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D E P A R T M E N T O F P H I L O S O P H Y

Philosophy at Purdue

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Letter from the Head My introduction to the third issue of our newsletter—dedicated to keeping you abreast of what’s going on in Purdue’s Department of Philosophy—begins on a sad note: Emeritus Professor Bill Rowe died on August 29, 2015. Bill joined the Department in 1962 and served as Head from 1981-91. Known for his influential work in the philosophy of religion, he changed the nature of the debate of the problem of evil with his seminal paper “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” (American Philosophical Quarterly, 1979). A prolific author, Bill published more than 70 articles and five books, among them the highly regarded The Cosmological Argument (Princeton University Press, 1975). He will always be remembered as a colleague and friend who made the Department proud. Moving on to good news, it gives me great pleasure to report that two faculty members, Taylor Davis and Dan Smith, are on paternity leave this fall. Congratulations to Dan and Catherine Dossin (Department of Art and Design in the School of Performing Arts), whose baby girl Amélie Dossin Smith was born on August 10, 2015. Taylor and his wife Rebecca Trainor are expecting a baby girl in mid-September.

Congratulations to Mark Bernstein, Dan Frank, and Chris Yeomans, all of who wrote books that appeared in print this past year. Mark published The Moral Equality of Humans and Animals (Palgrave Mac-

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millan, 2015), Dan co-authored with Jason Waller (Ph.D. Purdue University) Spinoza on Politics (Routledge, 2015), and Chris wrote his second monograph on Hegel: The Expansion of Autonomy: Hegel’s Plu-ralistic Philosophy of Action (Oxford University Press, 2015). Mike Bergmann is working this year on a book tentatively titled Responding to Skepticism: Radical, Moral, and Religious. He was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship in Religious Experience by the University of Notre Dame. This book project is a follow-up to previous work on a 3-year grant, called “Knowing in Religion and Morality,” that Mike and Pat Kain received from the Templeton Foundation.

I would also like to congratulate Jack-ie Mariña on the excellent work she has done as chair of the Department’s Inclu-sion and Diversity committee. The com-mittee, whose work is supported through a grant from the Provost’s Office, conducted a climate survey to find out how our grad-uate students view their learning environ-ment. Jackie’s end-of-year report mentions that our graduate students described our Department as “exceptionally vibrant, providing many opportunities for interac-tion and a great deal of intellectual stimu-lation.” I want to thank Natalia Washing-ton, last year’s Diversity and Inclusion Fellow, for setting up a website that lists important resources, for organizing three talks by guest speakers, and also three workshops for graduate students. Natalia successfully defended her dissertation in

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August and will begin this fall a two year post-doc at Washington University.

In October, the Department’s Tom Scholl Visiting Philosopher Lecture Se-ries will continue with two talks in the Philosophy of Science by Kyle Stanford, University of California Irvine. Previous visiting philosophers were Susan Wolf, John Cooper, Stephen Stich, and Shelley Kagan. As in previous years, we will al-so have a visit by a Distinguished Wom-an Philosopher. In February 2016, Sara Moss, University of Michigan, will give a lecture and hold a workshop for gradu-ate students.

The new Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, David Reingold, is off to an impressive start. He has commenced a variety of initiatives to support faculty research and innovate undergraduate ed-ucation. I myself have been appointed chair of a committee tasked with devel-oping an integrated program in the liber-al arts. I see excellent opportunities for strengthening the role of philosophy in undergraduate education.

In conclusion, I’d like to thank our donors for helping us maintain a thriving and stimulating intellectual environment, and Andrew Israelsen for his tireless work in putting together this newsletter.

Department News 11 Diversity and Inclusion Initiative 12 Chris Yeomans in Xiamen 5-6 Faculty Articles

Faculty Work: 2 Mark Bernstein 4 Patricia Curd 5 Dan Kelly 8 Leonard Harris 9 Matthias Steup

Sapientia

Graduate Students: 13 Graduate Student News: James Elliot 14 Montoya, Gulley, Mollison 15 Washington and Tuttle 16 Incoming Grad students

Colloquia: 7 Philosophy Department 2014-2015

F A C U L T Y R E S E A R C H

Mark Bernstein: The Moral Equality of Humans and Animals

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I begin with two stories: The dramatis personae for our first tale include a dog, Wulfie, and humans, Bonnie and Hannah, the latter being a highly qualified MD and DVM. As it so happens, Wulfie and Bonnie enter Han-nah’s office simultaneously. Wulfie has suffered a broken paw having just leapt from a curb during a walk. Bonnie has just broken a finger in an accident involv-ing a recalcitrant door. Wulfie and Bon-nie are suffering equally. The quantity and quality of the pain and discomfort that Wulfie endures is the same as the quantity and quality of the pain that Bon-nie bears; the suffering that Wulfie un-dergoes ‘means as much’ to Wulfie as the suffering that Bonnie experiences ‘means to’ Bonnie. There are no other morally relevant factors that enter Hannah’s de-liberations about whom to treat first. What ought Hannah to do?

I have presented variants of this story to students and laypersons for more than 3 decades, and the overwhelming consen-sus is that Hannah ought to prioritize Bonnie’s suffering over that of Wulfie’s. The reasons for this judgment have var-ied. Those with a religious bent reference scripture to justify their opinion that hu-mans are (objectively or impartially) more important creatures than nonhuman animals, where this difference mandates that, all else being equal, human interests ought to be extended preferential concern relative to the like interests of animals. Secularists refer to some (putatively) unique human capacities to support the judgment that the pains and pleasures of humans demand privileged concern rela-tive to the attention appropriately extend-ed to the like interests of animals. These prized capabilities typically include the abilities to reason (think Aristotle), to use language (think Descartes), and to act au-tonomously (think Kant). Regardless of one’s particular strategy, the verdict that Bonnie’s interests objectively warrant special care makes a demand on all capa-ble agents; all else being equal, any indi-vidual regardless of species identity, ought to privilege human interests over similar interests possessed by nonhuman

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animals. There are those who abjure objectiv-ist attempts to ground Hannah’s obliga-tion, and rest their case on the fact that Hannah and Bonnie share a species mem-bership while Hannah and Wulfie do not. The argument continues by demonstrating that the co-speciesist relationship serves as a legitimate basis to warrant Hannah prioritizing Bonnie’s interests. Adopting this ‘species-relativist’ account of justify-ing bias toward humans comes with some costs. If the role of Hannah is filled by Vinny the Venusian, the appeal to a shared species identity would no longer be applicable, and so Vinny could do no bet-ter than flipping a coin to determine whether to begin with the interests of Bonnie or Wulfie. Perhaps even more disconcerting to the relativist is the pro-spect of Woody—an incredibly intelligent and fully capable dof—functioning in Hannah’s role. Since Woody shares a spe-cies identity with Wulfie, privileging his co-speciesist’s suffering would be morally required where all else is held morally equal. Species-relativists tend to be cogni-zant of these implications, but draw com-fort from the fact that in the real world - one which, as best we know, is absent ra-tional Venusians and Einsteinian dogs- Bonnie’s interests will be those which are favored.

Let’s turn now to a second narrative in which we find the humans Donna and Sheila, and the dog Knish. Donna is row-ing a small boat when she finds herself equidistant from a flailing Sheila and an equally desperate Knish. Donna can save the life of only one of these two drowning individuals. There are no other morally relevant factors. Who ought Donna to save? We are now confronted with a pris-tine life-and-death conflict situation, where the stakes for Sheila and Knish are much steeper than the relatively puny worries that faced Bonnie and Wulfie. It is scarcely shocking to learn that when mod-ified versions of this story are discussed, the consensus is even more extreme than in the prior example; almost unexception-ably, audiences believe that Donna is ob-ligated to save Sheila. Moreover, unlike

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our previous tale where there was an op-tion to adopt a species-relativist explana-tion, the fact that Donna is obligated to save Sheila is advanced as an objective or impartial moral truth; any capable agent of whatever species who finds herself in a unalloyed life-and-death conflict circum-stance involving a human and a nonhu-man animal ought to save the human at the expense of the animal. Even Vinny and Woody, were either of them to find themselves in the dire circumstance that Donna finds herself, ought to save Sheila rather than Knish. That Donna ought to save Sheila and allow Knish to perish is intended to re-flect the fact that Sheila’s life is more val-uable than Knish’s, and more generally, that human lives have greater value than nonhuman animal lives. The (alleged) fact that human lives are more valuable than animal lives is not meant to explain why Donna ought to save Sheila. Rather, Don-na’s obligation to rescue Sheila is meant to provide the practical significance or re-al-life meaning of the fact that Sheila’s life possesses more value than Knish’s. To revert to language of yore, Donna’s obligation to save Sheila in our imaginary scenario is forwarded as the ‘operational definition’ of Sheila’s life having greater (objective) value than Knish’s life. The behavioral requirements placed upon any capable agent who finds herself in a life-and-death conflict situation in which one potential victim is a human and the other

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an animal is that the benefactor-in-waiting ought to rescue the human at the expense of the animal.

