Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Beautiful fall foliage campus photo by Vicki Brett.

Big news people: we are on Twitter.  We are @WaterlooPhilos. Follow us!

 We were very pleased to usher in our colloquium series with a talk by Rob Stainton, Distinguished University Professor, University of Western Ontario. Series organizer John Turri says, “Robert talked to the department about natural language and logical form. He argued that some items have logical form that doesn’t derive from the logical form of expressions in natural language. As an added bonus, in the question and answer period, it was inadvertently revealed that Paul Grice once wrote a letter of recommendation for a member of our department, in which that department member was praised for his punctuality and unrivaled fluency in the English language. This prompted deep reflection on the richness of conversational implicature.”

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Here’s an update from our colleague Shannon Dea who is on leave. Shannon says, “I have a small bit of news. On Friday, I gave a talk on “Peirce and Spinoza’s Pragmaticist Metaphysics” in the departmental seminar series at the University of Sheffield, where I’m spending my sabbatical. It’s a great department and the discussion was long and lively — a real treat.” We’re glad you’re having a nice time away, Shannon!

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Heather Douglas says the video of the talk she gave at SUNY-Oswego on the role of science in a democratic society is up. You can check it out here or at theyoutube link.

Another lovely campus photo by Vicki Brett.

That’s all for past and recent news. We have a few interesting upcoming events.

Heather Douglas and I will both be participating at the upcoming Canadian Association for American Studies conference here in Kitchener-Waterloo. The conference them is “Total Money Makeover”$: Culture and the Economization of Everything.” My talk is “The Cold-Blooded Economist is a Dangerous Figure”; the talk will touch on the way rational choice theory elides the distinctions we draw i in the way we regard our preferences. Heather will be speaking on “Science Advisors and the Problem of Loyalty during the Nixon Administration.”

Heather is also presenting next week at the Science and Society Conference at the University of Ottawa.

Nick Ray says, “I am giving a talk as part of the PHYS 10 Colloquium. “Mach, Newton, Empiricism and Spacetime”: Here’s the abstract: “There is a received view of Ernst Mach’s contributions to physics, and it is a tale of two cities. In the first city, the City of Theory, Mach was cited as one of the main intellectual influences for Einstein’s discovery of both special and general relativity. In the second city, the City of Method, Mach has been much maligned for arguing vigorously against fairly common (and arguably necessary) modes of scientific theorizing—especially regarding the development of concepts not reducible to experience and the search for deep, Planck-like explanations of nature.I think both cities (and the received view they comprise) are on shaky foundations. I will argue that the development of special relativity would have been hampered had Einstein actually applied Machian principles of conceptual analysis, and that Mach’s significance for modern physics comes rather from his critique of classical mechanics—one that applies Newton’s own empirical standard for physical theorizing, not some “abusive”, anti-theoretical, and overly reductive notion of empirical adequacy. We have much to learn about how to argue against entire theoretical frameworks in physics if we closely examine Mach’s mature criticism of Newtonian Absolute Space.” Details: Tuesday October 22, 2013, 11:30-12:30, Physics 145.

Don’t forget you can see more news and check out upcoming events at our Department website. And did I mention we’re on Twitter?

As always, I hope everyone is doing well, and thanks for reading!

— Patricia

Wednesday October 2, 2013

Hi everyone,

It is with great pleasure that we would like to congratulate our Department Administrative Assistant and Grad Coordinator Debbie Dietrich on her 25th anniversary at Waterloo! Some of my colleagues who’ve worked closely with Debbie over the years wanted to share their thoughts on this happy occasion. Our chair Dave DeVidi writes, “It’s hard to believe that it has reached the stage where Debbie is one of only two people in the department who have been here longer than me. While she’s important in the work life of everyone in the department, I’ve probably had as much chance to work with her as anyone: she’s been a key administrator for 15 of my 17 years here, and I worked closely with her for the six years I’ve spent as graduate officer and the past 15 months as Chair. There are lots of good things to be said, but maybe it is appropriate to say again what I said to the Dean about her 25th Anniversary at Waterloo:

What makes Debbie so valuable to the department is the personal touch she brings to all aspects of her work, and the personal connections this has allowed her to make all over campus. Has some unusual situation come up? Debbie will know exactly who to call to help solve it, and will know the person on the other end of the line. Is a visitor coming to the department? That person will already like the place when they arrive, because they’ll have been dealing with Debbie to make arrangements. Generations of grad students have known just where to go for a problem solver and a sympathetic ear—not to mention generations of department chairs. We’re lucky to have her.

Our recent chair Tim Kenyon seconds this: “Debbie has adapted to many changes in personnel, policies, processes and technologies during that time; but her collegiality and warm professionalism have been constants. She was an invaluable supportive colleague to me during my time as Chair.”

Brian Orend also described Debbie as “invaluable” to him during his tenure as Grad Officer: “She helped bring me up to speed on a whole range of rules and processes, even in the face of a sea-change in procedures about grad funding. Together with the Committee, Debbie was instrumental in helping bring together the biggest incoming grad student cohort in memory. I feel that Debbie combines polished professional discretion with useful frank advice. She has always been a total pro: always getting the job done yet ever with a fun attitude and an approachable demeanour that makes everyone’s job easier. She has also, of her own generous accord, provided me with additional help in connection with International Studies over the years.”

Doreen Fraser, current Grad Officer, says “Debbie is not only the one who helps faculty and graduate students navigate paperwork and University regulations, but also someone who keeps on top of what people are doing outside of the University (with extracurricular activities, partners, and children) and who offers support which goes well beyond help with administration. Thank you and congratulations, Debbie!” I know from years working with Debbie that she brings to our Department an extraordinary ability — to combine the formal and administrative aspects of her job with a kindness and friendliness that makes our Department a warm and connected place. It wouldn’t be the same without you, Debbie. Thank you so much, and congratulations on your 25th!

