that I thought or said about philosophy Quite frustrated, I had to answer, "no" Now I think I know why For most explanations, we can't prove that the explanation is correct This is because it doesn't follow deductively from our data. We can't prove that Darwin was right about evolution. What we can show is that evolution is the best explanation we know about for speciation and many other phenomena in biology. Similarly, we can (sometimes) show that one philosophical position is a better explanation than any other we know about. So I'm on the side of thinking that metaphysics is basically a kind of explanation, not just a matter of looking at meanings and language structures.

This semester I'm teaching a new course, "Philosophic Themes in Science Fiction", and in the fall I'll be teaching a newer version of a pretty new course, "Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence".

This update was not written by ChatGPT

Chris Eliot:

I have been investigating philosophy of science issues as they arise in biogeography That's the study of where animals and plants and other organisms are, have been, and might be and maybe even where they should be This research takes up some foundational philosophy of science issues like how observed data relates to general hypotheses But it also leads to some tricky, value-laden questions like where living things belong, if anywhere, and what that might mean On the teaching side, I've been offering the usual philosophy of science, logic, and ethics courses I continue to edit and build out a growing academic journal, Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology (PTPBio). And I have been working with the University Senate, trying to improve university policies and procedures wherever we can optimize them.

Amy Karofsky:

In January of 2022, my book, A Case for Necessitarianism was published (click here). In the book, I argue that absolutely nothing about the world could have been otherwise in any way, whatsoever. The philosophy department will be hosting a book symposium to discuss my work on Friday, March 10. I hope that some of you will be able to attend the symposium either in-person or virtually. This past Fall, I was promoted to the position of full professor And this coming year, I will be working on the 5th edition of t he textbook Philosophy through Film (click here) I will be the sole author for the new edition (as my co-author Mary Litch is now fully retired) Some recent movies that I might incorporate include Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Get Out (2017), The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)

Terry Godlove:

On the research side, I have been continuing a project on the nature and status of social groups The question is under what circumstances, if any, groups exist, act, and can be owed moral obligations (big reveal: sometimes, rarely, and never) Separately, I wrote a somewhat fanciful paper for a 2022 conference on the future of the philosophy of religion titled, “Elements of a Kantian Philosophy of Religion” Lastly, I am hoping to meet (ok, to renegotiate) a contractual deadline for a “collected essays” volume of my work in theory and method in the study of religion The volume will collect already published articles in this area together with some new work (including the somewhat fanciful piece on Kant). My recent teaching has been occupied with a mix of first-year seminars, Honors College Culture and Expression, Classical Modern Philosophy, with advising an occasional departmental honors thesis, and with what is, for me, a new course, Philosophy in America a tour of pragmatism from Peirce to Haack Students continue to be mostly delightful, asking delightfully challenging questions

Mark McEvoy:

I have recently taught courses on Metaphysics, Philosophy of Literature and Epistemology My paper “The New Four-Color Theorem Problem Revisited” was published in November in the Springer Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Mathematical Practice I am currently working on an article on how it is possible to learn from fictional literature.

Ira Singer:

Kathleen Wallace:

A paperback edition of my book, The Network Self: Relation, Process and Personal Identity has been released, and the book is now available in both print and eBook formats I have published several articles developing themes from the book, and also co-edited another book, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Historical, Contemporary and Pedagogical Perspectives. I have also been working on revamping the Ethics course, and this semester I am participating in a projectbased learning course on Climate Change Challenges, bringing my expertise in sustainability and Climate Ethics to that initiative.

For me the last few years have been primarily devoted to developing my teaching, including Honors College lectures on Plato and on Montaigne, a new one-credit course on Happiness and the Good Life, and work on increasing the participatory character of my regular roster of courses Supervising an Independent Study on Korsgaard gave me a chance to reflect again about her metaethical account Finally, I’ve continued to read about, and have conversations about, the developing field of algorithmic fairness (or, as I prefer to label it, algorithmic justice mere fairness can involve treating everyone equally shabbily!).