Achieving clarity of the relation-ship between ‘leading a more valuable life’ and ‘sustaining an obligation, in conflict situations, to rescue the indi-vidual possessing the more valuable life’ is essential if we are to focus on the point of contention between those who endorse this objectivist judgment that humans are more valuable than animals and those who deny this evaluation. The pivotal question, then, is not whether the greater value of Sheila’s life is ade-quately manifested by Donna saving her rather than saving Knish in the conflict situation, for this much is secured by ‘operationally defining’ the difference in the value of lives as determining who should be saved. Rather, the point of contention is whether there are good reasons for believing—as virtually eve-ryone does—that human lives are more valuable than the lives of animals, where the practical, real-life, behavioral implication of this assessment is that anyone who can save either an individ-ual with a life of more value or an indi-vidual with a life of less value should save the former at the expense of the latter when only one can be rescued.

I can now announce the thesis of The Moral Equality of Humans and An-imals. The book is an extended argu-ment against the moral superiority of humans over nonhuman animals where this hierarchy is understood in terms of

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both of the aforementioned stories. I be-lieve both that there are no good arguments for the claims that (i) human interests are deserving of more (objective or agent-relative) consideration than the like inter-ests of nonhuman animals, and (ii) human lives possess greater value than lives of nonhuman animals. Returning to our two tales, my thesis entails both that (i) Hannah has no good reasons, full stop, to preferen-tially consider Bonnie’s interest in reliev-ing her suffering relative to Wulfie’s equal interest in relieving his suffering and (ii) that Donna has no good reasons, full stop, to save Sheila rather than Knish in life-and-death conflict situations. In short, the per-vasive conviction in human exceptionalism is a myth. This thesis has wide-ranging implica-tions. Invariably, we are unwilling to re-place animals with humans in the most popular animal-related activities. Regard-less of one’s attitude toward factory-farming, no one (I declare confidently) thinks that the factory-farming of humans is morally permissible. The same attitude applies to the practices of hunting and (in-vasive) animal experimentation. It is diffi-cult to conceive of any means of justifying these institutions in which 56 billion (that’s ‘billion’ with a ‘b’) animals are annually destroyed that does not also justify these same institutions when humans are the in-dividuals maimed, tortured, and murdered, unless some appeal to human superiority is presumed. Those harboring a skeptical attitude regarding, minimally, an implicit employ-

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ment of human superiority are invited to ask, say, a hunter if he would still hunt were he to believe my thesis. If said hunter were to really accept the facts that human interests merit no more concern than the like interests of animals, and that animal lives were equally valuable to hu-man lives, I would be shocked to discover that he would continue to hunt. I simply cannot fathom what (non-mystical) reason is left to the hunter (or factory-farmer or vivisector) to explain his (presumably) distinct attitudes about the hunting of hu-mans and the hunting of nonhuman ani-mals.

If my argument is sound, the ubiqui-tous belief in the moral inequality of hu-mans and animals should be renounced. And with this abdication, we should abol-ish the practices of factory-farming, hunt-ing, and (invasive) experimentation; an ethical world demands no less.

Mark Bernstein is the Joyce and Ed-ward E. Brewer Chair in Applied Eth-ics at Purdue and has been in the de-partment since 1999. He works exten-sively on Animal Ethics, as well as on issues in the Philosophy of Free Will.

Patricia Curd: The Presocratics and the Possibility of Knowledge

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Interview with Patricia Curd Q: You have been working on a new book now for some time about the Presocratics? Curd: Yes, the book grew out of a pa-per published in Rhizomata, a version of which I presented at the 2009 Sym-posium Presocraticum, but it reflects a much more long-standing interest. The book is concerned with how, and why, early Greek philosophers claimed that they could truly ‘know’ anything at all. It is really surprising when people like Xenophanes and Heraclitus begin to make claims about how inquiry into the world could lead to something like genuine knowledge.

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The traditional, Homeric conception was that knowledge was the province of the gods. The gods aren’t omnisci-ent; they can be fooled and deceived, but they are much better off than we ‘mere mortals’ (who are at their mer-cy, epistemologically) are. Q: What do you think accounts for such a radical change about the possi-bility of knowledge? Curd: That’s the question; it’s a really interesting development! I think it begins with Xenophanes, or at least that’s where we find the clearest early articulation. In this book I’m not go-ing to say much about Milesian phi-losophy (there is so little evidence

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about Thales and his immediate fol-lowers). But Xenophanes apparently thinks that knowledge is possible, and I think his reason for thinking this is related to a brand new claim, at least for the Greeks, about the nature of di-vinity. Not the nature of the gods, but of the divine. In fragment B.23, Xe-nophanes speaks of “One god, great-est among gods and men, not at all like to mortals in body nor in thought;” he goes on to make claims grounded in the notion of what is “fit-ting” or “appropriate” for the divine. This is a new concept of divinity, and my general thesis is that the human capacity for knowledge is consistent

Patricia Curd has been a member of the Purdue Philosophy Department faculty since 1984. She is one of the world’s leading experts on Presocratic thought and has published extensively in that field. She teaches courses on Presocratic philosophy, Plato, and Aristotle.

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with this new divinity. Q: What is the connection between this new concept of divinity and the prospect of we ‘mere mortals’ coming to true knowledge? Curd: The new divinity is distin-guished in Xenophanes and the phi-losophers who follow him, notably Heraclitus and Parmenides, by at least three things: immortality, power, and knowledge. Of especial interest for me is the relation between the divine and knowledge, and how that shows up in relation to human beings. Knowledge is emblematic of divinity, and this divinity is no longer solely the purview of the traditional gods, but is something we humans are capa-ble of participating in. The capacity to know is an ability to move beyond the present time, and grasp what is in itself intelligent, real and true. The cosmos itself, these thinkers are be-ginning to claim, is such a thing, an intelligible object, and—this is where it gets really strange for us, given the contemporary way of thinking—an in-telligent, self-regulating system. We can recognize the intelligibility of na-ture, and that suggests to these philos-ophers that there is a type of isomor-phism between human reason and the cosmos. Q: How is this new project carried on by later thinkers? Curd: It’s unclear from the texts them-selves, but my reading is that, given the isomorphism between thought and what-is, or the cosmos, there is a new epistemic hope that we can figure things out. For Heraclitus, there is the logos, which is the account, or expla-nation, of the divine system, and it is accessible to human thinking. Hera-clitus thinks he has a better under-standing of this logos, not because he is being given a divine revelation, but because he is ‘better at paying atten-tion’ to the logos than other mortals. This is further developed in Parmeni-des; he gives us a basic criterion for what sort of thing can be genuinely real and hence knowable. Because the question to ask Heraclitus is ‘how do you know you are paying the right sort of attention? Even if knowledge

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is possible, there must be better and worse ways of trying to find it; how can you know if you have been successful?’ Parmenides’ poem introduces us to the route of inquiry, or way of thinking, ‘that it is’. This way of thinking that leads to What-is, what is really real; this serves as a sort of basic ‘logical test’ for what can be known. What is fundamentally real, to Parmenides, is available to intellect. This is the strongest Presocratic claim about the isomorphism of thought and what-is. Q: Some commentators interpret Parmen-ides as giving an account of a divine reve-lation, as though the fundamental insight is a gift from the Goddess met by the young man in the beginning of the poem. Curd: I’m a deflationist about B1, the po-em’s beginning; I don’t take this to be about the gods in the old sense, or even about something broadly like religion. Parmenides contrasts genuine knowledge with mere human opinion, and indeed, discusses this in the context of a divine meeting. But both human and divine thinking involve nous, mind, indicating that divine thinking and human thinking are continuous rather than distinct. The goddess isn’t giving the young man in the poem a divine favor, she is teaching him to think like a god. Parmenides’ nous is not the poets’ divine inspiration from the Muses. Q: Is this capacity something every mor-tal has, or only some? Curd: In principle, every human being is capable of it; that’s the new claim. Many people may turn out to be unable to think correctly, but not because it is in principle impossible for them, as human beings. Q: How much of your reading do you think is fairly standard, interpretively, and how much is divergent from other opin-ions? Curd: Well, one thing that I think, and have been arguing about for years, that many disagree with, is that the Presocrat-ics are not necessarily what I call matter-ists (in the Aristotelian sense). They are non-stuffy thinkers, as I say (or at least not entirely stuffy). Many interpreters conceive of them as having a fundamen-tally Aristotelian material view of the world, which I think is wrong. For Par-menides, for example, the reason nous can succeed is because it is fundamentally