In graduate student news, some of our MA students, Teresa Branch, Sandie DeVries, Marian Davies, and Jamie Sewell, have had a poster accepted for the 2013 Science and Society Conference in Ottawa. The title is “Scientific information, misinformation and disinformation: The perils of open access and trust.” They write in the abstract, “The aim of this research is to explore the relationship between how information is presented by ‘science authorities’ and the public. This relationship is fraught with concern from science communicators as to the best means to convey the information, the public and their ability to understand the concepts, and the social position afforded to science as the sole authority with which to accurately measure the world. With the exponential increase in available sources of information via the internet, it is becoming increasingly necessary for the public to be able to critically analyze these sources and discern what science is reliable in order to make informed decisions about science policy. By looking at the recent controversy surrounding the exhibition, Sex: A Tell-all Exhibition at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa, we will explore 3 facets of science communication and the dissemination of knowledge. We will analyze the means with which the exhibit attempted to reach the audience, the inherent concerns regarding the authority of science on the topic, and public discussion surrounding the exhibit via the internet. This example, serves as a means of showcasing the challenges of publicizing science as well as ways to harness this intersection of ideas to acknowledge biases and create a more balanced and better informed public.” Congrats to all!

Heather Douglas writes, “This past Saturday (Sep. 28), I gave the Warren Steinkraus Lecture on Human Ideals at SUNY Oswego. I spoke about “Ideals for Responsible Science in Democratic Societies” and we had a wide-ranging discussion about the role of scientists, collective responsibility, dual-use research, and public interest science, among other things. I also got to enjoy lovely Oswego, situated on Lake Ontario, on a spectacular day, with my host and tour guide, Brad Wray.” Heather also passed along some great pictures:

Joe Novak presented a paper (“Sawyer and Consciousness”) at a conference entitled Science Fiction: The Interdisciplinary Genre. Joe says, “The conference was held at McMaster University September 13-15 2013 and it celebrated the donation of the papers of Robert Sawyer to the Library at McMaster which also houses the Bertrand Russell Archives. Robert Sawyer is probably the most significant SF writer in Canada; more information on him can be found at http://www.sfwriter.com/. More information on the conference can be found at: http://sfwriter.com/mcmaster.htm. I also attended the annual Medieval Philosophy Conference at U of T, held on September 20-21. This is an international conference featuring presentations by established scholars as well as some very talented doctoral students.”

Graduate student Rosalind Abdool and I together presented a paper we co-authored at The Pittsburgh Area Philosophy Colloquium. Our paper, “Utilitarianism, Intuitions, Rationality and Neuroscience,” challenged Peter Singer’s claims that neuro-scientific results were evidence for the rationality of utilitarianism over alternatives and argued on behalf of a pluralist approach. We had a great time meeting and talking with other Pittsburg area philosophers. Here’s a photo of us just after our talk:

Dave DeVidi has some serious thoughts about science and academic freedom. “On September 17,” he says, “I took part in a public town hall in uptown Waterloo that is the first public event in Get Science Right, an initiative by the Canadian Association of University Teachers to raise public awareness and discussion of “the public impact of the crisis in science and research policy in Canada.” About 50 people attended, and the event was filmed by one of the national current affairs program as part of an investigation they are doing of the issues we were discussing.

“The other panelists (Melanie Campbell, a physicist from Waterloo and Jeffrey Jones, a neuroscientist from Wilfrid Laurier University) spoke passionately about the harmful implications of the defunding of basic, curiosity-driven research for the long term interests of the country. Since they are both from STEM backgrounds, I raised issues of particular concern to the humanities and social sciences—such as the ill-conceived changes to Library and Archives Canada and the killing of the long form census, both of which will prevent Arts researchers from effectively doing the research that a democratic society will want to see done if its interested in intelligently governing itself.

“A major topic of discussion was the harmful effects of all the gag orders imposed at the federal level on government scientists, librarians and archivists, and others. Their harm to good democratic decision-making is obvious. But the climate of silencing and retribution has other side effects. It’s an alarming trend among university administrators to see their role in terms of “keeping the university’s message focused and positive,” including keeping research that runs contrary to government policy from gaining much publicity—which, to my mind, is a rather grave failure to understand what universities are actually for. Which will be the first university administration to try to put gag orders on their faculty of the sort government departments have put on their scientists? It may happen sooner than we think, so faculty should be on their toes and be willing to put a stop to it when someone tries.”

Upcoming activities:

Tim Kenyon says, “On Thursday I will be giving a presentation to uW Library staff outlining some of the common uses and abuses of research output impact measures. The title is ‘Research measures and rankings.'”

Don’t forget you can see more news and check out upcoming events at our Department website. Our Facebook group is now for anyone who wants to keep in touch — just send a request to join. And why not follow this blog by email? Just use the gadget on the right hand side!

As always, thanks for reading!

— Patricia Marino

Wednesday September 18, 2013

Hi everyone and welcome to the start of fall term, always a time of intense activity. Before we get to the news-news, we’d like to take a moment to remember Ardeth Wood. Our chair Dave DeVidi writes:

It has been a decade since one of the most traumatic events in the history of the department. Those who were here at the time will remember the shock and grief that gripped the department when Ardeth Wood disappeared on August 6, 2003. For those of you who never had a chance to meet Ardeth: She was a PhD student—making good headway in the early stages of the program, well liked and with many close friends in the department, collegial, involved, active, and full of promise—when she went home to Ottawa for a short vacation with her family. Here is a link to one story about the anniversary.”  Ardeth’s memory is honored in the life of our Department by the Ardeth Wood Memorial Bursary; as Dave says, “None of us who knew her will forget her.”

