Author: Malley, Mary

Heather Battaly and Casey Johnson: Character, Vices, and Authority

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Tune into Character, Vices, and Authority with UConn Professor of Philosophy Heather Battaly and UConn alumna Casey Johnson (now Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho) on Thursday, May 13th, at 2:00 PM!

When trying to make sense of the world, we rely on other people – for information, ideas, alternative perspectives, criticisms, and objections. We therefore need to be able to recognise authoritative people, ones worthy of the trust we put in them when we ask for intellectual help. But how do we identify authoritative people?

One answer: we assess their intellectual virtues and vices. We ask if someone is reflective and open-minded, or dogmatic and closed-minded. This conversation will explore the intellectual vices, what they are, where they come from, and how we should try and deal with intellectually vicious people.

Alumna Emma Bjorngard-Basayne: From a Doctoral Student in Philosophy to a Higher Ed Professional

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UConn alumna Dr. Emma Bjorngard-Basayne’18 Ph.D. Philosophy is currently an Academic Advisor at the Office of Undergraduate Advising, UConn School of Business. She is also an Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at the Stamford Campus, UConn. Her career journey suggests that in addition to the academic skills and training gained from one’s degree program, doctoral students should step outside of their department and take a test drive in the field of their interest through internships or career-related experiences that might help expand their career choices and may eventually lead them to their future career.

Read the full profile here.

Stewart Shapiro: American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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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”

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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”

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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.

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Drew Johnson: “Disjunctive Luminosity”

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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.

 

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Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization

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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

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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.