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free from, and not tied to, matter. The degree to which these thinkers are materi-alists varies, but none of them would be recognized as materialists by contempo-rary standards. They are all concerned with rational cosmology and the basic en-tities that set the terms of the debate really cannot be conceived as solely, or primari-ly matter. The idea of matter as basic only comes in with Aristotle. For Anaxagoras it is nous that sets the cosmos in motion and the basic ingredients are such things as hot and cold, earth and fire, which are treated as being exactly same kind of thing. For Empedocles, love and strife are non-mattered forces that move the ingre-dients, earth, water, air, and fire. Even for Democritus and the atomists, the basic things, atoms and void, move because they have always moved. These thinkers are all looking for ‘basic entities’, the first causes and most fundamental realities of everything whatsoever. Socrates and Pla-to take this sort of question and turn it to-wards moral questions. Socrates (as rep-resented by Plato in the Phaedo) wants the Forms to explain everything: both the heavens and the basis of our moral re-sponsibility. In this way, Plato is really the last Presocratic philosopher, rather than a break with the tradition. Q: Great, when can we expect to read the book? Curd: A very good question!

F A C U L T Y R E S E A R C H

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In a turn of phrase repeated often and with wildly varying degrees of irony, Wilfrid Sellars once described philos-ophy as the attempt “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” That’s a tall, wooly order, but it suc-ceeds in giving a sense of the relative-ly unrestricted range of subjects that can be usefully philosophized about. Indeed, philosophy’s relevance to so many topics is a large part of what drew me to it in the first place, and some of that range is reflected in what I’ve been up to this last year.

Some of it was extending my past research in new directions. For in-stance, I continue to be involved with the Building Sustainable Communi-ties: Institutions, Infrastructure and Resilience initiative, which brings to-gether researchers from several Pur-due colleges to address the tangled bundle of challenges presented by climate change. My collaborations there attempt to better understand the role that social norms play in individ-ual and collective responses to emerg-ing problems, either in guiding ame-liorative action or by standing in its way by stabilizing the status quo. Pushing another element of my previ-ous research into a very different area, I was an invited member of a panel at the Pacific APA on Negative Aesthet-ics. There I started with some ideas from my book on disgust, but used them to explore the similarities and differences between it and boredom, with an eye toward the different ways artists play with those two emotions, and the significance each one might have for art in general.

Other highlights from last year represented the crystallization of lines of thought that I have been developing for a while now. In the fall, and to-gether with then graduate student Na-talia Washington, I helped kick off a series of speakers sponsored by our department’s new Diversity Commit-tee. In our talk ‘Responsibility from the Outside In: Shaping the Moral Ecology Around Implicit Bias,’ we

Dan Kelly: A Many Splendored Thing

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described a body of recent psychologi-cal work showing that most people, of-ten despite their best intentions and ex-plicitly held views, harbor some form of implicit bias against members of certain social groups (races, genders, religions, etc.), and pointed to ways those implicit biases can aggregate and scale up to collectively influence trends visible at the level of institutions. We then argued that despite the fact that key features of implicit biases (e.g. they can operate without conscious awareness or intent) seem liable to ab-solve individuals of blame for behav-iors influenced by them, the situation is rapidly changing, and in ways relevant to issues of moral responsibility. The wealth of psychological research itself is allowing us all to become more aware of implicit biases, and showing how their influence can be most effec-tively restrained. The epistemic pro-gress being made in understanding how our minds work is paving the way for moral progress, progress that we can make by adjusting the norms we use to assign blame, and by taking responsi-bility for injustices that we can now see are the result of implicit biases.

Elsewhere I was pushing in new directions. In the fall, Purdue held the campus-wide Dawn or Doom confer-ence on the impact of accelerating technological development, artificial intelligence, and coalescing worries about a near future when humankind has merged with, or possibly been sup-planted by, its own creations. In my talk ‘Minds, Culture, and the Evolu-tion of Intelligence: What’s Going To Happen To Us?’ I pulled out a strand of thought running through recent work in the evolutionary and cognitive sci-ences that holds that the intuitive, sali-ent boundaries between biological or-ganisms and their putative external en-vironments are theoretically much less important than common sense leads us to believe. In our own case, a particu-larly promising idea is that the unique evolutionary trajectory and extraordi-nary evolutionary success of homo sa-piens has deep roots in the fact that we have been exceptionally active shapers

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Michael Bergmann and Jeff Brower: Reason and Faith: Themes from Swin-burne (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Michael Bergmann, co-edited with Brett Coppenger: Intellectual Assur-ance: Essays on Traditional Epistemic Internalism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Mark Bernstein: The Moral Equality of Humans and Animals (Palgrave Mac-millan, 2015).

Jeffery Brower: “Aquinas on the Prob-lem of Universals”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2015).

Taylor Davis: “Group Selection in the Evolution of Religion: Genetic Evolu-tion or Cultural Evolution?”, Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming).

Paul Draper: “God, Evil, and the Na-ture of Light,” forthcoming in the Cam-bridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Chad Meister and Paul Moser (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Paul Draper: “Where Skeptical Theism Fails, Skeptical Atheism Prevails,” forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Phi-losophy of Religion (Oxford University Press, Volume 7, 2016).

Daniel Frank and Jason Waller: Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza on Politics (Routledge, 2016).

Patrick Kain: “The Development of Kant’s Conception of Divine Freedom,” in Leibniz and Kant, ed. Brandon Look (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Recent Faculty Publications:

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of and contributors to the very envi-ronments in which we evolved. We humans continue to meticulously con-struct the niches in which we live and operate, from sprawling urban jungles to the ergonomic precision of a well-ordered kitchen to the individualized settings of your laptop computer. We are also distinct in the extent to which we create and fill our environment with artifacts, tools and other forms of cultural information that we pass be-tween ourselves, transmitting knowledge and skills through popula-tions and across generations. Moreo-ver, we carefully calibrate the very setting and methods by which this transmission takes place, engineering our own informational environments, and enriching the cognitive ecologies in which we raise our children. Our species’ long immersion in the infor-mationally and technologically rich environments that we ourselves create has, in turn, continued to produce brains that are bigger and better able to understand, use, invent, and inte-grate information and technology. From this perspective, to worry that intelligence that is extra-biological is “artificial” or that we are losing touch with human nature in a blizzard of technology is to lose sight of our own history and to misunderstand the na-ture of our own intelligence. We’ve been trafficking in socially transmitted information, actively shaping elements of the world around us, and integrat-ing all of it into our lives for as long as we’ve been human. In fact, it’s proba-bly how we got here: in a very con-crete way, culture and technology are what have allowed us to accumulate as much knowledge and become as intel-ligent as we are, and thus are a big part of what continues to makes us distinctively human.

One of things I was most excited about last year was my essay “David Foster Wallace as American Hedge-hog” appearing in Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of Da-vid Foster Wallace. With the book’s release, I made the transition from (merely) long time, mildly obsessed Wallace fan boy – I’ve read every-thing he published, most of it more

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than once – to Official Published Da-vid Foster Wallace Scholar. The book itself collects essays by philosophers discussing Wallace’s undergraduate thesis on free will and fatalism, which was published in the wake of his death in 2008. Rather than adjudicating his debate with the fatalists, or delving in-to the technical aspects of the system of modal logic he designed to make his case, my contribution instead looks at Wallace’s later work, particularly his essays and fiction. I argue that de-spite leaving academic philosophy, Wallace never really left behind the questions about free will and choice that he wrestled with in that under-graduate thesis. Instead, they make up the central theme running through his work; it is the “one big thing” that he hedgehoggishly knew. I trace out the way that thing weaves its way through stories, essays, and interviews, appear-ing explicitly in some discussions, as more of a subterranean current in oth-ers, and I map out the main images and metaphors he used to explore it. In making my case, I also pull together Wallace’s scattered comments about the distinctive challenges contempo-rary American culture raises for choos-ing, and the way he thought those challenges infect our sense of our-selves as citizens, moral agents, indi-viduals and selves.