The main happening around our department recently was, of course, our welcome party. Our current Associate Chair for grad studies, Doreen Fraser, writes: “the first week of September we welcomed 16 new graduate students to the Department–9 MA students and 7 PhD students. Their interests are distributed across the full range of research areas in the Department; some are continuing their education with us at uWaterloo, and others have come from universities across the country.  The day of departmental orientation sessions was capped off by a welcome party in Dave DeVidi’s back yard.” A lovely event — and we are thrilled to be welcoming so many great new students!

Current graduate student Peter Blouw reports on various recent research travels: “In August, I presented a poster on evaluations of rule-breaking and the pragmatics of indirect speech at the 6th Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress in Boulder, Colorado. The poster was based on some experimental philosophy work I’ve been doing with John Turri, and it was really interesting to present this material in a setting where there’s naturally a bit more of a focus on the aspects of the research related to ethics rather than cognitive science. I got some good feedback and ideas about project, and I really enjoyed taking in the other talks and posters at the conference. I also went to Berlin in August for the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. I presented a poster based on some work I’ve been doing in Chris Eliasmith’s lab on distributional models of lexical semantics, and it was good chance to meet other people who are also interested in this topic. Over 1000 people attended the conference, so there were a lot of opportunities to learn about recent developments in cognitive science research.” Great work, Peter!

Brian Orend says the second edition of his book is out! Check out the cover, then read all about it at Broadview press!

Heather Douglas spoke on Monday at the Stand Up for Science Rally in Kitchener about the state of Canadian public science.  A news clip on the rally can be seen here. Heather says, “it was good to come out and meet with others concerned about Canadian science in the public interest.” The discussion continued Tuesday with a panel discussion including Dave DeVidi, at an event called called Get Science R!ght on Tuesday, September 16 at the Waterloo Public Library. Dave says, “This event was organized by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, and is the first in a nationwide series of events to ‘discuss the public impact of the crisis in science and research policy in Canada.’ It was hosted by Craig Norris of the local CBC radio morning show, and the other panelists were Melanie Campbell of Waterloo’s Physics and Astronomy department and Jeffrey Jones, a neuroscientist from Wilfrid Laurier.” Since this was just as our blog was going to press, we’ll have more details from Dave next week.

Doreen Fraser just got back from a workshop on the applicability of mathematics in physics at Simon Fraser University.  Doreen says, “The other speakers were Nic Fillion (SFU) and Bob Batterman (Pittsburgh); the participants came from philosophy and applied mathematics departments at SFU and UBC.  One of the issues addressed was how to explain why mathematics is applicable in the ways in which it is in contemporary physics.  The starting point for providing such an explanation is to respond to physicist Eugene Wigner’s infamous skeptical assessment that ‘[t]he miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.’ A common thread running through the talks was that applied mathematics represents reality in only very minimal respects.  This feature of the examples analyzed had diverse causes: the need to engineer a problem that is tractable using methods available to applied mathematicians (Fillion), the introduction of idealizations (Batterman), and that the applicability of a common mathematical formalism across a wide range of domains reflects the fact that the physical conditions for applicability of the formalism are very minimal (Fraser). One strand of the discussion that I will be following up on is whether the identification of causal structures (as characterized by some account of causation) could play any role in my case studies.”

Tim also just presented a talk: on Friday September 13, to the  Department of Philosophy colloquium at McMaster University, titled “Oral history and the epistemology of testimony.”

Steve Weinstein is back after recording an album, set for release in early December. Steve adds, “in my absence, I entered an FQXI (Foundational Questions Institute) essay contest on “Questioning the Foundations: Which of Our Basic Physical Assumptions Are Wrong?” and tied for second with Hawking collaborator, cosmologist George Ellis. Essay is here.” Welcome back, Steve!

Carla is enjoying her first time teaching Intro (Phil 110A) at Waterloo.  She says, “I am really excited about this class. What struck me right away was the incredible diversity of students in the room.  I love the idea of people of so many different races and ethnicities coming together to explore philosophy. I am looking forward to the rest of the semester.” I second that: I always enjoy teaching Intro classes, and I especially enjoy them at Waterloo where the students bring such an interesting mix of perspectives.

The Philosophy Graduate Student Association (PGSA) welcomed the incoming grad students and celebrated the return of our continuing grad students after orientation with a visit to the Grad House. The grad students had a great time getting to know each other and sharing in the tradition of spending time at the Grad House on Fridays! Here are a couple of excellent pictures:

Our outgoing PGSA president, Rosalind Abdool, says: “It is with great pleasure that I would like to present the Philosophy Graduate Student Association executive for the 2013-2014 academic year:

President: Nathan Haydon
Administrator: Ashley Keefner
Treasurer: Sara Weaver
PhD Representative:  Jay Michaud
MA Representative:   Nicholas Ferenz
GSA Representative:  Cristina Balaita

Ben Nelson, Ayo Ogunshola, Dylon McChesney have been appointed as our 2014 UWaterloo Graduate Conference organizers, and Peter Blouw will continue in the role of graduate colloquium series coordinator.

Rosalind adds, “I would like to thank all those who made this past year such a wonderful one – especially the former exec, including Sara, Lindsey, Ashley, Nathan and Ben, as well as the conference organizers, Nathan and Ben, and our colloquium series organizer, Peter. A huge thank you to Jim for all of his advice, expertise and contributions to the PGSA. Lastly, thank you to all department members as well for all of your continued support of the grad students!”

