MIT philosophy: news

October

• him, himself, and he: Caspar Hare's "eyebrow-raising" solipsism
• Sally Haslanger on gender equity

September

• The MIT and IJN philosophers successfully self-located
• The 2008 Philosopher's Annual contains another bumper crop from MIT L&P: Agustín Rayo's "Vague Representation", and Kai von Fintel's "CIA Leaks" (with Anthony Gillies)

August

• Judy Thomson gave a keynote address ("More on the Metaphysics of Harm") at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress. This fall she will be a Visiting Professor at Princeton.
• Julia Markovits joined the department from the Harvard Society of Fellows
• Paolo Santorio gave "Communication for Expressivists" (co-authored with Alejandro Pérez Carballo) at the ANU PhilSoc, and (last month) "Monsters and binding" at the Melbourne AAP

July

• A new book to take to the beach: Caspar Hare's On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects

June

• The much reported release of eight books by MIT philosophers is marked with a party; celebratory crossword and answers here
• Sally Haslanger won a Levitan Award for Excellence in Teaching

May

• Bob Stalnaker gave the Hempel Lectures at Princeton

April

• Mahrad Almotahari and Ephraim Glick's paper "Context, content, and epistemic transparency" was accepted by Mind
• Paolo Santorio gave his paper "Epistemic modality and contexts" at Semantics and Philosophy in Europe

March

• Alex Byrne and Heather Logue's Disjunctivism won an award at the New England Book Show

February

• Steve Yablo is giving the Locke lectures in 2011-2
• Agustín Rayo was awarded a Burkhardt Residential Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for 2009-10

January 2009

• MIT minds, past and present, met at the MITing of the Minds
• Ari Krupick presented a paper at the University of Miami graduate student conference in epistemology
• new books: Steve Yablo's Thoughts, Rae Langton's Sexual Solipsism, Alex Byrne and Heather Logue's Disjunctivism

December

• Public Intellectuals Division Christmas Special: Alex Byrne on God in the Boston Review
• Judy Thomson's Normativity has just been published, and you can catch Judy talking about the subject on YouTube
• The context set was shrunk at the 30th birthday party for Bob Stalnaker's "Assertion"
• Sally Haslanger's OpenCourseWare class on ancient philosophy has been translated into Persian

November

• more from our Public Intellectuals Division (this time the Premier League): Sally Haslanger talked about Queen Elizabeth, President Obama, and much more on bloggingheads

October

• from our Public Intellectuals Division: Judy Thomson weighed in on x-phi, and alum Liz Harman commented on the happiness of dogs

September

• the MIT philosophers retreated to Eastover
• Bob Stalnaker's Our Knowledge of the Internal World has just been published
• in an orderly handover that will see even higher yields from graduate students toiling in the field of philosophy, our Great Leader, Steve Yablo, has been succeeded by our Dear Leader, Richard Holton
• The Philosopher's Annual have made their picks of ten best philosophy papers published in 2007: they include Seth Yalcin's "Epistemic Modals", Sally Haslanger's "'But Mom, Crop Tops are Cute!' Social Knowledge, Social Structure and Ideology Critique", and our alum Adam Elga's "Reflection and Disagreement"

The MIT philosophy summer diaspora is finally over...

• Steve Yablo and Agustín Rayo are back from Peru, Bob Stalnaker is back from France and Germany, Rae Langton and Richard Holton are back from Iris Murdoch's house in Oxford, Alex Byrne is back from Australia and New Zealand, Caspar Hare is back from Britain, France, Macedonia, and Wisconsin, Vann McGee sensibly stayed home, other faculty members as yet unaccounted for...
• Adam Hosein, David Etlin, and Brad Skow went to the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress; his youthful good looks secured Brad the young ethicist prize
• more news about the peripatetic Etlin: he, Sarah Moss and Bob Stalnaker gave talks at the First Formal Epistemology Festival in Konstanz Germany -- which was partly in honor of Bob and co-organized by MIT alum Eric Swanson
• David Etlin wandered around the Americas: he gave a talk in Paraty Brazil at CLE30/EBL XV/SLALM XIV and then (if that were not exact enough) at the Society for Exact Philosophy, in Laramie Wyoming
• Heather Logue hopped around Australia: she gave a talk on The Relational and Representational Character of Perceptual Experience at the ANU
• Lauren Ashwell hiked around England: she gave a talk at Bristol
• much summer chitchat from Holton and Langton: Richard gave talks about freedom of the will in Oxford, Edinburgh, Oslo, Paris and Talahassee, and about factives in Oxford and Bristol; Rae gave talks about unknowability and intrinsicness in Oxford and Bristol, and about pornography and hate speech in Oxford, London, Sheffield, Edinburgh and Oslo

May

• the philosophy indoor soccer team, the Existential Eliminators, following distinguished predecessors, made the playoffs in our intramural competition
• in more tenure news, Steve Yablo's tenure as department head ended with a traditional reading of the hunting of the snark
• Agustín Rayo received tenure

April

• David Etlin, Caspar Hare, and Agustín Rayo all went to Paris to talk about vagueness
• Irving Singer is on MIT World
• MIT alum Peter Koellner won a Goedel centenary prize
• the 16th annual Harvard-MIT graduate student philosophy conference went swimmingly
• Ephraim Glick gave a paper ("What is the Problem of Intentional Identity?") at the central APA, winning a graduate student travel stipend

March

• Steve Yablo gave the Hempel Lectures at Princeton
• AskPhilosophers has been selected as one of the 101 most useful websites, which must have something to do with Sally's answers
• Ephraim Glick and Paolo Santorio gave papers at the Princeton/Rutgers graduate conference
• Brad Skow was picked to pick the Burchard Scholars
• Bob Stalnaker gave the keynote address ("The New Relativism") at the NYU/Columbia philosophy graduate student conference

February

• Judy Thomson gave the keynote address ("Turning the Trolley") at the USC/UCLA philosophy graduate student conference, and stayed on at UCLA for the rest of the month to give a mini-seminar on moral theory in the philosophy department, and a paper ("Some Reflections on Hart and Honore, Causation in the Law") at the law school's legal theory workshop
• 13 students and 2 faculty decided to getfit (alternative spin: 15 students and 10 faculty decided not to)

January 2008

• Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy, edited by Sally Haslanger and others, now has a companion blog: Gender, Race and Philosophy: The Blog
• faculty and graduate students of past and present had an enjoyable and successful MITing

December

• while the faculty were busy collecting their prizes, Seth Yalcin published "Epistemic Modals" in Mind
• in late breaking news, Brad Skow won the 2007 Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholars Competition

November

• Richard Holton gave a public lecture, "What Does Empirical Research on Moral Intuitions Tell Us about Morality?", at the Kennedy School of Government

October

• Irving Singer gave a public talk and reading from his new book on Ingmar Bergman at Lame Duck Books
• Valentina Urbanek presented "Person affecting reasons and the nature of morality" at the Northern New England Philosophical Association
• Irving Singer's book Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher: Reflections on His Creativity was published by MIT Press

September 2007

• the department introduced a new undergraduate concentration in ethics
• Rachael Briggs rewrote "Diamonds are a girl's best friend"
• Alex Byrne gave the Burman lectures in Umeå, Sweden
• Sally Haslanger's paper "Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: not by reason (alone)" made crooked timber and inside higher ed

It's summertime and the academic living is easy...

• ...except for Bob Stalnaker, who gave the Locke lectures at Oxford
• the departmental mug invaded the blogosphere
• Brad Skow joined the department from UMass Amherst