Finally, as the spring semester wound down I gave a talk at Northern Illinois University entitled ‘What are Narrative Theories of the Self Sup-posed to Explain?’ This was a first foray into territory I’ve long been ea-ger to explore. The idea that our selves and identities are intricately bound up with the stories we tell about our selves is not particularly new, but its profile has risen sharply in recent years. It is frustratingly murky (and artless articulations of it are, I think, plainly circular), but it is also intri-guing, and I can’t escape the sense that there is something right about it. My modest aim in this talk was to sketch a useful map of the logical geography of narrative approaches, identify the ma-jor theorists who appeal to the notion of narrative, and get straight on what sorts of phenomena each hopes to ex-

Daniel Kelly: “David Foster Wallace as American Hedgehog”, in Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace (Columbia Uni-versity Press, 2015). Jacqueline Mariña: “Where Have All the Monads Gone?” Journal of Religion (Fall 2015). Jacqueline Mariña: “Selfhood and Ra-tionality”, Oxford Handbook to 19th Century Theology (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Matthias Steup: “Foundational Justifi-cation, Meta-Justification, and Fumer-tonian Acquaintance,” in Michael Bergmann and Brett Copenger (eds.), Traditional Epistemic Internalism. Es-says in Honor of Richard Fumerton. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Matthias Steup: “Believing Intentional-ly,” Synthese, forthcoming. Dana Tulodziecki: “Structural Realism Beyond Physics”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science: Part A (forthcoming). Dana Tulodziecki: “From Zymes to Germs: Discarding the Realist/Anti-Realist Framework”, The Philosophy of Historical Case-Studies (eds, Sauer, T., and R. Scholl), Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science (forthcoming). Chris Yeomans: The Expansion of Autonomy: Hegel’s Pluralistic Philoso-phy of Action (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Recent Faculty Publications:

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plain by appeal to it, what explanatory work narration and autobiographical storytelling have been recruited to do. The list turns out to be long and shag-gy: there are narrative accounts of moral agency, personhood, selves, per-sonal identity, social identity, con-sciousness, personality development, imagination, psychological change, and more. The larger project, of which this was but a small first step, is less modest than the talk itself. I hope to develop the most promising threads of these literatures, square them with the foundational commitments of cognitive science and naturalism more generally, and see whether and how they might be woven together into a coherent ac-count of … whatever it turns out they are best suited to account for. It’s still in R&D, obviously. But one refrain that echoes through most of the work is that we use narratives to find coher-ence and render things intelligible, to construct meaning, and to make sense – of who and what we individually are, of our actions, of our relationships with others, of our lives, of our place in cul-ture, in history, in the cosmos itself. It might take a while, but I’d eventually like to make sense of that.

Taken together, my list of endeav-ors from the last year might itself seem to be without much coherence; it would be easy to imagine someone

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with a lust for tidiness disapproving of it as being all over the place, random, unfocused. Unsurprisingly, I think there’s a better way to think about it, namely as illustrating some of the core virtues of our discipline. Philosophy is a many splendored thing. Some of its loveliest splendors are bound up in how it fosters intellectual confidence and a skeptical attitude, traits needed to ques-tion whatever it is that you think needs questioning. It also provides the critical and evaluative skills needed to assess different answers to your questions, and, if none turn out to be adequate, to come up with answers of your own. Of course not all questions are of equal merit; to paraphrase another modern sage, if they can get you asking the wrong questions, it doesn’t matter what answers you come up with. But then philosophy can help you learn to ask better questions, too. Developing the capacity to think for your self in this way is really the point of a good educa-tion in general, but the tools and forti-tude required to do it, rather than any particular subject matter, are essentially philosophical. Overly focused concep-tions of what counts as genuine philos-ophy or what is worth philosophizing about seem not just to undersell what we have to offer, but to go against the restless and encompassing spirit of the enterprise itself. Philosophy can be rel-

Dan Kelly joined the Philosophy De-partment in 2007. His book, Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Dis-gust, was published through MIT Press in 2011. He teaches a variety of courses related to issues in the Philosophy of Mind.

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evant to virtually anything, and every-one, regardless of his or her interests, occupation or outlook, stands to bene-fit from it.

In any event, I’ve been having a rollicking good time philosophizing about what has seemed most urgent and fascinating and puzzling to me lately. And I’m pretty sure there are important connections between the things I’ve been thinking about over the last year, some obvious, some less so. Figuring out how all of those things hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term, however, is a project for another year.

PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIA in 2014-15

Christopher  Pincock,  Ohio  State  University  "Inference  to  the  Best  Explanation:  A  Modest  Pro-­‐posal",  September  11,  2014    Natalia  Washington  and  Daniel  Kelly,  Purdue    “Responsibility  from  the  Outside  In:  Shaping  the  Moral  Ecology  around  Implicit  Bias”,  September  23,  2014    Andreas  de  Block,  University  of  Leuven  “Homophobia  and  Essentialism:  A  Philosophi-­‐cal  Evaluation  of  Recent  Psychological  Research  on  Homonegativity”,  October  6,  2014    Susan  Wolf,  University  of  North  Carolina  Scholl  Lecture:  “The  Importance  of  Love”,  October  9,  2014  Department  Colloquium:  “Character  and  Respon-­‐sibility”,  October  10,  2014  

Carrie  Ichikawa  Jenkins,  U  of  British  Columbia  “What  is  Romantic  Love?    An  Incomplete  Map  of  the  Metaphysics”,  November  20,  2014    Carla  Fehr,  University  of  Waterloo  “Ignorance,  Excellence,  and  Diversity:  Improving  the  Representation  of  Women  and  Minorities  in  STEM”,  February  26,  2015   Mathias  Frisch,  University  of  Maryland  “Causal  Reasoning  in  Physics”,  March  5,  2015    Luvell  Anderson,  University  of  Memphis  “Calling,  Addressing,  and  Appropriation”,  April  9,  2015      

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F A C U L T Y R E S E A R C H

Leonard Harris: Philosophy of Race and Current Graduate Education

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Interview with Leonard Harris Q: Dr. Harris, thanks for being will-ing to discuss your work with me; what have been some highlights of the past academic year, and what is coming up on the horizon? Dr. Harris: One project I’ve been working on is a book series that I’m co-editing with Jacoby Carter, called “African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora”, which is be-ing published through Palgrave. The goal of the series is to publish a body of work that focuses on African American philosophers, their work, and the particular nature of the issues and problems that have accompanied American philosophers of African descent. I also recently edited, with Tommy Curry, papers from the 2014 Philosophy Born of Struggle confer-ence The Radical Philosophy Re-view, 18:1, 2015, "Philosophy Born of Struggle: Reflections on Racism and Other Spheres of Oppression". I’ll also be heavily involved in the upcoming “Philosophy Born of Struggle: Embodied Philosophy & Epistemologies of Liberation”, No-vember 6-7, 2015, Keynote speakers – James H. Cone and Mariana Orte-ga, which will be at University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT.

Questions arising from the theme this year include how various philosophies are ‘embodied’, cultur-ally, historically, and socially, and how that challenges the notion of philosophy itself. Can philosophical traditions that are products of certain times and places be universalizable, as philosophy is usually conceived of as being? Also, how might various epistemologies serve as tools of lib-eration from such embodied tradi-tions? Q: Can you speak a bit, Dr. Harris, on the graduate seminar you’ll be teaching this Fall? Dr. Harris: Yes, the class is a gradu-ate pro-seminar entitled ‘Philosophy of Liberation’. I’ll be teaching a va-riety of different authors, all con-

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cerned with the question of libera-tion, and how liberation stands as a corrective to the oppression faced by various groups, e.g., the working class, the poor, victims of racism, women, and the subaltern. We’ll be concerned with questions such as what oppression is, what it consists in, and relatedly, what liberation is, such that it counts as a corrective to oppression. This class is different than an average graduate philosophy class, though, as it will connect a lot of different students from various in-stitutions through Webex, an online teaching tool. The classes will be recorded and archived in the Philos-ophy Born of Struggle Archive here at Purdue. Q: Do you think that a more open format, like that provided by Webex, will be more conducive to teaching this kind of material? Dr. Harris: Well, that’s not the right question; it isn’t really a matter of conduciveness, of this being a better or worse way to teach philosophy. This is a new format for a philosophy class, one that I’m pioneering at the graduate level. Most grad seminars are very small, and very self-enclosed, very cloak and dagger, but this, in addition to being on a wider scale through the online tool, will feature a variety of guest lecturers—including several of the authors we’ll be reading in the course—as well as a series of visiting scholars. We will have several “Alain L. Locke Visit-ing Scholars”, who will join us here at Purdue, for an extended stay, to participate in the seminar. These will include Lee McBride, from The Col-lege of Wooster, Jacoby Carter, from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Mindy Tan, who is a recent Ph.D recipient from Purdue’s ‘American Studies’ Department. So, there are a number of variables to this class: the online component, the visiting schol-ars, and the guest lecturers, as well as my own particular approach to teach-ing philosophy of liberation. My

