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.

The UConn Humanities Institute, led by our Michael Lynch, is now a university-wide research institution. See the story.

UConn’s Philosophy Department has inaugurated an ongoing program of hiring three Assistant Research Professors, each for a three-year term. UConn Assistant Research Professsors will pursue their own research, collaborate with faculty and students, and teach one course per semester. The inaugural group comprises Tracy Llanera, Jessica Tizzard, and Charlie Crerar. Tracy received her PhD from Macquarie University in 2016. Her main research interests are Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, and American Pragmatism. Jessica received her PhD in 2017 from the University of Chicago. Her main research interests are Kant, Kantian Ethics, and Moral Psychology. Charlie is finishing his PhD from the University of Sheffield. His main research interest is epistemology, and in particular virtue and social epistemology. We are delighted that these three young philosophers will be joining us in Fall 2018.

See the nice piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Ruth’s new book.

• Emma Bjorngard-Basayne has accepted a position as Academic Advisor & Program Coordinator in the UConn School of Business in Stamford starting summer, 2018.

• Ralph DiFranco has accepted a position as Instructor in Philosophy at Auburn University starting fall, 2018.

• Hanna Gunn has accepted a position as Mellon Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University starting fall, 2018.

• Alycia LaGuardia-LoBianco has accepted a position as Resident Fellow in the Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the United States Naval Academy starting fall, 2018.

• Thomas Meagher has accepted a position as Postdoctoral W.E.B. Du Bois fellow at UMass-Amherst, summer 2018; thereafter he will take a position as Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy and Political Science, Quinnipiac University, starting fall, 2018.

• Andrew Tedder has accepted a two year post-doctoral position at the Institute for Computer Science at the Czech Academy of Sciences as part of the research project Non-Classical Logical Models of Information Dynamics (NOCLID) starting fall, 2018.