Tracy Llanera: The Women Doing Philosophy Group in the Philippines

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At the height of the pandemic crisis in 2020, Filipino women philosophers everywhere gathered virtually to form the group Women Doing Philosophy. Read two feature essays about the organization in the APA-Black Issues in Philosophy Blog:

  • “To Slay a Specter: on the Founding of the Women Doing Philosophy Group in the Phillippines” by Cass Teodosio, University of the Philippines
  • “In/Visible Brown Babes: Synthesis of the Brown Babe’s Burden 2020” by Tracy Llanera, University of Connecticut

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.

Sandy Grande: New Faculty in Social Justice Bring Diverse Voices to UConn

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Sandy Grande

Excerpted from UConn Today

The department is pleased to welcome Sandy Grande who will be a professor in the political science department with an affiliate appointment in the philosophy department. She identifies as a Quechua national and comes to UConn as part of the Native American and Indigenous studies cluster hire. Previously, Grande was a professor of education and director of the Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity at Connecticut College. Her research works across the fields of Native American and Indigenous studies, contemporary political theory, education, and comparative ethnic studies.

Grande was recently awarded the Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship to complete a new book tentatively titled, Indigenous Elders and the Decolonial Elsewhere of Aging, which presupposes that there is something to be learned, politically and pedagogically, about the colonial present through the study of Elders and older adults. She is also a founding member of New York Stands for Standing Rock, a group of scholars and activists that works to forward the aims of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence.

Stewart Shapiro in 2019 Philosopher’s Annual

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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.

In Memoriam: John Troyer

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John Gordon Troyer (1943-2020)

With great sorrow we report the death of Associate Professor Emeritus John G. Troyer, who died on August 11, 2020 surrounded by family. He was a beloved colleague, generous with his time, who took great interest in the work of the rest of the department members. He was always willing to read and give helpful comments on one’s latest essay.

John received his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1965, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967 and 1971. He was brought to the University of Connecticut in 1970 by then Department Head Jerome Shaffer as part of an initiative to build up the research profile of the Philosophy Department, spending his entire teaching career here. He spent the 1969-70 academic year at Oxford on a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship from Harvard. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Younger Humanist Fellowship in 1974 and became an inaugural Member of Common Room at Wolfson College, Oxford in 1977.

Most notable among his publications were a special issue of Sythese in 1974, Intentionality, Language, and Translation jointly edited with Samuel C. Wheeler, III, that included papers from a widely acclaimed international conference they hosted at UConn; an essay “Locke on the Names of Substances,” first published in 1975 and reprinted in 1992 in a volume on Locke edited by Vere Chappell; and a 1997 collection entitled In Defense of Radical Empiricism: Essays and Lectures by Roderick Firth, on whose work John was a world expert.

Troyer was a superb chess player. Once after winning the New Mexico state championship he was accosted by the great George Koltanowski as well as the then champion of California and told not to go into chess because there was no future in it. He was an indefatigable squash player who beat almost everyone he played, clearly manifesting genes from his father who broke the University of Michigan 50-yard dash record in a gym class and who became a golden gloves boxer in the Navy. Among other quirks, John was a beekeeper who produced a peerless dark honey and an expert on the Shroud of Turin.

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

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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.

The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology

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Heather Battaly, Editor

Routledge, 2019

What is an epistemic virtue? Are epistemic virtues reliable? Are they motivated by a love of truth? Do epistemic virtues produce knowledge and understanding? How can we develop epistemic virtues? The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology answers all of these questions. This landmark volume provides a pluralistic and comprehensive picture of the field of virtue epistemology. It is the first large-scale volume of its kind on the topic. Composed of 41 chapters, all published here for the first time, it breaks new ground in four areas.

  1. It articulates the structure and features of epistemic virtues.
  2. It provides in-depth analyses of 10 individual epistemic virtues.
  3. It examines the connections between epistemic virtue, knowledge, and understanding.
  4. It applies virtue epistemology, and explores its impact on related fields.

The contributing authors are pioneers in the study of epistemic virtue. This volume is an outstanding resource for students and scholars in philosophy, as well as researchers in intersecting fields, including education, psychology, political science, and women’s studies.

Book cover for the Virtue Epistemology Handbook