December News Digest

It's been an exciting month for our lecturers and postgraduate students, with great news about publications, presentations, conferences, and positions.

Early in the month we learned that our two recent PhDs, Javier González de Prado Salas and Tsung-Hsing ("Tracey") Ho, secured positions at excellent institutions.  Tracey got an appointment at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He will hold the post of Distinguished Post-Doctoral Scholar there starting in January. Javier was appointed a teaching fellow at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. We were also proud to hear that Javier will be co-editing a special issue of the major philosophy journal Synthese in the near future. Congratulations, Tracey and Javier!

Around the same time we heard this news, Kurt Sylvan gave his paper "Knowledge as a Non-Normative Relation" in Saarbrucken at the Normativity of Attitudes conference, where he was a main program speaker alongside the preeminent philosophers of normativity Maria Alvarez, John Skorupski, John Hyman, and Ram Neta.  It was a great honour for Kurt, who had also recently given the talk in Berlin at the European Normativity Network conference.

In the middle of the month, after returning from Budapest as a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Lee Walters hosted the Fictional Characters conference here in Southampton (http://bsafictionalcharacters.weebly.com/). Generously funded by the British Society of Aesthetics, it was a very successful couple of days with some really stimulating discussion.

And in publication news, Alex Gregory learned that his paper "Reasons as Good Bases" was accepted at Philosophical Studies, while Aaron Ridley was offered a contract from Oxford University Press for a book entitled 'Nietzsche on Will and Action'.  Congratulations to Alex and Aaron!