Finally, while this is generally a blog about what-has-happened, we’re going to add listings of activities outside the department that we’re involved in, in case any one wants to join in:

Paul Thagard says that on Sept. 20, he will be giving the Killam Lecture at Dalhousie, and on Oct 11, he’ll be speaking at a conference in Delft, Netherlands, on cognition, complexity, and urban planning.

Rosalind Abdool and I will be presenting our co-authored paper “Utilitarianism, Intuitions, Rationality and Neuroscience,” this upcoming Saturday at the Pittsburgh Area Philosophy Colloquium.

Recent Faculty Publications

Matt writes, “Recent Waterloo Philosophy graduate Dr. Rachel McKinnon– now a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary– and I have just published a paper in Philosophical Psychology together called “This paper took too long to write: A puzzle about overcoming weakness of will.”

My paper “Moral Coherence and Value Pluralism just came out in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Here’s a link to the open access version.

Don’t forget you can see more news and check out upcoming events at our Department website. Our Facebook group is now for anyone who wants to keep in touch — just send a request to join. As always, I hope everyone is having a great fall, and thanks for reading!

— Patricia Marino

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Color me blown away that summer is virtually over! The one good thing about getting older and time passing more quickly is that now I can think, “Meh, soon it’ll be springtime again.”

Our biggest departmental news of the summer is that long-time department member Joe Novak officially retired on August 1.

Joe Novak in his office. Photo by Vicki Brett.

Our chair Dave DeVidi writes, “Joe completed his PhD at the University of Notre Dame in 1977, writing a dissertation entitled Aristotle on Method: Definitions and Demonstrations. He joined the Waterloo department in 1984, having resigned from a tenured position at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan in 1983.  He served for two years as Chair of the Thomas More department. At Waterloo he was the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies for several years in the early 1990s, and he served as Acting Chair in 2009-10.

“Joe was always in demand as a graduate supervisor. While he was hired into a department with a significant focus in the history of philosophy, the direction of the department changed over the years, so the number of PhD theses Joe supervised was not large. But he supervised well over a dozen PhD research areas, and many MA theses and research projects.  Students who worked with him described him as an “incredibly resourceful” supervisor who cared deeply about the success of his students and, going back to pre-Google times, as a “walking library catalogue” when it comes to Aristotle.

“In recent times, Joe has carried much of the department’s undergraduate teaching load in history of philosophy, especially ancient philosophy.  These courses consistently received solid reviews from students. But perhaps Joe’s best loved course was Phil 208: Philosophy Through Science Fiction.  The course was Joe’s own creation, first offered two decades ago.  It introduces perennial philosophical questions to do with the nature of knowledge, mind and body, ethics, logic and language as they arise in classic works of science fiction—what’s not to love about that?

“Joe’s research has primarily been in ancient philosophy, though as good history of philosophy tends to do the lessons learned in those investigations have allowed him to also contribute in other areas.  Much of his early work involved investigating the ways in which the philosophical views of Plato and Aristotle depended on the developments in the mathematics of their day. An admirable feature of the work is that Joe did not shy away from doing the math necessary to do this work well—for instance, by solving some of the geometric puzzles posed by Socrates in the dialogues he was able to show previously unremarked ways in which the solutions illuminate the philosophical arguments in the dialogue in question.  This expertise on the technical presuppositions of and work by important ancient philosophers placed him well to weigh in on the work of philosophers from other historical periods, such as Franz Brentano, who offered their own accounts of the work the ancients.  The boundary-breaking nature of his work resulted in it appearing not only in venues such as the History of Philosophy Quarterly, but also in the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic and the Australian Logic Teachers Journal.  In recent years, his work has turned more towards ethics in the ancient and medieval periods.

“It’s hard in a short notice of this sort to adequately acknowledge three decades of dedicated work for the department.  The department will be holding a retirement celebration during the coming term to try to do so more adequately.”

In the meantime, Thank You, Joe, from all of us!

Exciting news: Paul Simard Smith succesfully defended his PhD dissertation, Logic in Context: An essay on the contextual foundations of logical pluralism, on Monday, August 26! His supervisor Dave DeVidi says, “In the dissertation, Paul develops a novel account of logical pluralism that, he argues, avoids the problems that bedevil previous versions of logical pluralism in the literature.  He then investigates some “downstream” implications in other areas of philosophy, such as epistemology and argumentation theory, if logical pluralism is true.  The examining commitee included external examiner Martin Montminy of the University of Oklahoma, Ken Hirschkop of Waterloo’s English Department, and Doreen Fraser, Tim Kenyon, and Paul’s PhD supervisor Dave DeVidi, all of Philosophy.  Many of the questions at the defence circled around a challenge that also confronts versions of pluralism in many domains besides logic—why regard participants who seem to be disagreeing about a claim as actually doing so rather than merely using the same words to express different propositions? That is, why talk of pluralism rather than ambiguity?  Paul defended his view well. By the end it was clear all around that with the way his work spills over from philosophical logic into philosophy of language, epistemology and other areas of philosophy, the thesis is the start of a promising research program.” Congratulations, Paul!

Graduate student Jim Jordan writes to tell us he’ll be presenting a paper at the upcoming WCPA conference this Fall. Jim says, “The title is “Closing a Route to Logical Pluralism.” Gillian Russell’s paper “One True Logic?” presents cases where an argument expressed in natural language can be valid or invalid, depending on how indexicals and other contextual matters are resolved, and she suggests that this could be a route to logical pluralism. I show that it cannot be–while she has identified an interesting pluralism, it’s rooted in semantics and denotation, not in logic, and so it’s not a viable route to logical pluralism. (More boldly, I think it undermines Beall and Restall’s Tarskian approach, too, but I need to look at that more closely.)”

