posted May 1, 2013, 7:13 AM by Peggy DesAutels
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updated May 1, 2013, 7:25 AM
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L. A. PaulUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill(Photo L. A. Paul 2006 © Jiri Benovsky)
L. A. Paul works on a range of topics, from the metaphysics of causation and time to the epistemic puzzles raised by transformative experiences like having a child.
Much of her early work in metaphysics focused on fundamental ontology, especially on the nature of properties. She argues that the world is built from properties alone, and that there is no deep metaphysical difference between properties and objects. Instead, the world is, fundamentally, a mereological mix of qualitative natures. To support this view she develops a mereology of properties as parts and of ordinary objects as fusions of properties, and argue that this metaphysical view fit better with fundamental physics than more "ordinary" views which endorse the existence of substances. These sorts of reflections on the fundamental structure of reality have led her to investigate the methodological connections between metaphysics and science on the one hand and metaphysics and ordinary experience on the other, and some of her more recent work develops connections between physics and metaphysics, as well as between cognitive science and metaphysics.
The idea that best unites her current interests is the importance of using experience, or what she would describe as "phenomenology," in making sense of the world around us. Thus, she is fascinated by how we experience causation and time, and in particular how we experience ourselves as perceivers in time and as causal manipulators and agents. This draws her to empirical work in psychology, especially developmental psychology and cognitive science. She has just published a book on the metaphysics of causation, and she is developing a series of papers on the relationship between time and our experience of time, especially our experience of the passing of time and of the way the past differs from the future, drawing on connections between the cognitive science of temporal perception, the metaphysics of the temporal direction and temporal passage, and thermodynamics and entropy.
Consistent with her primary philosophical focus on phenomenology and its role in how we understand the world around us, she has also been investigating questions about how phenomenology interacts with decision theory, especially in the context of major or life-changing decisions. She is especially interested in-- if we think of ourselves as making decisions that affect our lives as experiencing selves-- how we should approach life-changing decisions to act in ways that that modify who we are or how we experience (they are transformative experiences). Such decisions are often epistemically impenetrable in a special way, since we need to actually have had the experience we are contemplating undergoing before we can assess its value and fully grasp how it might change us. This situation has some interesting philosophical implications, especially because decision theory may not have the resources to model all the important features of such decisions. The possibility of transformative experiences raises interesting questions about how we should think about making major life decisions, whether we should think of ourselves as rational actors when making major decisions, and how we are to assess our own well-being, especially over the long term.
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posted Mar 28, 2013, 9:23 AM by Peggy DesAutels
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updated Mar 28, 2013, 6:14 PM
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Alison Jaggar University of Colorado at Boulder ALISON M. JAGGAR is a College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she holds a joint appointment in Philosophy and Women and Gender Studies. She is also a Research Coordinator at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo, Norway. Jaggar has won many fellowships and awards. In 2011 she won the University of Colorado Gee award for advancing women, interdisciplinary scholarly contributions and distinguished teaching.
Jaggar was a pioneer in introducing feminist concerns into philosophy. In 1971, at Miami University of Ohio, she taught what she thinks was the first-ever course in feminist philosophy, distributing her syllabi and readings through the newly-formed Society for Women in Philosophy. Her articles and books have been translated into many languages and some have become classics. Jaggar also pioneered the discipline of feminist studies, producing several texts which helped define the field. They include, Feminist Frameworks, (co-edited with P. Rothenberg, 1978, 1984, 1993), Living with Contradictions: Controversies in Feminist Ethics (1994) and Just Methods: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Reader (2008).
In 1971, Jaggar was a founder of SWIP and in the late 1960s she worked with a women’s caucus in the APA which eventually grew into the Committee on the Status of Women. Jaggar was a member of the CSW for several years and chaired it from 1986-1991. She was also a founder of Hypatia.
Jaggar currently works on gender and globalization, a broad area which she approaches from several angles, normative, methodological, and epistemological. Normatively, she has published many articles exploring how global institutions and policies interact with local practices to create gendered cycles of vulnerability and exploitation. In 2013, Polity will publish her edited book, Gender and Global Justice and she plans an eventual monograph. Jaggar is also a team member in a multi-disciplinary and transnational research project working to develop a new poverty metric capable of revealing the gendered dimensions of global poverty. This project is methodologically innovative because it incorporates the perspectives of poor people into the measure. Finally, at the epistemological level, Jaggar is working with Theresa Tobin (Marquette) to figure out how moral claims may be justified in real-world circumstances of diversity and inequality. Jaggar and Tobin propose a new mission and method for moral epistemology. They advocate abandoning the search for a one-size-fits-all-contexts method of moral justification and substituting a naturalized case-study approach, which investigates how moral claims are justified in the real world. They argue that, through interdisciplinary teamwork and moral fieldwork, philosophers should develop different models of moral justification appropriate for varying contexts and explain why some models “fit” some contexts better than others. Expressed in the most general terms, Jaggar seeks to reframe traditional philosophical debates about justice and justification in terms that are responsive to gender, globalization, and post-colonialism.
