Midterm News Digest
The spring semester has had a wonderfully eventful start for staff and students alike, with a surge of publication acceptances, distinguished conference presentations, and honors.
The publication successes began with Jonathan Way and Conor McHugh learning that their paper “What Is Good Reasoning?” was accepted for publication by the preeminent journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Around the same time, Jonathan’s solo paper “Two Arguments for Evidentialism” was accepted by The Philosophical Quarterly, another leading philosophy journal. Not long after this, another staff duo—Aaron Ridley and Alex Neill—had their paper “Still an Error: Relational Theories of Art” accepted for publication in the British Journal of Aesthetics. Our department's historians of philosophy also received excellent news in Februrary, with Chris Janaway’s “Attitudes to Suffering: Parfit and Nietzsche” slated to appear in a special issue of Inquiry and Sasha Mudd’s “The Good Will and the Priority of the Right in Kant’s Groundwork I” in the Proceedings of the 12th International Kant Congress. Major kudos to Jonathan, Conor, Aaron, Alex, Chris, and Sasha for these research achievements!
Our undergraduates have also had impressive research successes recently. St. John Lambert was awarded First Prize in a competition for the best essay submitted to the University of Sheffield Undergraduate Conference. The paper was entitled "An Objection Against Frank Jackson's Metaethical Views". St. John also presented this paper at the Reading Undergraduate Conference, and it will be published in Reading's undergraduate philosophy journal. Bruno Russell, who is Philosophy’s Academic President, presented a paper at Sheffield as well, entitled "Contractualism, Consequentialism and the Moral Landscape: A New Pro-Contractualist Picture of Ethical Theory". Bruno's paper has also been accepted for publication in Sheffield's undergraduate philosophy journal. We are very proud to have such exceptional young philosophers as students.
The last few weeks have also witnessed distinguished presentations by staff. Fiona Woollard just returned from the Central Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago, where an author-meets-critics symposium was held on her new book Doing and Allowing Harm (Oxford University Press, 2015). Commentators on Fiona's book included Matthew Hanser from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Carolina Sartorio from the University of Arizona, with Fiona giving an introductory talk and a response to Hanser and Sartorio. Jonathan Way also recently returned from a prestigious American conference. He delivered his paper “Creditworthiness and Matching Principles” at the Arizona Normative Ethics Workshop. This paper is forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, a periodical associated with the Arizona workshop.
In addition to marveling at this torrent of research activity, we were thrilled to hear that Ray Monk was awarded a Miller Distinguished Scholarship at the Santa Fe Institute in Nevada. Nominations for this prestigious scholarship are internal only, and the record of previous holders is exceptionally star-studded. Former Miller Scholars include world-famous philosopher Daniel Dennett, actor-playwright-director Sam Shepard, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, and MIT theoretical physicist and engineer Seth Lloyd, among others. More information about the Miller Scholarship can be found here: http://www.santafe.edu/research/miller-scholars/. Congratulations, Ray!