Chris Eliasmith was on CBC Quirks & Quarks radio show about  “Building a Brain.” Some other recent press about Chris’s work is here in the The KW Record: UW prof teaches readers how to build a brain and here in the Biomedical Computation Review: Behind the Connectome Commotion (section on Simulating a Human Connectome: Spaun).

Chris Lowry says, “I attended the 30th International Social Philosophy Conferenece from July 11 to 13, held this year at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. I was there as the chair of the NASSP Book Award Committee to present the award to José Medina from Vanderbilt University for his book The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations, and to join a panel discussion with the author.”

Ben Nelson wrote an interesting blog post about his experience at the World Congress of Philosophy in Athens, at Talking Philosophy: The Philosophers’ Magazine Blog.  (If that link has problems it’s also here).

PGSA president Rosalind Abdool passes along two items:

1. The PGSA held its annual Spring BBQ at Waterloo Park on Saturday July 27th. Although the weather was a bit damp for a summer day, we had excellent company and a great time. Thank you to everyone for bringing potluck items and for joining us that day!

2. The PGSA’s Ashley Keefner has done a fabulous job at taking the initiative to create a new UWaterloo PGSA Facebook page – and it looks amazing! This page is a resource for incoming graduate students to ask questions to the current grad students. We look forward to welcoming the new graduate students soon! The new page will also feature PGSA updates for events and serve as a source of communication for grad students. Excellent work and a huge thank you to Ashley!

Recent faculty publications:

Patricia Marino, “Moral Coherence and Principle Pluralism,” in The Journal of Moral Philosophy. This paper develops and defends a conception of moral coherence that is suitable for use in contexts of principle pluralism. I argue that, as they are traditionally understood, coherence methods stack the deck against pluralist theories, by incorporating norms such as systematicity—that the principles of a theory should be as few and as simple as possible. I develop and defend an alternative, minimal, conception of coherence that focuses instead on consistency.

Don’t forget, as always, you can see more news and check out upcoming events at our Department website.

School starts in two weeks, so there’s sure to be more news soon. Thanks for reading! And keep in touch!

— Patricia Marino

Wednesday June 19, 2013

OK, I took this at Congress last year, but hey – you’ve seen one beer tent, you’ve seen them all, right?

Hi everyone, quite a bit of news today, and first some updates from what Matt Doucet describes as “Canadian philosophy’s annual summer camp”: the Canadian Philosophical Association meetings, part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

This year’s meetings were in Victoria, and were well attended by Waterloo Philosophy people. In addition to those below, graduate students Humayra Kathrada and Sara Weaver presented at the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science, Humayra on “The Role of Maxwell’s Ether Models,” and Sara on “Two Approaches to the Integration of Feminism with Evolutionary Theory.”

Matt says, “While at the CPA, I presented a paper entitled ‘Do we always regret weakness of will?’ In it, I argued that several contemporary models of weakness of will give regret  a central place. The idea is, roughly, that regretting your actions after the fact is a good bit of evidence that it might have been weak-willed. In my view, this is a mistake: drawing on psychological evidence on self-assessment, I argued that we very often do not regret our weakness of will. I therefore argued that the dominant models need to be reworked in order to drop the regret condition, and offered some speculation on what such reworked models might be like.”

Tim Kenyon was also at Congress, where he presented the joint paper “Critical thinking and debiasing,” with Guillaume Beaulac (Western), and also a commentary on Mike Raven’s (Victoria) paper on testimony at the CPA.  Tim also gave a talk on bibliometrics and other research impact measures as part of the Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences speaker series at the Congress.

Shannon Dea says, “I presented my paper “A Harm Reduction Approach to Abortion” in a well-attended plenary session. The plenary was a great opportunity for me. Throughout the Q+A, and indeed, the remainder of the CPA, I received really helpful questions and comments about my work. I was even name-checked the next day in Daniel Weinstock’s “Big Ideas” lecture, where he emphasized the importance of harm reduction approaches and told the audience that I’m the only other philosopher he’s heard discussing harm reduction. I also gave a talk on Spinoza’s theory of judgment, and a commentary on a paper on the ethics of parenting. In other news, I’m leaving Monday for Nanjing, where I’ll be teaching a couple of Philosophy courses at Nanjing University, as I did last year. Last year’s experience taught me a lot about accessible instruction. I’m really looking forward to reprising the experience. Anyone interested in following my adventures in China is welcome to visit my blog: anotherchineseroom.wordpress.com.

Graduate student Peter Blouw also presented a paper at the CPA  — on the role that counterfactual comparisons play in our ascriptions of mental states to other people. Peter writes, “This work was co-authored with John Turri, and it was great to get some feedback from other philosophers at the conference – I learned a lot, and I had the chance to meet a bunch of people working on similar topics, which was really helpful.”

Peter adds, “I also recently presented a poster with John at the annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in Providence, RI. This work describes and explains empirical evidence of a surprising tendency people have to deny that instances of blameless rule-breaking are, in fact, still a form of rule-breaking. We got some good questions and suggestions from other attendees at the conference, and there were a number of excellent talks to take in over the course of the event.”

Porter Library in springtime, by Vicki Brett

In other conference news, Heather Douglas says, “June 6-7, I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop on Cognitive Attitudes and Values in Science at the University of Notre Dame, where I gave a paper called ‘Norms for Claim-Making:  Between Pure and Practical Reason.’ It was a very helpful workshop, with lots of papers referring to each other’s work– and it seemed to make things clearer by the end!”