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posted Mar 3, 2013, 5:12 PM by Peggy DesAutels
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updated Mar 3, 2013, 5:28 PM
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Sally J. Scholz Villanova University Sally J. Scholz is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, where she won the prestigious Lindback Award for Teaching Excellence in 2006. She works in social and political philosophy and feminist theory. Scholz’s early work focused on violence against women, oppression, and peacemaking. Prior to moving to Villanova, she worked as a legal advocate for victims of domestic violence in Indiana. This work led her to explore issues in the ethics of advocacy and, later, expanded to violence against women in conflict situations. She co-edited Peacemaking: Lessons from the Past, Vision for the Future with Judith Presler (Rodopi 2000) and has published numerous essays on war rape and just war theory. Her first two single-author books, On de Beauvoir (Wadsworth 2000) and On Rousseau (Wadsworth 2001), are short, accessible introductions to two very influential thinkers. She has subsequently explored Beauvoir’s own appreciation of Rousseau’s work with a number of essays. Additional work on Beauvoir led to the co-editing of The Contradictions of Freedom: Philosophical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Les Mandarins’ with Shannon Mussett (SUNY 2005).
Her recent research emerges out of these various strains and focuses on solidarity. In 2008 she published an extensive study of the moral relations of solidarity that could not help but be influenced by Rousseau and Beauvoir. This book, Political Solidarity (Penn State Press), offers a comprehensive theory of collective movements for social change. Political solidarity is unique among forms of solidarity; an individual’s moral commitment precedes the collective engagement of solidarity. Scholz continues this interest in solidarity with research on global and transnational feminist accounts of solidarity. A small part of that may be seen in the Feminism: A Beginner’s Guide (One World 2010).
Scholz is a former editor of the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy (July 2003-June 2008), former co-editor of the Journal for Peace and Justice Studies (August 2006-2011), and recently guest edited a Special Issue of Hypatia on Crossing Borders (Vol. 28.2). She currently serves on the APA Board as Chair of the Committee on Lectures, Publications, and Research. She is also Vice President of the North American Society for Social Philosophy. In July 2013, Shelley Wilcox and Sally Scholz will become the new editorial team for Hypatia. Wilcox will serve as Book Review Editor at San Francisco State University. Scholz will serve as the Editor and will welcome the Editorial Offices to Villanova University. |
posted Jan 31, 2013, 6:30 PM by Peggy DesAutels
Naomi Zack University of Oregon
Naomi Zack is Professor of Philosophy at University of Oregon. Her two recent books, The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011) and Ethics for Disaster (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009) are analyses and applications of ethical theories to areas of study that have not yet been approached from primarily ethical perspectives. The Ethics and Mores of Race is an inquiry into the history of moral philosophy in search of general principles of universal equality, which do not appear until the mid-twentieth century. In that process she has reexamined the work of canonical figures–Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, J.S. Mill, and Rawls–in terms of what they meant by “equality” and how comprehensive over the human community (–not very–) those meanings were in both philosophical and historical contexts. While she does not provide an Ethics of Race, per se, the book concludes with twelve universal egalitarian Requirements for an Ethics of Race. Ethics for Disaster is the first philosophical address of disaster ethics, with a multidisciplinary reach. She has introduced deontology and virtue ethics into disaster studies, as a challenge to the simplistic utilitarianism that has dominated this field.Besides her work on race and disaster, she has recently published several occasional articles on popular culture, e.g., vampires and black female comedians, and Race and Ethnicity (2012), a textbook for Bridgpoint Education, which will primarily be used as an e-book at Rockford College. Race and Ethnicity combines earlier philosophical work of hers and others with a sociological consensus that human races are culturally relative and that although racial divisions have no biological reality, their social reality is still powerfully associated with oppression.In 2010 she founded the UO website of free streaming videos, Philosophical Installations (http://philinstall.uoregon.edu/) that by Spring 2013 will have 2500 philosophy videos available all in one place, for classroom and research use. |
posted Dec 30, 2012, 5:35 PM by Peggy DesAutels
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updated Dec 30, 2012, 6:45 PM