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hope is that this will provide a new approach to these controversial con-cepts, and provide an open communi-ty within which we can discuss them. Q: Sounds like a great seminar. Fi-nally, you mentioned that you had recently done a review of graduate philosophy education in the United States. Dr. Harris: Yes, this is a project I’ve been working on for some time; my findings can be studied in more depth in a recent publication in the Gradu-ate Faculty Philosophy Journal (Vol. 35, 1-2, 2014). Let me preface by describing what I was looking at, and why. I point out in the paper that, “Rarely are authors such as Kant or Marx defined simply as instantiations of ‘Europeans,’ but it is common to read the works of Japanese, African, or Chinese authors as paradigmatic of ‘Japanese,’ ‘African,’ or ‘Chinese’ kinds of persons.’ Some surveys of Japanese and Korean philosophers suggest that they may not know many names of Japanese or Korean philosophers but they certainly know Kant, Marx or Schopenhauer. This reflects a longstanding tradition, in American, and more broadly, West-ern philosophy, to structure depart-ments around individual thinkers, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Marx being paradigmatic examples. This sort of structuring—what I call a cephalous, or ‘headed’ structure, in that it is led or ‘headed’ by these in-dividual philosophers—is opposed to what I call an acephalous tradition, or one based, not on individual thinkers, but on sagacious communities. The-se two structures are, I argue, irrec-oncilable, and the cephalous tradition presents a variety of deeply rooted problems that have to be overcome, in favor of an acephalous model. The cephalous tradition is perpetuat-ed by universities, authors, and pub-lishers, who have an ongoing and vested interest in maintaining their status as the people who decide what a graduate education in philosophy

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should be. It’s a big issue, who de-cides what should count towards ob-taining a doctorate in philosophy, and there is a vast array of interests devot-ed to maintaining control over how this is defined. The problem is that the cephalous way of doing philosophy is mired in provincialism, racism, and the legacy of colonialism. There is a deep-seated, but completely backward notion that philosophers are ‘leaders’, or pure ‘lovers of truth’, but this isn’t the case. Philosophy in American Universities, for the most part, contin-ues to perpetuate the biases it has in-herited from thinkers like Hobbes, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Hegel—who, in my review of eighty-six ran-domly selected graduate philosophy programs in the United States, were the most commonly required philoso-phers for study—all of whom were supporters, in one form or another, of racialism, sexism, slavery, or colonial-ism. The acephalous and cephalous divide is complicated by ethnic, reli-gious, and racial bifurcations. Q: Do you propose doing away with the study of these philosophers, or try-ing to incorporate them into a more pluralistic framework? Dr. Harris: It isn’t as easy as many

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people think, to try and ‘incorporate’ thinkers into a new, pluralistic frame-work, or situate sagacious texts within a cephalous tradition. Such thinkers claim an absolute corner on truth, and with that comes their biased social and racial views. The cephalous tradition is fun-damentally opposed to a tradition cen-tered upon sagacious communities, which also carry their own biases. It isn’t just a question of ignoring the un-savory aspects of philosophers, but of re-jecting that model of thought and the tradition built on it. The way this tradi-tion continues to oppress manifests itself in a number of ways, one of the largest of which is the dominance of certain languages. These days, to be a ‘famous philosopher’, it is all but required to pub-lish in English, or to a diminishing de-gree, German or French. English is the ‘lingua franca’ of contemporary philoso-phy. Almost no attention is paid, in the United States, to philosophers publishing in Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic, and a whole range of other languages. Even in coun-tries where these languages are domi-nantly spoken, it’s common practice for Universities to offer philosophy courses in English, and to a lesser extent, French or German. This is just another aspect of the ongoing control exerted by the ceph-alous Western tradition.

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Q: Is your proposal then to radically change the basis of graduate educa-tion, to reform it around these ‘saga-cious communities’? Dr. Harris: I’m not proposing a defi-nite plan of action here, I’m just pointing out that there are two irrec-oncilable traditions at play here, and that we need to be aware of that ir-reconcilability. Opening lines of dia-logue will at least allow us to realize where change needs to occur, and hopefully, will show us how to start effecting such changes.

Matthias Steup: Can You Know You Are Not a Brain in a Vat?

F A C U L T Y R E S E A R C H

Dr. Harris has been with Purdue’s philoso-phy department since 1991. He works and has published extensively on Philosophy of Race, and the philosophy of Alain L. Locke. He teaches courses on social issues related to Philosophy of Race and Philoso-phy of Liberation.

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Distinguish between the good case and the bad case. In the good case, things are what you take them to be. Your beliefs about who you are and where you live are true, and you are right in taking yourself to have hands and feet. In the bad case, things are radically different. You are not the kind of person you take yourself to be, you don’t live where you think you do, and you have neither hands nor feet. You are a brain in a vat (a BIV): a separate brain that, floating in an oxygenated, life-sustaining liquid, is electrochemically stimulated so as to give it the experiences of a normal life. So, in the bad case, your experi-ences perfectly duplicate those you have in the good case. From within your mind—that is, with regard to the

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way things look, sound, smell, and feel—your experiences in the good case and your experiences in the bad case are identical. In the good case, they usually connect you to the real world. In the bad case, they are all rad-ically misleading. The question is: Can you know that you are not in the bad but in the good case?

Although you might initially think that of course you know you’re not a BIV, a bit of reflection will reveal that any such confidence would be risky. If you do indeed know that you are not a BIV, how do you know this? What reason could you give in defense of your knowledge claim? A good candi-date for such a reason is that neurosci-ence tells us that envatment—keeping a separate brain alive and stimulating it

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so it thinks it’s a normal person—is not possible. At present, we have nei-ther the know-how nor the technolo-gy needed for envatment. That cer-tainly looks like a reason to think that you are not a BIV. But is that reason strong enough for you to know that you are not a BIV? Many epistemol-ogists would say it is not because you would have that very same reason al-so in the bad case. If you were a BIV, then you would think that, according to current neuroscience, envatment is not possible—when in fact it is and (let’s assume) has been practiced for many centuries. This point can be generalized. Whatever reason for denying envatment you might claim to have, you would also have this reason if you were a BIV. So the evi-

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F A C U L T Y R E S E A R C H

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dence you have in the good case is ex-actly the same evidence you have in the bad case.1 Thus, it would seem, your evidence does not help you to distinguish between being and not be-ing a BIV. How, then, could you pos-sibly justify your claim to know that you are not a BIV?

There are several theories whose defenders are happy to concede that knowing one is not a BIV is not pos-sible. According to one such theory, knowledge requires a conclusive rea-son. What makes a reason for a propo-sition p conclusive is that you would not have that reason if p were false. Let’s apply that to knowing one is not a BIV. Consider again the neuroscien-tific reason for thinking you are not a BIV. If it were false that you are not a BIV—that is, if you were a BIV—then you would still have that reason. You would be convinced that, accord-ing to current neuroscience, envat-ment is not possible. So the neurosci-entific reason is not conclusive. The same applies to all reasons for think-ing you are not a BIV. You don’t have, then, any conclusive reason for denying envatment. Hence you cannot know that you are not in the bad case.

Let’s suppose that’s right. You cannot know that you are not a BIV. Why think that would be bad? Con-ceding such ignorance would be trou-blesome because it undermines pretty much all of what you take yourself to know about the world. There is an in-tuitively compelling principle, called Closure, which says the following: if you know p and you also know that q is a logical consequence of p, then you know q as well. The Closure Principle also tells us that, if you know that q is a logical consequence of p but you fail to know q, then you don’t know p ei-ther. So, if Closure is true, and if you don’t know that you are not a BIV, then you don’t know any proposition whose logical consequence is that you are not a BIV. There are many propo-sitions like that. Suppose the BIV in the bad case (i.e., you) was grown from human cells three years ago, is located on a planet other than Earth, and the actual year is not 2015 but 2656. Given these stipulations, your

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beliefs about your age, your present lo-cation, and the time period you live in all logically imply that you are not a BIV. So, if the Closure Principle is true and you don’t know that you are not a BIV, then you don’t know your own age, your present location, and what time period you live in. Hence, if Clo-sure is true and you don’t know that you are not a BIV, a severe form of skepticism is unavoidable.