And one of our graduate students, Rosalind Abdool, presented two of her papers at the annual Canadian Bioethics Society conference at the end of May in Banff. Her first paper stemmed from her research area under the supervision of Mathieu Doucet; she discussed three major philosophical accounts of personal identity, provided a critique and comparison of the accounts and applied this analysis to a case in mental health. The second paper was a preliminary presentation of Rosalind’s thesis work, under the supervision of Patricia Marino. She argued that two of the major traditional philosophical arguments against deception in caregiving are inadequate; she further argued that cases where patients are incapable provide unique challenges to these arguments, and that the use of deception can actually enhance autonomy and promote trust.

More amazing campus wildlife captured on film by Vicki!

Next, the Department is  pleased to announce teaching and travel awards.

Department Teaching Award: Jim Jordan

Department Teaching Assistant Award: Ashley Keefner

Jim has an excellent track record as both a teacher and a TA.  The hard work he puts into course design and preparing his lectures, together with his obvious caring for his students, resulted in very strong student evaluations in all the courses he taught this year. Ashley won very strong praise from all the faculty members she TA-ed this year. They praised the quality of the feedback she provided to students, her reliability, and her pro-active approach to getting her work done efficiently and effectively.  They are both highly deserving winners.  But, as they are every year, these were very difficult decisions.  We are proud of all our grad student TAs and teachers, and wish to thank them all for their great contribution to Departmental teaching in this regard.

Congratulations Jim and Ashley!

These special travel awards are new this year:

The Philosophy Department Congress Travel Awards are for students with refereed papers accpeted at Congress meetings. This year’s awards go to Peter Blouw and Sara Weaver, whose papers are described above.  Congratulations to Peter and Sara!

The Philosophy “Excellence in Ph.D. Studies” Travel Awards are for students who have completed their course work and PhD Research Areas are eligible for this award. This award goes to two students each year based on overall performance in the program.  The awards can be used for whatever will best advance academic prospects of the student, whether it be by sharing the results of their research at conferences, visits to summer institutes or other departments, or in some other way.

The inaugural winners of this award are Paul Simard Smith and Rosalind Abdool. Congratulations, Paul and Rosalind!

Paul is nearing the completion of his PhD, in which he develops a nuanced account of logical pluralism and investigates the ‘downstream” implications for current debates in other areas of philosophy such as epistemology and argumentation theory if logical pluralism is true.  He has published a number of articles in professional journals and peer reviewed conference proceedings. He also has several presentations at professional conferences, and won an award for the top student paper at an international informal logic conference in 2011.  He is an excellent teacher, receiving very strong evaluations from the students in his courses, and is one of the department’s best and most reliable teachers of online courses.

Rosalind has long been known as a great Departmental citizen, with first-rate grades and terrific reviews for her TA-ing. This past year, she was president of the grad student association, and passed her dissertation proposal, which will deal with the use of deception in medical ethics, for instance in giving covert medication to patients. She works and volunteers in clinical bioethics fields at various Ontario hospitals, and delivered 2 refereed papers last year, one at the World Congress for Psychiatric Nurses and the other at the Canadian Bioethics Society Conference.

We’re so pleased to be able to support our graduate students in developing and disseminating their research.  Great work, all!

Also, some faculty written work has just appeared:
Heather Douglas has two new pieces:  “The first, co-authored with PD Magnus (SUNY Albany), is in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science and presents an overview of the arguments made about the value of novel prediction, arguing for a pluralist instrumentalist view of the issue.  It is available here. The second is a book review of Kitcher’s latest book, Science in a Democratic Society, and is in the British Journal for Philosophy of Science.  It is here.”

Nick Ray says, “My paper, “Interpreting Russell’s Gray’s Elegy Argument” has come out in the most recent volume of Dialogue. The paper argues against the idea that Russell’s theory of denoting concepts was inconsistent, and mobilizes textual evidence in support of more subtle semantic and epistemological reasons why that theory was rejected in favour of Russell’s theory of descriptions in his famous 1905 paper, “On Denoting.”

Finally, I keep forgetting to mention, I also have a blog, which is sometimes philosophical:  The Kramer Is Now: Accidental Philosopher Encounters Modern Life.  If you want to read a recent post mocking recent trends in university instruction, you can check out Naked Accounting 101: The Course Catalog of the Future.

Don’t forget, as always, you can see more news and check out upcoming events at our Department website.

— Patricia Marino

Wednesday April 24, 2013

As many of you know, last week was our department’s annual awards celebration and general end-of-the-year-party.

One of the things we do at this event is connect up with current Friends of the Department and invite new ones, and we were very glad our Friends Bob Ewan and Gerry Remers were able to join us and participate in the presentation.  It is always nice to see our Friends, and Bob and Gerry both shared interesting reflections on the role of a philosophy and arts education in modern life and modern business.

Our first agenda item was to formally install a new Friend of the Department, Brian Rudrick.  Having invited Brian to join our Friends recently, we were shocked and saddened at his sudden death several weeks ago.  Inducting him as Friend posthumously, Tim Kenyon shared with us his memories of Brian’s warmth and lifetime intellectual curiosity.  Here’s a picture of Tim holding the plaque that honors the occasion:

Tim Kenyon posthumously installs Brian Rudrick as a Friend of the Philosophy Department.

Then the main event:  student prize giving!

The first year prize was split as a tie between Martin Zelko, prestented by Carla Fehr, and Bethany Roorda, presented by me, Patricia Marino.