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Cynthia WillettEmory University
Cynthia Willett is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. She studied political science at the University of Missouri (BA) and philosophy at University of Minnesota, University of Toronto (MA), University of Texas, and Pennsylvania State University (where after a ten-year journey through a wonderfully wide range of graduate programs she earned a Ph.D. writing on Hegel and Derrida). She has taught at Harvard, Le Moyne College, University of Kansas, and, since 1996, at Emory. She has won two teaching awards, and served as department chair, and as co-director for the Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy during its exciting 50th anniversary. She has served on the APA executive board, and now is on the executive board for American Philosophy Forum and for Symposia on Race, Gender, and Philosophy: http://sgrp.typepad.com/
Her research spirals around edgy questions of social justice, comic conceptions of community, the tragedy of hubris, and the festive ethics of eros. She is inspired by many writers and thinkers, including Luce Irigaray, Stanley Cavell, Toni Morrison, and Enrique Dussel. Her first book, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities, (Routledge, 1995) offers a slave narrative of history (in contrast with Hegel’s master narrative). This history reconfigures human nature through the social bond between the mother and child; rejects separation from the mother as a measure of maturity; and draws upon Frederick Douglass as a major political thinker of social freedom. She edited Theorizing Multiculturalism (Blackwell, 1998) while having children. Her second book, The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (Cornell, 2001), is a dialectic of hubris as a violation of social bonds; here care ethics and critical theory are transformed as a theory of social eros. Her third book, Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom recapitulates American history as farce yet with a promise of social freedom.
A fourth authored book, Interspecies Living (a serious ethics with a comic twist) is just completed. There she presents a model for social attunement across species.
Her new essays are coauthored: “The Seriously Erotic Politics of Laughter,” in Social Research Volume 79 No 1 (Spring 2012); reprinted version with added section in Joanne Waugh and Sharon Crasnow’s Philosophical Feminism and Popular Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). And “Trayvon Martin and the Tragedy of the New Jim Crow,” in Pursuing Trayvon Martin edited by George Yancy and Janine Jones (Lexington, 2012).
An interview with Chris Long and Shannon Winnubst on anarchic communitarianism and animal humor appears at:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/digitaldialogue/2012/12/digital-dialogue-59-anarchy-and-animal-humor.html
Her next project is on the politics of music, and she counts learning jazz guitar as research. |
posted Dec 7, 2012, 7:18 AM by APA Status-of-Women
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updated Dec 7, 2012, 2:26 PM by Peggy DesAutels
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Chris J. CuomoUniversity of GeorgiaChris
J. Cuomo is Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of
Georgia, where she also serves as an affiliate faculty member of the
Environmental Ethics Certificate Program, the Institute for Native American
Studies, the Institute for African-American Studies, and the Initiative on
Climate and Society. Originally from New York but raised in suburban New
Jersey, Cuomo received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison in 1992. She served as Obed J. Wilson Professor of Ethics at
the University of Cincinnati before moving south in 2006. Chris has held
visiting fellowships at Cornell University, Amherst College and Murdoch
University, and has been a recipient of research grants from the Rockefeller
Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Ms. Foundation, the National
Council for Research on Women, and Ideas for Creative Exploration.
Cuomo's
work is multifaceted. Her primary interests are the articulation of
feminist philosophy on its own terms, and interdisciplinary research and
teaching that desegregate theory and practice. She has been a leading advocate
for feminist approaches to environmental philosophy, science and activism, and
has developed concepts, such as ecological feminism, flourishing and dynamic
charm, to ground critical multicultural movements for green justice (Feminism
and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing, Routledge, 1998). Her
work in philosophy of race has focused on the cunning fictions of whiteness and
their maintenance in mundane social norms (Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical
Reflections, co-edited with Kim Q. Hall, Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). Her
2007 essay "Dignity and the Right to be Lesbian or Gay" considers
sexual autonomy a fundamental aspect of human dignity, and provides more good
reasons to reject policies based on religious homophobia (Philosophical
Studies 132(1)).