One way to avoid this unfortunate outcome is to deny the Closure Princi-ple. That’s what the aforementioned Conclusive Reasons Theory recom-mends. But someone who denies Clo-sure is forced to assert things like the following: • I know that I’m 26 years old, but I

don’t know that I’m not a three-year old BIV.

• I know that I live in the state ofIndiana, but I don’t know that I’m not a BIV located on another plan-et.

• I know that the current year is2015, but I don’t know that I’m not a BIV created in 2653.

For each of these statements, it would seem that, if you don’t know the latter, you don’t know the former either. That’s why denying Closure as a way to avoid radical skepticism is less than popular among contemporary episte-mologists.

A better way to avoid radical skepticism is to argue that you do in fact know that you are not a BIV. Mak-ing this argument requires navigating around the traps set by those who give skepticism too much credit. One of these traps is the thought I mentioned above: if, in the good case and in the bad case, your evidence is the same, then your evidence can’t give you knowledge of which case actually ob-tains. Let’s call this thought the De-feated Evidence Principle. This thought conflicts with another one, called Fallibilism. According to Falli-bilism, for evidence to be strong enough for knowledge, it must remove all reasonable doubt, but it need not be infallible. If your evidence for p re-moves all reasonable doubt about p, it can give you knowledge of p although there are logically possible situations

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in which you have that evidence and p is false. To see why the Defeated Evidence Principle conflicts with Fal-libilism, let’s distinguish between ve-ridical and deceptive situations. A ve-ridical situation is one in which your total evidence fallibly supports p and p is true. A deceptive situation is one in which your total evidence supports p but p is false. For every veridical situation, there is a logically possible corresponding deceptive situation in which your total evidence is the same. Therefore, if the Defeated Evidence Principle is true, there can’t be any veridical situation in which your total fallible evidence is strong enough for knowledge. But Fallibilism is the very thesis that there can be such situa-tions. So, the Defeated Evidence Principle conflicts with Fallibilism.

Assessing the plausibility of fal-libilism is a complex matter. One ar-gument against it is that a sentence like:

‘I know that I have hands but might be mistaken about it’ sounds infelicitous. But this argument is not compelling. If ‘I might be mis-taken about it’ is understood as mean-ing ‘There is some likelihood that I’m mistaken about it’ (as in ‘It might be raining this afternoon’), then the sen-tence would be infelicitous. But that meaning of ‘might’ is not at issue here. If, on the other hand, ‘might’ is understood to be expressing mere log-ical possibility, the sentence must be paraphrased thus: I know that I have hands but it is logically possible that I am mis-taken in believing I have hands. It is far from obvious that the sen-tence, thus paraphrased, is infelici-tous. There are other arguments for rejecting Fallibilism, but they can’t be discussed here. Let us suppose, then, that no part of our understanding of what knowledge is demands that only infallible evidence can give us knowledge. If we accept Fallibilism, we must reject the Defeated Evidence Principle. And if we reject that prin-ciple, the fact that your evidence is the same in the good and in the bad case is no longer a good reason for claiming that you know you are not in

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F A C U L T Y R E S E A R C H

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By Andrew Israelsen, Editor Purdue’s Department of Philosophy has recently begun an initiative to promote diversity and inclusion. De-partment Head Matthias Steup con-vened a committee, chaired by Jacqueline Mariña, to conduct a grad-uate student climate survey, organize colloquia and workshops devoted to exploring issues of diversity and in-clusion, and set up a website listing important resources. This past year, Diversity Fellow Natalia Washington assisted the committee in its important work. Graduate student Robert Spears succeeds her in 2015-16.

The climate survey, based on a similar endeavor by graduate students at Rutgers University, was carried out in early 2015. Its point was to learn how students view the philosophy en-vironment at Purdue. To ensure that all responses would remain anony-mous, Purdue’s Office of Institutional Assessment administered the survey, and Director of Assessment Diane Beaudoin provided important help. Carla Fehr, the Associate Director of the American Philosophical Associa-tion Committee on the Status of Women Site Visit Program, assisted in interpreting the survey’s results, which, we are proud to report, indicat-

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ed that the philosophy program at Pur-due is exceptionally vibrant, providing many opportunities for interaction and a great deal of intellectual stimulation.

The Department intends to con-duct such a survey once a year from now on. As an additional step, the De-partment will begin offering a course for advanced graduate students to aid them in developing papers for profes-sional presentation and publication. Fehr’s research suggests that these kinds of opportunities for intense pro-fessional interaction among diverse students with different interests are just the kinds of actions that contribute most to diversifying and creating community in a department at the graduate level. The Department also hosted a number of talks on issues concerning diversity and inclusion. In September of 2014, Purdue’s own Natalia Wash-ington and Dan Kelly presented, “Re-sponsibility from the Outside In: Shaping the Moral Ecology Around Implicit Bias”. In February of 2015, Carla Fehr, who is the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at the University of Waterloo’s Phi-losophy Department, gave a presenta-tion entitled “Ignorance, Excellence, and Diversity: Improving the Repre-

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sentation of Women and Minorities in STEM”. Finally, Luvell Anderson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis presented a paper entitled “Calling, Addressing, and Appropriation”, which focused on issues within the philosophy of race.

In an effort to increase gender balance and diversity among its col-loquium speakers, the Department in-vited Susan Wolf, the Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy at the Uni-versity of North Carolina, to give the yearly Scholl lecture; and Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins, who holds the Can-ada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, to give the an-nual Distinguished Woman Scholar lecture. Both of them participated in the Department’s “Women into Phi-losophy” meetings and contributed greatly to the discussions there. Ichikawa Jenkins, who has long been at the forefront of debates concerning the underrepresentation of women in philosophy, also spoke with the Di-versity and Inclusion Committee on November 19, 2014 and provided ex-cellent advice on how to increase the representation of women and minori-ties among both undergraduate and

The Department of Philosophy’s Diversity and Inclusion Initiative

Dr. Steup joined the Philosophy Depart-ment in 2008, and has served as Depart-ment Head since that time. He works on Epistemology and teaches courses on Epistemology and Free Will.

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the bad case. Is there another reason for the

conclusion that you don’t know you are not in the bad case? Philosophers sympathetic to skepticism might claim that part of what we know un-dermines the neuroscientific reason mentioned above. They might, for example, say that you know it’s pos-sible for you to be a BIV who is de-ceived into thinking, according to current neuroscience, envatment know-how and technology do not ex-ist. Your knowledge of this possibil-ity undermines or defeats the neuro-scientific reason for non-envatment. If we accept Fallibilism, we must view this claim as ill-motivated. Fal-

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libilists should say that a reason R is effectively undermined only if, in light of our total evidence, you must suspect that R is misleading. But in light of your total evidence, you have no rea-son at all to suspect that the neurosci-entific reason for non-envatment is misleading. So, if you accept Fallibil-ism, you can argue that you know you are not a BIV because (i) current neu-roscience says envatment is technolog-ically impossible and (ii) you have no reason to doubt that neuroscience is right about that.

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Chris Yeomans: Doing Philosophy in Shanghai and Xiamen

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Interview with Chris Yeomans Q: Tell us about your recent teaching experience in China Yeomans: I spent a couple of weeks in China, first to Shanghai, and then to Xiamen, this past summer. In Shang-hai I stayed with Rockwell Clancy, one of our former graduate students, who is teaching at Fudan University in Shanghai. I gave a talk at Fudan on my recent book, The Expansion of Au-tonomy. I received excellent questions about my work from both faculty and students. While in Shanghai, I also had a chance to talk with Rockwell about what he has been doing in Fu-dan, which is very interesting. He is teaching courses on Engineering Eth-ics, and developing a textbook on the subject, patterned after his course. I am hoping that the department can find a way to bring Rocky back to Purdue to give a presentation to the graduate students in the department on how to teach Engineering Ethics, and perhaps provide a venue for him to publish his book. There are a lot of opportunities for teaching and doing philosophy arising in China, and Rocky is one of the first students from Purdue to explore those opportunities.

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I travelled next to Xiamen, which is a very beautiful city, and taught a two-week course on the Philosophy of Action, using Michael Thompson’s book, Life in Action as the core source material. I found the students very engaged and excited about the materi-al, and enjoyed the class a great deal. After the class I would often hold somewhat informal study group ses-sions with interested students, so I had a good chance for more personal inter-action with students.

Q: You mentioned that there is a growing connection between the Uni-versity of Xiamen, and Purdue’s phi-losophy department. How did that begin?