Carla Fehr presenting one of two first-year prizes to Martin Zelko

Patricia Marino presenting one of the two first-year prizes to Bethany Roorda.

The second year prize was awarded to Julia Hill, presented by Mathieu Doucet.

Matt Doucet awarding the second-year prize to Julia Hill.

The third year prize was awarded to Raya Sidhu, presented again by Mathieu Doucet.

The fourth year prize was also a tie, between Mike Kelly, presented by Shannon Dea, and Claire Gallant, presented by Dave DeVidi.

Shannon Dea presenting one of the two fourth-year prizes.

Dave DeVidi presenting one of the two fourth-year prizes to Claire Gallant.

Professor Emerita Judy Wubnig funds two prizes for papers in the history of philosophy, one at the undergraduate level and one at the graduate level.  The undergraduate winner was Robert Mason, for his paper “Abandoning the Silencing Requirement for Virtue,” and the graduate winner was Ben Nelson, for his paper “Unwritten Law: Three Selections from the History of Political Philosophy.”

Ben Nelson, Judy Wubnig, and Robert Mason

Another essay prize honors the memory of our late Distinguish Professor Emeritus Angus Kerr-Lawson.  This prize is given to the best graduate or undergraduate paper in naturalistic philosophy or American philosophy, which were Professor Kerr-Lawson’s research areas.  I was very pleased to assist Kate Kerr-Lawson in presenting this prize to Eric Bendall, for his paper “Bangu’s Quasi-Empirical Strategy and Mathematical Naturalism.”

Kate Kerr-Lawson presenting the Kerr-Lawson prize to Eric Bendall

Our awards ceremony was another opportunity to celebrate Paul Thagard’s winning the prestigious Killam Prize.  Associate Vice-President, External Research Bruce Muirhead joined us to help honor Paul:

Bruce Muirhead and Paul Thagard

We were also very pleased to celebrate some graduate student degrees and honors.  Four students earned MA degrees over the past academic year; here they are with their thesis titles:

Christine Heffernan, “Everything is going to be Okay, Right?  Kindness, Compassion, and the Moral Responsibility of Self-Deception.”
Ryan Huckle, “Knowledge, First Aid and the Moral Requirements of Rescue.”
Jim Tigwell, three papers in lieu of a thesis, including “The Lions and the Little Bird: Authenticity in Social Media.”
Jessey Wright, “Quantum Field Theory:  Motivating the Axiom of Microcausality”

To cap it all off we were thrilled to honor our two most recent PhD’s both receiving SSHRC post-docs!  Eric Hochstein will spend his at Washington University, and Rachel McKinnon will spend hers at the University of Calgary.

We are grateful to Christie Digital for its generous support of this event, and to Vicki Brett, Debbie Dietrich, and Shannon Dea for organizing and planning.  Thanks to Vicki and to graduate student Ben Nelson for taking great photographs.  And thanks to all the department members who make these events possible.  Congratulations again to all the prize winners and nominees!

Some other news from last week comes to us from Nick Ray, who attended an intensive UW “teaching academy.”  Nick says, “I was very fortunate to attend the Teaching Excellence Academy, which ran from Wednesday April 17 to Monday April 22. The Academy is an intensive workshop that brings faculty together from around the university to discuss strategies for course development and design. There were 13 participants from across all 6 Faculties, as well as a host of facilitators from the Centre for Teaching Excellence, the Centre for Extended Learning, and former partipants of the TEA–one of which was our very own Chair, Dave DeVidi! He was kind enough to share with the participants his experiences from last year’s TEA, as was Wayne Loucks (Engineering). It was nice for us rookies to have some veterans from which to learn the ins and outs of the Academy.

The goal of the Academy is to apply conceptualization tools and principles of alignment in the process of re-designing a course syllabus. I was trying to improve my syllabus for 250B, Great Works: Modern. I quickly realized that my standard tools of assessment (mainly essay writing) were out of step with what I wanted the students to learn, both about Modern Philosophy, and the sorts of skills I wanted them to take away from the course. I also learned that the description of the course I had on offer, as well as the objectives I wanted to strive for, were a bit unclear for students. The Academy really got me thinking about how a student reads a course syllabus.

We also spent a great deal of time discussing strategies relative to student learning abilities, and the relevance of contextual factors that impact our teaching, including empirical research that shows how students in first and second year differ from students in third and fourth year as regards attitudes to knowledge, and how a university course, the professor, and fellow students can facilitate knowledge generation (as opposed to mere information transference). Generational differences in student learning were also addressed, as were strategies for how to utilize online resources (especially LEARN) in effective teaching.

Details aside, the Academy was a wonderful opportunity to think about course design for a number of days, and to share in the collective wisdom of the group. Each of us has a unique pedagogy, and it was fantastic to see how others handled those tricky situations that seem to accompany university teaching, regardless of the specific content of the course.I hope to be able to attend the Academy again, or other similar workshops. It really was a fantastic, informative, and transformational experience.”  Thanks, Nick, for passing that along.

I’ll end with one programming note from myself:  between now and September I expect there will be less news, so I will post every two or three weeks instead of every week. You can follow this blog by email using the wordpress gadget on the right hand side.  I always post these in our Facebook alumni and friends group, and soon I’ll also set up a department Facebook page — liking that page will also be a way to see updates.

Don’t forget, as always, you can see more news and check out upcoming events at our Department website.

Hope everyone is well!

— Patricia Marino

Wednesday April 17, 2013

Another great campus photo by Vicki Brett.