Cuomo's
book The Philosopher Queen: Feminist Essays on War, Love, and Knowledge (Routledge
2003) was nominated for a Lambda Award and an APA book award, and includes
writings on topics ranging from post-9/11 anti-war politics to conflicts in
feminism to earth-friendly science. Her co-edited Feminist Philosophy Reader
(with Alison Bailey) is a popular textbook in philosophy and women's and
gender studies. She has edited a special issue of Ethics and the Environment,
on Eco-Art, and a forthcoming special issue of Hypatia, on Climate
Change (with Nancy Tuana). Her 1996 essay “Why War is Not Just (an Event):
Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence" (Hypatia
11(4)) has an enthusiastic following in the debate community and is an
oft-cited "kritik" argument.
Currently Chris is involved in ongoing
collaborative research on local and indigenous knowledge about landscape
changes on the North Slope of Alaska (see "Environmental Change, Indigenous Knowledge, and Subsistence on Alaska’s North Slope"), and
writing on feminism and climate justice (e.g., “Climate Change, Responsibility and Vulnerability”). She is also working on an art exhibit/performance
in the form of a community education center on global warming and alternative energy, and learning to play the
fiddle.
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posted Sep 3, 2012, 9:56 AM by Peggy DesAutels
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updated Nov 24, 2012, 11:26 AM
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Roberta L. Millstein University of California, DavisRoberta L. Millstein is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, where she is affiliated with the Science and Technology Studies program and the John Muir Institute of the Environment. Her research interests are in the history and philosophy of biology, the philosophy of science, and environmental ethics. Millstein's research interests include the way that general topics in the philosophy of science, such as causation, mechanisms, probability, and determinism, illuminate and are illuminated by topics in evolutionary biology and ecology. Recent work examines the concepts of 'fitness,' 'population', and 'random drift'; race and sexual selection; and connections between population genetics and ecology. She is currently working on projects exploring Patricia Gowatyʼs adaptively flexible sex role model, on the importance of interconnectedness in Aldo Leopoldʼs Land Ethic, and on different types of field experiments (in contrast to laboratory experiments). She is also a co-editor of the forthcoming Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics with Hsiang-Ke Chao and Szu-Ting Chen.
Prior to her current position at UC Davis, Millstein had a position at CSU East Bay/ Hayward and a visiting position at the University of Pittsburgh. She was twice elected as Secretary of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science, where she served for four years, in addition to serving the Society for many years in capacities such as the listserv moderator and webmaster. She is currently on the Governing Board for the Philosophy of Science Association, and is webmaster/ listserv moderator for the PSA Women's Caucus. |
posted Aug 16, 2012, 8:51 AM by APA Status-of-Women
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updated Aug 16, 2012, 9:12 AM
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Susan Brison Dartmouth College
Susan Brison is Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Dartmouth College, where she also teaches in the Women's and Gender Studies Program. She has held visiting positions at Tufts, Princeton, and NYU, and was a Mellon Fellow in Law, Philosophy, and Social Theory at NYU and a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
The overarching themes of Brison’s work—on topics ranging from mental representation to free speech theory to sexual violence—have been anti-individualism and a defense of the relational self. After completing her Ph.D. dissertation, Do We Think in Mentalese? A Critique of the Language of Thought Hypothesis, Brison brought her background in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language to bear on issues in ethics and in social, political, and legal philosophy. In a series of articles and a forthcoming book on freedom of expression, she exposed and critiqued an implicit mind-body dualism in the legal categorization of harms caused by verbal and physical assaults and argued against the defense of the right to free speech grounded in individual autonomy.
In her book, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton, 2002; Editions Chambon, 2003; C.H. Beck Verlag, 2004), Brison argued for the necessity of first person narratives in theorizing about personal identity and defended an account of the self as an embodied narrative that is socially constructed (and undone and re-constructed) in relation to other selves. Her work in progress includes a coauthored book, Debating Pornography, and a book on the so-called “sex wars” that divided U.S. feminists beginning in the 1970s and continue today in conflicts between feminist theorists and queer theorists over gender-based harassment and violence.
Influenced by feminist theory since studying French feminism as an undergraduate and interviewing Simone de Beauvoir, she credits the mentors she met through SWIP (the Society for Women in Philosophy), especially Eva Kittay, Diana Meyers, and Virginia Held, with inspiring and sustaining her work in feminist philosophy. She, in turn, mentors numerous women in philosophy, including those she has met through her work with SWIP, FEAST (the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory) and WPHTF (the Women in Philosophy Task Force).