Yeomans: It began in summer of 2014, when Dr. Steup attended a con-ference at the University of Xiamen. He made some connections there, and was invited back to teach a course. This opened up lines of dialogue, which have resulted in a number of opportunities. One of the first things that happened was that a delegation of faculty members from Xiamen Uni-versity visited Purdue in April of this year (2015), to beginning setting up an exchange program. The delegates in-

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graduate philosophy students. In an attempt to foster change at

the graduate level, the Department has instituted a series of workshops de-signed to educate its graduate students about these issues, to help fostering an inclusive atmosphere, and to pre-pare them to deal with these problems as they continue in their philosophical careers. These workshops have been largely graduate-student run, with Na-talia Washington doing a great deal of work. Natalia led the first workshop, “Implicit Bias and Stereotype Threat”, on Sept. 24, 2015, during which she discussed the empirical ev-idence demonstrating the reality of these problems and how to effectively counter them. Carla Fehr led the se-cond workshop, entitled, “Creating a Happy, Ethical, and Successful Ca-

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reer”, on Feb. 27, 2015, which posed strategies for being a good colleague to underrepresented groups in the profes-sion, coping with bullying, bias, and harassment, minimizing the negative effects of implicit bias on personal happiness, and avoiding biases in one’s own teaching and mentoring. Dr. Luvell Anderson, during his visit to campus, led the final of the year’s three workshops, “Ally and Bystander Train-ing and Racist Jokes”, which covered the best ways to confront blatant racist and sexist behavior, as well as practices for creating a diverse and inclusive space in the classroom.

Finally, the Department has made an effort to provide an inclusive and welcoming atmosphere for women fac-ulty and graduate students by holding bi-monthly “women into philosophy

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get-togethers.” These are usually held at a faculty member’s home, and women faculty and graduate students make it a point to attend. Many of the-se get-togethers have been held in honor of a visiting female speaker. Relaxed and semi-formal, they have facilitated fruitful discussions of strat-egies for the advancement of women in the profession and how to provide much needed support to junior faculty and women graduate students. The Department of Philosophy is proud of the steps being taken in this regard, and feels that the result will be a richer, more inclusive, and more ro-bust academic atmosphere.

A Special Thank You The Philosophy Department would like to offer a special expression of gratitude to our secretaries, Vickie Sanders and Brenda Pickett. Without their tireless work, very little would get done in the depart-ment, and we are very fortu-nate to have them.

Vickie Sanders has worked at Purdue University for 26 years, and has been with the Philosophy department since 2004. Before she moved to Philosophy, she worked in the School of Education.

Brenda Pickett, our Graduate Secretary, joined the depart-ment in Fall of 2014, and has been with Purdue University for nine years.

Many thanks to Vickie and Brenda for all their hard work!

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Dr. Yeomans joined the philosophy department in 2009. His research fo-cuses on Hegel and German Idealism, as well as Philosophy of Action. He teaches courses on Philosophy of Law, German Idealism, and Philosophy of Action.

Graduate Student News

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James Elliot I have recently had a paper accepted by the journal, Religious Stud-ies (forthcoming, at the end of the year), entitled, “The Power of Humili-ty in Sceptical Religion: Why Ietsism is preferable to J.L. Schellenberg's Ul-timism.” I've also finished a book re-view I had contracted with Philosoph-ical Psychology that will appear at the end of the year. I'm also presenting some of this work at Harvard this fall in their annual "Ways of Knowing in Religion" conference.

The Religious Studies publication grew out of a paper I wrote for a sem-inar on the Philosophy of Religion taught in Spring of 2015 by Dr. Paul Draper and Dr. Jacqueline Mariña. In the paper I argue against ‘Ultimism’, Schellenberg's much-discussed model for religious thinking, which holds, basically, that there is some trans-cendent reality that is "axiologically, soteriologically, and metaphysically" ultimate, and little more can be said as to the nature of this reality. I argue that “Ietsism” (from the Dutch ietsisme, meaning literally "some-thingism") is preferable to Ultimism for skeptical religion. Ietsism is much more modest than than Ultimism--it suggests that there is only some-

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thing transcendent worth religiously as-senting to. It doesn't have to be ulti-mate in any way, and it moreover doesn't need to be axiologically or metaphysical-ly transcendent. In essence, I think pupils of skeptical religion would do better to assent to Ietsism--something much more likely to be true--than something like Ul-timism, which is quite specific and gran-diose. We'll have to wait and see what Schellenberg himself thinks about my suggestions.

I've also finished a book review I had contracted with Philosophical Psy-chology that will appear at the end of the year. I'm also presenting some of this work at Harvard this fall in their annual "Ways of Knowing in Religion" confer-ence.

I'm thankful to Professor Dan Kelly for pointing me in the direction of writ-ing a review for Philosophical Psycholo-gy. I studied psychology and neurosci-ence in undergrad and have been looking for opportunities to implement that knowledge in a philosophical context. Writing this review has thus given me the opportunity to utilize this knowledge while broadening the scope of my aca-demic repertoire. The book is John V. Kulvicki's Images. It's a rather svelte volume that aims to act both as an intro-

James Elliot is a third-year graduate student at Purdue. His interests include Philosophical Theology, Metaphysics, and Philosophy of Science.

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cluded Dr. Zhiping Cao, who is the chair of the Philosophy Department at Xiamen University, as well as Drs. Wuwei Li, Jianbo Cao, Feng Ouyang, and Xiofei Liu. The visit allowed us to begin setting goals for increased in-teraction between Xiamen University and Purdue. The goals we are jointly working towards with this program include faculty exchange between the two universities, as well as the crea-tion of what we call a ‘Three-Two’ program, where students at Xiamen will earn a B.A. in philosophy at Xia-men, then come to Purdue for a two-year M.A. opportunity. Finally we hope to institute an undergraduate study abroad program that will run both ways, and give students from

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Xiamen and Purdue an opportunity to study in a foreign country.

During this time, I was invited to travel to Xiamen and teach the Phi-losophy of Action seminar over the summer, which I was very glad to do. The seminar was in English, and I had a very positive experience with my students there; they were very en-gaged and interested in the material. The University of Xiamen is one of the top five in the Country of China, in terms of the quality of student work and achievement. Hopefully the con-nections we are making with Xiamen will result in many more such oppor-tunities for positive academic interac-tion.

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duction to the philosophies of percep-tion within the Philosophy of Art and the Philosophy of Mind, and to argue for a particular theory that can help unite the heretofore disparate models of perception as found within each re-spective field. This book was quite outside my comfort zone--especially the aesthetics portion--so writing this review was a great learning opportuni-ty for me.

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Joshua Gulley: I had the opportunity to attend a sum-mer school held at the British School in Rome, entitled: “Powers, Percep-tion, and Agency”. The event, which took place September 21-25, 2015, was part of the ‘Power Structuralism in Ancient Ontologies’ project headed by Anna Marmodoro of Oxford. The Power Structuralism project is funded by a 1.3 million euro grant from the European Research Council.

Purdue has had prior interaction with this project, as both Patricia Curd and Jeff Brower of Purdue have given talks associated with the Power Struc-turalism project.

The summer school lasted for five days, and it is focused on the meta-physics of powers, particularly in ac-counting for perception and agency (with an emphasis on contemporary metaphysics and Aristotle). Anna Marmodoro and Erasmus Mayr led the classes. The event concluded with a conference on Saturday and Sunday of the last week of the summer school, featuring John Heil, Chris Martin, Ste-phen Mumford, and William Jaworski.

Joshua Gulley is a fifth-year Ph.D candi-date at Purdue; he is working on a disser-tation on theories of mixture in the Presocratics and Aristotle with Dr. Patri-cia Curd.

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Tiffany Montoya This summer I presented at a confer-ence in Havana, Cuba. The conference was put together by the Center for Global Justice, a project of the Radical Philosophy Association. I presented a paper entitled, "Organizing the 'Precar-iat' Class as a Strategy for Systemic Transformation". My paper addresses the now commplance trend, in critical theory, to talk about the difficulty, and sometimes futility, in organizing the working class because of its shape-shifting character.

The conversation is often that the entire working class cannot be simpli-fied into a single category, and does not function the same as it did when Marx was speaking of the proletariat in industrialized Europe, and therefore our class analysis and our strategies of liberation must accommodate for this evolution. One recent suggestion by sociologist Guy Standing has been to analyze the new working class as the “Precariat” - a combination of the word ‘proletariat’ and ‘precarious’, to mark the precarious position that 21st Century workers find themselves in.