Alumni & Student Updates

Mubeena('01)

Philosophy continues to warp my sense of time and space. In the beginning, an advanced class in high school egged me to major in the love of wisdom at Hofstra. All it took was a mind-bending conversation of five minutes to initiate my quest down the rabbit hole of thought. “Do I see colors the same way as the next guy?” had me hooked for one very long moment My time at Hofstra was nothing short of a personal renaissance As an international student, I relished an out-of-country experience, not only to embrace new ideas, but to make space to build my own Philosophy only added fuel to this fire But what would I do with it after school? And so I decided to also major in Psychology Figured it was the closest thing to a career in applying philosophical insights while exploring perception, emotion, ethics and culture

With a Masters in Organizational Psychology, I used Philosophy in business over the next twenty years (feels like 10 minutes though). As a workplace culture specialist, my core service was to ask the right questions, rooted in existentialism, to uncover human issues in the workplace. Constructing a sound argument and communicating messages based on the human condition are what I became known for. Because of Philosophy, work never felt like work. Times have changed and so have my philosophical views. I used to put rationality on a pedestal, but with life experience I now value emotional resonance too Today, I’ve cut down on consulting to write my first novel set in a world of philosophical quandaries And I’ve picked up my paint brush again So, I guess it doesn’t matter if you see colors differently to the way I do, as long as you’re in for the joyride

Hofstra Philosophy Department Newsletter

After graduating from Hofstra in 2019, I entered the PhD program in philosophy at Villanova University. I'm currently working on a dissertation project focusing on the concept of the general will in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and subsequent political philosophers including G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Aimé Césaire, and Paulin J. Hountondji. The 20222023 academic year is my research year in my program; I spent this past autumn as a visiting researcher at the CRMEP at Kingston University in London, during which I gave a few conference presentations on material related to an in-progress thesis chapter I'm currently rounding out my research year by continuing dissertation writing, preparing for teaching, and working on other research and editorial projects None of this would have been possible without my time at Hofstra and in the philosophy department especially, where I was first introduced to Rousseau and wrote an undergraduate thesis on his work under the patient and enormously helpful direction of Dr Ira J Singer The supportive environment at Hofstra philosophy was largely responsible for instilling in me a high valuation of academic mentorship and community.

awarded a Firestone Fellowship, allowing me to pursue research full time, assisted by Dr John Krapp The topic we were exploring was the Limit of Reason, or more specifically, the conflict between our reason and intuitions It is often the case that when faced with ethical dilemmas, the actions prescribed by our intuitions contradict those prescribed by theories and principles developed by philosophy through reason After more closely scrutinizing “intuition” and “reason” and the means by which we develop judgements and prescriptions of actions using either, it seems that both are, when taken alone, unable to provide us with deductively verifiable guidance on these matters. Due to the nature of normative claims, and our difficulty verifying inductive and empirical claims, it seems we need to build our rational arguments on the back of some assumptions, the majority of which will be informed by our intuitions. If we wish to continue making value-laden statements and building arguments upon them, we must acknowledge this fact, so that we may do away with the pretense of deductive certainty and be more critically aware of how we authorize ethical claims

Thomas McGlone ('19)

Student Spotlight

Evan Lopes ('24)

Roger Orellana ('22)

I came to law school right out of college, without any meaningful exposure to the legal industry. Law school has a learning curve during the first year, and I was apprehensive of this and thought I would be at a disadvantage relative to my peers. But there were some skills that I developed as a philosophy major that were crucial to help me navigate my first year of law school. First, I became a better reader. Naturally everybody who enters college will be able to read and write. But my esteemed philosophy professors at Hofstra encouraged me to read intently and with purpose, a skill that was invaluable in law school. I learned that every word counts. An added bonus to reading philosophy is that most of the writing can be dense and highly complex, which often mirrors some of the stylistic choices of judges. When I opened my first law school textbook, I felt fortunate to have developed the requisite patience and attention by parsing through hundreds of pages of Kant Second, I became a better writer One of my favorite things about being a philosophy major was that I did not need to (and was advised not to) write ornately I learned how to express ideas in an analytical, concise, and clear manner The writing is neat, clean, unclouded by unnecessary whims, and highly logical This kind of writing was exactly what was expected of me when I was asked to write a memo, outlining facts and explaining the possible arguments to arrive at different outcomes of a legal problem. Third, I became a better thinker. In other words, I became better at thinking analytically about problems. The hardest skill to develop as a philosophy major, in my experience, is finding the weaknesses and addressing counterpoints for any given argument. Even the most famous and smartest of philosophers have gaps in their theories, so odds are that an argument in a student essay will not be bulletproof. But finding the weaknesses in your beloved thesis, while soul-crushing, is a necessary part of becoming more analytical. Perhaps you do get to save your ideas from its imminent criticisms. What matters is that at the end of that journey, you become a better thinker, and a stronger one too. This skill is of course useful in the day-to-day life of a law school student, where the law truly is always changing, and it pays dividends to understand the strengths and weaknesses underlying any legal doctrine.

I am sure my other colleagues during my time at Hofstra are still benefitting from the skills they