A politically engaged philosopher, Brison grounds her theoretical work in people’s actual experiences and uses her training in philosophy to work for social justice. She is a prominent voice in the anti-rape movement and is active in the struggle for LGBTQ civil rights. Through her scholarly articles and lectures, she has brought greater philosophical attention to the topics of rape and domestic violence, and she has also raised public awareness of gender-based violence through articles in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Chronicle Review, and other newspapers and magazines.
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posted Jun 2, 2012, 10:08 AM by APA Status-of-Women
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updated Jun 2, 2012, 10:15 AM
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Naomi SchemanUniversity of Minnesota
Naomi Scheman is a professor of Philosophy and of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. She received her BA from Barnard College and her PhD from Harvard, and before going to Minnesota in 1979 taught at the University of Ottawa. She is currently also a guest researcher at the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Umeå in Sweden, where she will receive an honorary doctorate in October 2012. She is affiliated with Minnesota's Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and will be participating in an exchange with the University of the Western Cape.
Scheman was one of the first to bring a feminist perspective to the reading of Wittgenstein and a Wittgensteinian perspective to feminist theory. With Peg O'Connor, she co-edited the Feminist Interpretations of Wittgenstein volume in Nancy Tuana's Re-Reading the Canon series (Penn State Press, 2002). The central themes of her work have been the moral and political implications of taking seriously the ways in which human practices shape the world (ontology) and our knowledge of it (epistemology). Thus, for example, she has argued since the 1970's against physicalism and for an understanding of mental phenomena as socially constructed and hence for our responsibility for the (un)intelligibility of each other's lives. She is especially interested in the ways in which marginalized and transgressive practices both illuminate what "we" (the more normatively intelligible) do and also create the possibility of acting, and meaning, differently.
These themes have emerged in work covering a wide range of topics--from Shakespeare to Wittgenstein, from Jewish and transsexual identities to community-based participatory research--and appearing in a wide range of journals and edited collections. Her essays have been republished in two volumes: Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege (Routledge, 1993) and Shifting Ground: Knowledge and Reality, Transgression and Trustworthiness (Oxford, 2011). She currently holds the University of Minnesota Imagine Chair in Arts, Design, and Humanities and will be exploring alternative, place-based visions for public research universities, with a focus on epistemologies and ontologies of relationship, narrative, trustworthiness, and respectful engagement. |
posted Apr 30, 2012, 4:40 PM by Peggy DesAutels
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updated Apr 30, 2012, 4:53 PM
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Helen Longino
Stanford University Helen Longino's teaching and research interests are in philosophy of science, social epistemology, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 1990), The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 2001) and many articles in the philosophy of science, feminist philosophy and epistemology. Her many co-edited volumes include Feminism and Science (Oxford University Press, 1996); Scientific Pluralism, Vol. XIX of the Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Competition: A Feminist Taboo? (The Feminist Press, 1987).
In philosophy of science, Longio disambiguated the claim that science is value-free by distinguishing between constitutive and contextual values and argued that standard approaches to scientific methodology could not guarantee the freedom of science from contextual (social) values. The idea that science is objective could nevertheless be rescued by adopting a deeply social epistemology, that takes critical interaction as a central element of scientific methodology. A consequence of this view is that scientific communities must cultivate diversity in their membership and engage with researchers outside those communities. This obligation is not absolute, as all critical interactions must satisfy certain conditions in order to qualify as objective. This places the outsider and insider on equal footing, in principle if not in practice.
As a feminist philosopher, she analyzed the evidential structure of research on the biological bases of alleged gender differences, demonstrating that they could satisfy internal methodological requirements while nevertheless being structured by masculinist bias. Longino also undertook a criticism of the standardly cited cognitive virtues by contrasting them with values endorsed by feminist scientists and philosophers of science. Her forthcoming book, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexual Orientation, is due from University of Chicago Press in late 2012. This work examines the logical structures and interrelations of purportedly competing approaches in the study of behavior as well as their social and cultural reception and uptake. She plans to return to developing the ideas in her version of social epistemology now that this book and her term as department chair are (almost) completed.
Longino has had positions at University of California, San Diego, Mills College, Rice University, University of Minnesota, and is currently Clarence Irving Lewis Professor in Philosophy at Stanford University. She has lectured and/or taught in many European countries, as well as in Argentina, Australia, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, and New Zealand. She served as member of the APA CSW from 1984 to 1987, and as its chair from 1991-1994. She was active in the founding of the journal Hypatia and served on its advisory board for many years. She has also served on various other committees of the APA and the PSA, and was recently elected to the Vice Presidency of the PSA. She will become President of that association in January 2013. |
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