The word describes a set of the population who are uncertain about the reliability of employment, about the consistency of their hours or pay, and who are easily replaceable. All of the qualities of the Precariat attest to the near impossibility of organizing such a class (the risk seems much too high for them). I point out that this precarious-ness is actually not new to Marxist theory, as this happens through a pro-cess of proletarianization spoken about in "Das Kapital".

I argue, however, that the apparent weaknesses of this Precariat class (spe-cifically those who earn less than a liv-able wage) might also prove to be the ground from which a new organiza-tional strategy can grow. It is precisely their wretched position, their lack of wellbeing, which creates the moral ob-ligation to change their situation. In other words, the intractability of their material situation is what creates the moral traction. Therefore, this Precari-at class might find more efficacy in first leveraging principles of morali-ty—of their basic right to existence

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and wellbeing—before being able (or willing) to enact the traditional Marx-ist model of liberation, that is, utiliz-ing their immediate relation to the means of production. This strategy of consciousness-raising, not through a sudden awareness of class structure and its relation to class interest, but through pathos and recognition of basic human rights, will also create a more solid foundation whereupon change can occur with a ratchet effect of moral acceptability.

Tiffany Montoya is a fourth-year graduate student at Purdue. She works on Philoso-phy of Race and Critical Theory.

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It was an excellent opportunity for me, as the issued discussed are highly pertinent to my dissertation, the prima-ry focus of which is mixture and pow-ers in Empedocles and Aristotle.

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James Mollison on the Paris Seminar With the help of the Partner Univer-sity Fund, Purdue University and Université Paris Ouest Nanterre con-vened for a week-long summer school this June to discuss analytic and French approaches to the philos-ophy of science in the 20th century.

Purdue’s contributions were led by Dan Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky, with the Université Paris Ouest Nan-terre’s contributions being led by Jean-Michel Salanskis. Seven gradu-ate students were invited from Pur-due to participate - Pamaela Carrale, Alex Gillham, Joshua Galat, Patrick Hoburg, Brian Johnson, James Molli-son, and Christina Weiler. In addition to the cultural experience of spending a week in Nancy, the program af-forded students the chance to partici-pate in three colloquia each day on the philosophy of science. Students were also invited to present their own work and receive commentary from esteemed professors. This latter group included the aforementioned Dan Smith, Arkady Plotnitsky, and Jean Salanskis, as well as Thomas Bentatouil, Eli During, Brice Halimi, Gerhard Heinzmann, Thierry Hoquet, Cyrille Imbert, Pierre Livet, Baptiste Meles, Francesca Merlin, and Pierre Wagner. Topics covered spanned the history of analytic and French ap-

Natalia Washington 'Hi Purdue philosophers! Starting this year, I'll be at Washington University in Saint Louis as a McDonnell post-doctoral scholar in the Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Psychology pro-gram. The PNP program is an inter-disciplinary program, which brings together researchers in different fields who focus on the mind and brain. I'll be joining several other post docs in philosophy, psychology, and linguis-tics, and collaborating with them over the next two years, as well as further-ing my research on concepts of mental health.'

James Mollison is a second-year Ph.D stu-dent at Purdue; his research interests are the History of Philosophy and the philoso-phy of Gilles Deleuze.

Natalia Washington defended her disser-taiton, “Mental Health and Human Minds: Some Theoretical Criteria for Clinical Psychiatry”, chaired by Dr. Daniel Kelly, during the summer of 2015. She also worked extensively on the development of Purdue’s Diversity and Inclusion Initia-tive as its inaugural graduate fellow.

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Jacob Tuttle In the Fall of 2015, I began the first year of a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. As part of the fellowship, I'll typically teach three courses from the University's core curriculum each se-mester, and I'll occasionally teach up-per-division courses in my areas of spe-cialization. For example, this semester I'm teaching three sections of Philo-sophical Inquiry, a lower-division course required for all students at the University. I'm tentatively planning to teach an upper-division Metaphysics course next fall.

The fellowship's modest teaching load provides significant time for re-search. I plan to use this time to wrap up several publication projects based on material from my dissertation. These projects include three articles focusing on aspects of Suarez's theory of efficient causation, as well as a book-length translation of Suarez's disputations On Action and On Passion. I also plan to begin drafting a book examining the his-torical and philosophical significance of Suarez's views about causation and causal explanation.

In addition to providing teaching experience and time for research, the fellowship program at Loyola Mary-mount also provides the opportunity to explore the distinctive mission of Jesuit universities. As part of the program, I

Incoming Graduate Students Purdue is proud to welcome Jasmine Contos, Hamed Tabatabaei Ghomi, Alžbeta Hájková, Vincent Jacobson, Adam Nuske, Keunchang Oh, Stephen Setman, and Luke Wilson into the program this year.

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participate in monthly workshops on Ig-natian pedagogy. These workshops are augmented by conversations with several mentors—both within and outside the Philosophy Department—who have sug-gested additional resources tailored to my specific interests. For example, partly be-cause of my work on Suarez, I want to better understand how the history of the Jesuit order informs Ignatian pedagogy. I'm excited to explore the sources my program mentors have suggested, espe-cially primary documents from some of the earliest Jesuits.

Jacob Tuttle received his PhD at Purdue in August of 2013. He wrote his dissertation, "Suarez's Metaphysics of Efficient Causa-tion", under the direction of Jeff Brower. Tuttle's research focuses on metaphysical issues in Medieval and Early Modern Phi-losophy, especially the metaphysics of causation. He has papers published or forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy and Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and he has presented his re-search at numerous conferences and work-shops. His paper "Suarez's Non-Reductive Theory of Efficient Causation" recently re-ceived the Founders Award from the Soci-ety for Medieval and Renaissance Philoso-phy. At Purdue, Tuttle taught Ethics, Sym-bolic Logic, and Medieval Philosophy.

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proaches to the philosophy of science and included discussions within the philosophy of biology, mind, mathe-matics, and physics.

Jasmine Contos I received my B.A. (Philosophy w/emphasis in Law) from San Fran-cisco State University. I received my MSc (Ancient Philosophy) from the University of Edinburgh. The main focus of my research thus far has been the philosophy of death--more specif-ically the question of whether it is ra-tional to fear death and Epicurus's ac-count of death. In broad strokes, I am also interested in the nature of truth, with special regard to necessary truth and a priori reasoning, and the philos-ophy of time.

Hamed Tabatabaei Ghomi I am a scientist by training. I have graduated as a doctor of pharmacy, and after getting an MS in mathe-matics, I am now perusing a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry with focus on computational drug design. My dream, however, is to become a phi-losopher, and this is why I am in the philosophy department! Naturally, I am interested in philosophy of sci-ence. But I also love epistemology, ethics and philosophy of religion.

Alžbeta Hájková I obtained my BSc in political science with the highest distinction from Brati-slava International School of Liberal Arts in June 2013. In July 2014 I com-pleted Master’s program in philosophy at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven with high honors. My MA thesis focused on the notion of equality in the thought of John Locke. After my Master studies, I worked for a year as a research assistant to a member of Slovak National Council and senior research fellow at the Center for European Policy Studies, Brussels. My main research interests are early modern philosophy, specifically John Locke, and political and social philoso-phy, mainly authors exploring structures of totalitarian regimes, such as Hannah Arendt and Jan Patočka.

Alžbeta Hájková

Vincent Jacobson I am a 2014 graduate from Wisconsin Lutheran College in Milwaukee with a B.S. in Philosophy and Psychology. Currently, my main philosophical in-terests are in the intersection of con-sciousness and epistemology, namely, the questions of how consciousness can be rendered intelligible, and what sort of knowledge we can have of it.

Vincent Jacobson

Jasmine Contos Adam Nuske

Adam Nuske I am interested in the phi-losophy of religion broadly construed so as to include figures such as Kierke-gaard, as well as other rel-evant figures in German philosophy. I am also in-terested in early 20th cen-tury philosophy and the philosophy of language.

Keunchang Oh

Keunchang Oh I am interested in social and political phi-losophy, history of political thought, 19th and 20th Century European philosophy and critical theory. I received a BA and MA in philosophy at Seoul National University, South Korea.

Stephen Setman

Stephen Setman I received a B.A. in Philosophy and German Studies from Gettysburg College. My areas of interest are critical theory, phenomenology and panpsychism.

Luke Wilson

Luke Wilson I have received a bache-lor's degree in philoso-phy from the University of Iowa and a master's from Western Michigan University. My main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of religion and in metaethics.

Hamed Tabatabaei Ghomi

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