Hi everyone, first we have a bit of sad news about a former member of our Department, J. Sayer Minas.  Professor Minas died recently at the age of 87; he  was a professor in the early days of the Department, and later served as Dean of Arts. You can read more about Professor Minas’s research interests and life at UW in today’s Bulletin.

Ben Nelson, looking philosophical.

In graduate student news, Ben Nelson tells us he’s had a paper accepted for presentation at the World Philosophy Congress this summer in Greece, on “A Non-Standard View of Intuitions.”  Congratulations, Ben — sounds like it will be fun!

I have some news myself this week:  I just got back from presenting the keynote address at Northwestern’s annual graduate student conference Queertopia! 6.0.  The conference is interdisciplinary, and this year’s theme was “Philosophical Investigations into Sexuality.”  There were some great papers by students on topics like the nature and possibility of consent, Wittgensteinian theories of sexual identity, and depictions of queerness in the media.  In my talk, titled “Objectify Me:  Sexual Autonomy and the Utopia of Non-Conformity,” I discussed the possibility of positive sexual objectification, and connected sexual autonomy with the kinds of options a person has to choose from.  There are differences between the stripping and flaunting of a gay pride and the stripping and flaunting of Girls Gone Wild, and in part my talk aimed to analyze some of these.

Did you know Paul Thagard has a blog at Psychology Today’s website?  Paul’s most recent blog post, “What are Values,” touches on some themes raised by a conference he attended recently with UW people Carla Fehr, Heather Douglas, and Katie Plaisance.

Shannon Dea writes to share some news about Tim Kenyon’s presentation to the Faculty of Arts’ weekly “Pedagogy Picnics” series Tuesday.  Shannon says, “Tim talked about some cool teaching methods he used in his recent course on Testimony. For the course, he assigned some of his own work in progress as readings. Early in the term, he received a “revise and resubmit” on one of the articles they’d already read, an article about which the students hadn’t been very critical the first time out. So, he shared the referees’ reports with his class and they spent two weeks working through the reports, taking note of the main scholarly lessons to be gleaned from them — things like the merits of interpetive charity. For the rest of the course, the students’ critiques were more robust and more mature than before they’d examined the reports, and, on course evaluation forms at the end of term, many students listed the time with the referees’ reports as among their favourite parts of the course. While many of us would balk at sharing referees’ comments on our work, this approach was a great way to
expose students to important scholarly skills and some of what happens
“behind the curtain” of academe.”

Carla Fehr also shares some end-of-term thoughts about teaching:  I just finished teaching my first seminar class at Waterloo.  The topic was the social epistemology of science we focused on the work of Helen Longino and Miriam Solomon.  I had a really good time teaching the class.  I learned to look forward to going to class everyday because I could count on the students to share really thoughtful and interesting ideas.”

Shannon Dea

Shannon Dea also says to tell everyone that tomorrow (April 18), the Department will hold its fourth annual student awards reception.  “We’ll be awarding class and essay prizes, celebrating recent grads, congratulating Professor Paul Thagard on his Killam Prize and posthumously naming a new “Friend of the Deprtment,” Dr. Brian Rudrick, who was delighted to learn he’d been selected as our newest Friend before his sudden death a couple of weeks ago. We’ll also be welcoming back our first two Friends, Bob Ewen and Gerry Remers. Do you have a connection with the Department? Join us for the celebration Thursday at 3:30 in HH 373.” We’ll share the details about the event and about the prize winners in next week’s blog post.

Thanks so much to Shannon and to our Department undergraduate coordinator Vicki Brett, for organizing tomorrow’s event!

Don’t forget, as always, you can see more news and check out upcoming events at our Department website.

Have a great week,

— Patricia Marino

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Hi everyone, it’s the last Wednesday of term and hopefully the last day of wintry weather.

Eric Hochstein, future SSHRC post-doc!

First, our warmest congratulations to recent alum and current instructor Eric Hochstein, who won a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship!  Its value is $38,000/year for 2 years, and it’ll run from January 2014 to December 2016.  Eric says, “I’ll be working with Carl Craver (who specializes in philosophy of neuroscience), as part of the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis (which, incidentally, is where Chris Eliasmith got his PhD!).”  Great work, Eric.

Faculty members Heather Douglas, Carla Fehr, Katie Plaisance, and Paul Thagard attended the Socially Relevant Philosophy of/in Science workshop at Penn State.  Heather says that “it was an intense and productive two days, and lots of promising collaborations with colleagues at Penn State, Michigan State, and Notre Dame were begun!”

Tim Keynon and I (Patricia Marino) just got back from the Pacific APA, where Tim commented on a paper and I co-hosted two sessions for the Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love — which I and Prof. Helga Varden (UIUC) are co-Presidents of.

Tim “commented on a great paper by Shari Clough on feminist formal logic pedagogy.”  I was there and took this great photo of Shari and Tim after their session:

Shari Clough and Tim Kenyon

The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love featured two panels:  one invited session on pornography and another including a few papers submitted to us via an open call.

Rachel McKinnon

As part of that latter session Rachel McKinnon, very recently part of our Department and now about to take up her SSHRC post-doc at Calgary, presented a paper on “Stereotype Threat for Trans Women.”  Thanks for the great paper, Rachel!

Finally, here are some recent faculty writings and publications:

Heather Douglas published an essay on science and the boundary between public and private at Science Progress.  In it, Heather says, she “uses Dewey to elucidate why political conservatives are often more hostile to science than liberals.”

Tim Kenyon’s “Noninferentialism and Testimonial Belief Fixation,” has just appeared in Episteme 10.1: 73-85.

Don’t forget, as always, you can see more news and check out upcoming events at our Department website.

Have a great week,

— Patricia Marino