The notes available here were produced by Dorit Bar-On in preparation for meetings of a reading group on Ruth Millikan’s Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information, and were lightly edited by Ruth. The notes were prepared for online publication with the help of Drew Johnson.

See an interview with Michael Lynch about his new book, Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture.

Read an excerpt of the book in the fall issue of UConn Magazine.

Heather Muraviov and Taylor Tate co-authored “Black Women Philosophers Conference at the CUNY-Graduate Center,” which uses the pedagogical framework developed by Fanonian scholar Erica Burman to review the conference. Their analysis appeared in the “Black Issues in Philosophy” series of the Blog of the APA.

https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/04/30/black-issues-in-philosophy-black-women-philosophers-conference-at-the-cuny-graduate-center/

Drew Johnson has two forthcoming articles:  “Hinge Epistemology, Radical Skepticism, and Domain Specific Skepticism,” The International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, doi 10.1163/22105700-20191302 and “Epistemological Disjunctivism: Perception, Expression, and Self-Knowledge” (With Dorit Bar-On). Forthcoming in New Issues in Epistemological Disjunctivism (2019), Doyle, C., Milburn, J., & Pritchard, D. (eds.). Routledge.

Recent graduate Jared Henderson has a forthcoming article, ‘A Neglected QUA Solution to the Fundamental Problem of Christology’, (co-authored with Jc Beall) in the journal, Faith & Philosophy.

Recent graduate Dana Francisco Miranda has an article titled “Review: Jessica Blatt’s Race and the Making of American Political Science,” forthcoming in The Journal of African American History. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/jaah/current

Michael Patrick Lynch has been designated a University of Connecticut Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor. Michael is our fourth BOT Distinguished Professor from Philosophy, along with Ruth Millikan, Joel Kupperman, and Jc Beall. As the provost’s website says, “The Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor is the highest honor that the University bestows on faculty who have demonstrated excellence in teaching, research and service” and who have spent at least 10 years of their career at UConn. https://provost.uconn.edu/about/awards/

From an interview with legendary investor and philanthropist Bill Miller.

Q: What advice would you give students about areas of study and being prepared for the working world?

I was recently giving a talk at a conference, and there was a speaker there who specialized in disruptive technologies and had a PhD in computer science.  He described all the different technologies that would be changing significantly over the next 10 to 20 years and would upend the work force.  During the audience Q and A, somebody asked, “If that’s the case, what should we advise our children to do, because so many of the things that they would be trained for might become obsolete?”

He said, “You need to think about this in a way in which an economist would think about it. Mainly, what’s the scarcest resource?”  The scarcest resources get more valuable, and the abundant resources get less valuable.  He said, “In that kind of an environment, the scarcest resource will be critical and analytical thinking, and moral reasoning.  That would indicate you might want to have them take philosophy, or other disciplines in the humanities that might encourage those habits of mind.”

That was an interesting point, and I think it’s exactly right.

Susan Schneider has just begun a four-month appointment as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in The John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. The award is to enable her to pursue a research project entitled “Mind Design: Artificial Intelligence, Brain Enhancement, and the Nature of the Self.” She will confab with other top scholars, make use of the Library’s rich resources, and interact with policymakers and the public, plus give a public presentation about the nature and results of her research.

We are pleased to share our Faculty’s published works in 2018:

Battaly, H. D., ed. (2019). The Routledge handbook of virtue epistemology. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Beall, J. C., Glanzberg, M., & Ripley, D. (2018). Formal theories of truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bragato, F. F., & Gordon, L. R., eds. (2018). Geopolitics and decolonization perspectives from the Global South. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Green, M. S. (2018). Know thyself: The value and limits of self-knowledge. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Hellman, G., & Shapiro, S. (2018). Varieties of continua: From regions to points and back. New York: Oxford University Press.

McLeod, A. (2018). The philosophical thought of Wang Chong. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Simmons, K. (2018). Semantic singularities: Paradoxes of reference, predication, and truth. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

The Brazilian journal EntreLetras is doing a special issue on the work of Lewis Gordon. The announcement gives a nice summary of Lewis’s areas.