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".

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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!).