Author: Malley, Mary

Stewart Shapiro: American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Posted on by
Stewart Shapiro

Distinguished Visiting Professor Stewart Shapiro has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Academy is both an honorary society that recognizes and celebrates the excellence of its members and an independent research center convening leaders from across disciplines, professions, and perspectives to address significant challenges. Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”

Lewis Gordon: “How the Court of Law Needs to Change for Racial Justice in America”

Posted on by

Listen to Professor and Department Head Lewis Gordon's recent interview on Let's Go There with Shira & Ryan, "Racial Justice in America: Police Officers Need to be Subject to the Law and Not Above the Law."

**Episode Description**

"Minnesota is in a state of crisis. During the high profile trial of Derek Chauvin trial for the death of George Floyd, another black man, Daunte Wright, was shot over the weekend in Brooklyn. We talk to Dr. Lewis R. Gordon, Professor and Head of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs, about what America needs to ask about seeking racial justice in a court of law."

Lewis Gordon: “Derek Chauvin Trial”

Posted on by

Read Professor and Department Head Lewis Gordon's recent article, "Derek Chauvin Trial: 3 Questions America Needs to Ask About Seeking Racial Justice in a Court of Law."

**Excerpt from the article**

There are three questions I find important to consider as the trial unfolds. These questions address the legal, moral and political legitimacy of any verdict in the trial. I offer them from my perspective as an Afro-Jewish philosopher and political thinker who studies oppression, justice and freedom. They also speak to the divergence between how a trial is conducted, what rules govern it – and the larger issue of racial justice raised by George Floyd’s death after Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. They are questions that need to be asked.

Loader Loading...
EAD Logo Taking too long?

Reload Reload document
| Open Open in new tab

Drew Johnson: “Disjunctive Luminosity”

Posted on by

Read graduate student Drew Johnson's recent article in Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, "Disjunctive Luminosity."

*Abstract*

Williamson's influential anti‐luminosity argument aims to show that our own mental states are not “luminous,” and that we are thus “cognitively homeless.” Among other things, this argument represents a significant challenge to the idea that we enjoy basic self‐knowledge of our own occurrent mental states. In this paper, I summarize Williamson's anti‐luminosity argument, and discuss the role that the notion of “epistemic basis” plays in it. I argue that the anti‐luminosity argument relies upon a particular version of the basis‐relative safety condition on knowledge. This commitment is significant because basic self‐knowledge seemingly lacks any kind of distinct epistemic basis, such as inference, observation, testimony, etc., despite representing a genuine kind of knowledge of contingent matters of fact. I consider a disjunctivist account (due to Bar‐On and Johnson), according to which true basic self‐beliefs indeed lack an epistemic basis in any kind of epistemic method (such as inference), yet are still epistemically grounded in the mental states they concern. I argue that this account of self‐knowledge is compatible with standard understandings of the basis relative safety condition on knowledge, but rejects the particular version required by the anti‐luminosity argument.

 

Loader Loading...
EAD Logo Taking too long?

Reload Reload document
| Open Open in new tab

Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization

Posted on by

Lewis R. Gordon, Author

Routledge, 2021

The eminent scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a probing meditation on freedom, justice, and decolonization. What is there to be understood and done when it is evident that the search for justice, which dominates social and political philosophy of the North, is an insufficient approach for the achievements of dignity, freedom, liberation, and revolution? Gordon takes the reader on a journey as he interrogates a trail from colonized philosophy to re-imagining liberation and revolution to critical challenges raised by Afropessimism, theodicy, and looming catastrophe. He offers not forecast and foreclosure but instead an urgent call for dignifying and urgent acts of political commitment. Such movements take the form of examining what philosophy means in Africana philosophy, liberation in decolonial thought, and the decolonization of justice and normative life. Gordon issues a critique of the obstacles to cultivating emancipatory politics, challenging reductionist forms of thought that proffer harm and suffering as conditions of political appearance and the valorization of nonhuman being. He asserts instead emancipatory considerations for occluded forms of life and the irreplaceability of existence in the face of catastrophe and ruin, and he concludes, through a discussion with the Circassian philosopher and decolonial theorist, Madina Tlostanova, with the project of shifting the geography of reason.

Book cover for Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization.

Ruth Garrett Millikan Graduate Fellowship Matching Challenge

Posted on by

A “match challenge” has been made in support of the Ruth Garrett Millikan Fellowship Fund. Anonymous donors have pledged $1000, which will be contributed to this fund by December 31 if others have collectively contributed that same amount by that date.

 

The Millikan Fellowship fund is used to support ABD grad students for a summer of dissertation writing or related professional development, by providing them with a sum that they’d otherwise earn by teaching a summer course. They also receive research funds to purchase books, pay for conference registration, and, where appropriate, travel. Thus far there have been four holders of the Fellowship: Andrew Tedder (2018), Drew Johnson (2019), Jordan Ochs (2019), and Ryo Tanaka (2020). This spring the Department of Philosophy will select another holder of the Fellowship for the summer of 2021. As the balance of the fund grows, we will get closer to being able to use the income it generates to support a grad student for a semester of dissertation writing, and then, eventually, for an entire dissertation year fellowship.

 

Please consider giving what you can.

Stewart Shapiro in 2019 Philosopher’s Annual

Posted on by
Stewart Shapiro

Stewart Shapiro’s article, ‘Actual and Potential Infinity,’ co-authored with Oystein Linnebo, and published in Nous, vol. 53 (pp. 160-191), has been selected by The Philosopher’s Annual for inclusion as one of the ten best philosophy articles published in 2019.

Abstract

The notion of potential infinity dominated in mathematical thinking about infinity from Aristotle until Cantor. The coherence and philosophical importance of the notion are defended. Particular attention is paid to the question of whether potential infinity is compatible with classical logic or requires a weaker logic, perhaps intuitionistic.

Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture

Posted on by

Michael P. Lynch, Author

Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2020

Taking stock of our fragmented political landscape, Michael Patrick Lynch delivers a trenchant philosophical take on digital culture and its tendency to make us into dogmatic know-it-alls. The internet—where most shared news stories are not even read by the person posting them—has contributed to the rampant spread of “intellectual arrogance.” In this culture, we have come to think that we have nothing to learn from one another; we are rewarded for emotional outrage over reflective thought; and we glorify a defensive rejection of those different from us.

Interweaving the works of classic philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Bertrand Russell and imposing them on a cybernetic future they could not have possibly even imagined, Lynch delves deeply into three core ideas that explain how we’ve gotten to the way we are:

• our natural tendency to be overconfident in our knowledge;
• the tribal politics that feed off our tendency;
• and the way the outrage factory of social media spreads those politics of arrogance and blind conviction.

In addition to identifying an ascendant “know-it-all-ism” in our culture, Lynch offers practical solutions for how we might start reversing this dangerous trend—from rejecting the banality of emoticons that rarely reveal insight to embracing the tenets of Socrates, who exemplified the humility of admitting how little we often know about the world, to the importance of dialogue if we want to know more. With bracing and deeply original analysis, Lynch holds a mirror up to American culture to reveal that the sources of our fragmentation start with our attitudes toward truth. Ultimately, Know-It-All Society makes a powerful new argument for the indispensable value of truth and humility in democracy.