Check out Professor Lewis Gordon‘s recent publication in Krisis’ special issue in Caribbean Philosophy. This publication is an essay based on Professor Gordon’s Spinoza Lecture, which was held in 2022.
Congratulations, Lewis!
Check out Professor Lewis Gordon‘s recent publication in Krisis’ special issue in Caribbean Philosophy. This publication is an essay based on Professor Gordon’s Spinoza Lecture, which was held in 2022.
Congratulations, Lewis!
Congratulations to Department Head & Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, Lewis Gordon, for his recent publication in The Georgetown Law Journal! You can read Dr. Gordon’s essay “A Black Existential Perspective on Afrofuturity and the Law” on The Georgetown Law Journal website.
Check out Spectrum magazine’s reviews of Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Lewis Gordon‘s book Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge 2021). Each article reviews a chapter of the aforementioned book. There are currently four installments in the series, which you can read below:
Neighbor Love, Political Love, and Divine Love by Zane Yi
Congratulations, Lewis!
UConn Philosophy Alum Tom Meagher’s (’18) new article, “On the Notion of Black Issues in Philosophy,” was published on the APA blog, Black Issues in Philosophy, last Friday. Among some names mentioned is our very own department head: Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Lewis Gordon. Check out an excerpt from the article below:
In taking on Black issues, philosophy manifests its care for the maturation of knowledge by realizing philosophy’s significance to those who confront black issues not only as intellectual exercises but as impositions that imbue existence with tragic responsibilities that knowledge alone is insufficient to transcend. In short, black/Black issues are among those where the philosopher’s effort to deal with them may, in turn, make the philosopher’s work and labor more genuinely philosophical.
You can read the full article on the APA’s blog.
Congratulations, Tom!
Assistant Professor Ting-An Lin’s recent article “Democratizing AI’ and the Concern of Algorithmic Injustice” was just published in Philosophy & Technology. In this article, Dr. Lin examines the notions of democratizing AI in relation to lessening algorithmic injustice. You can read an excerpt from the abstract below:
My examinations reveal that while some versions of democratizing AI bear the prospect of mitigating the concern of algorithmic injustice, others are somewhat limited and might even function to perpetuate unjust power hierarchies. This analysis thus urges a more fine-grained discussion on how to democratize AI and suggests that closer scrutiny of the power dynamics embedded in the socio-technical structure can help guide such explorations.
Congratulations, Ting-an! You can read the full article by clicking here.
Tomorrow, Wednesday, September 4th, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Lewis Gordon will be delivering the DDT Jabavu Public Lecture at the University of Fort Hare. This lecture will examine Black Existentialism and Jabavu’s contributions to the topic. Additionally, it will explore the application of these philosophical insights to contemporary and prospective contexts.
The lecture will be held in person in Alice, South Africa, at the University of Fort Hare’s De Beers Gallery at 10:00am SAST (UTC+2:00). If you are interested in watching from home, the lecture will also be livestreamed on YouTube, which you can find by clicking here.
Congratulations to Dr. Tracy Llanera for her feature in The Philosopher’s Zone’s recent episode, “Extremism, gender and science”. This episode delves into how extremists are weaponizing gender and science in their arguments—an issue that has become increasingly prevalent in today’s political landscape.
You can read an excerpt from the website below:
Extremists used to be easy to spot: they were seen as irrational, unstable and… well, extreme. But in recent years, we’ve seen extremists on the political right laying claim to traditional Enlightenment values – reason, free speech, autonomy, human rights – that were traditionally used as bulwarks against extremism. This is clearly seen in contemporary battles around gender and science.
Check out Dr. Tracy Llanera’s interview on ABC’s The Philosopher’s Zone by clicking here.
Philosophy and Global Affairs 4, no. 1 (2024) is now available for download online at Philosophy Document Center.
To access each article, please click “view” under the article title, then “show document.”
Congratulations to Alumnus, Benjamin Nelson, for his recent publication in Journal of Modern Philosophy! Check out their article titled, “Hume’s “Of scepticism with regard to reason” and the Degeneration of Knowledge in Practice.”
Congratulations, Benjamin!
Congratulations to graduate student, Michael Hegarty, for being accepted for publication in Erkenntnis!
Check out the abstract for Michael Hegarty’s “Transformative Rationality” below:
Transformative Rationality and the Problem of ‘Creeping Rationalism’
According to ‘transformative’ theories of rationality, human rational mental capacities cannot be completely explained using the theories and concepts of natural science because rational mental states stand to one another in irreducibly normative relations of justification. Certain transformative theorists propose that a capacity counts as rational if a ‘Why?’ question is applicable to some exercises of that capacity. But ‘Why?’ questions are in principle applicable to any intentional action, like walking over there, or deliberately holding one’s breath. Transformative rationality therefore seems to entail that capacities for walking or breathing are rational and hence escape complete scientific explanation. Yet it would be surprising to learn that physiology, medicine, and biology could not completely explain such capacities. Given the ‘Why?’ question criterion for a rational capacity, there is a danger of ‘rationality’ creeping into capacities that (one might think) should submit to scientific explanation, and even into sub-individual processes. This is the ‘Problem of ‘Creeping Rationalism’’. After introducing the problem, I consider potential ways a transformative theorist could try to avoid the problem by limiting the scope of what capacities are ‘transformed’ by rationality. I argue that initially promising proposals to do this are either circular or are incompatible with core commitments of the theory.