Please mark your calendars for our panel “Expanding Career Horizons for Philosophy PhDs”!

We’ll have four PhDs in philosophy with us (either virtually or in person) to discuss the career trajectories that landed them in jobs that are partially or wholly outside the academy.  They’ll share with us experiences before, during, and after graduate school that set them up for their current positions, and some concrete things that you can do right now to prepare for a wide variety of careers.  Our panelists will be:

• Christina Drogalis (Ph.D. Loyola Chicago), Core Instructor, Stanford Online High School
• Ndidi Nwaneri (Ph.D. Loyola Chicago), Executive Board, International Development Ethics Association
• Sean Petranovich (Ph.D. Loyola Chicago), Data Scientist & Part-time Philosophy Instructor, Metropolitan State University of Denver
• Trevor Perri (Ph.D. Leuven), Philosophy Acquisitions editor, Northwestern University Press

The panel will take place on Wednesday, October 9, from 2:45-4:15pm in Information Commons 332 with ample time towards the end for a Q&A session.

Congratulations to the graduate students who received research awards for the summer of 2019!

Alec Stubbs, fourth year PhD student

Alec’s research focuses on the anti-democratic nature of what he is calling “technocapitalism,” viz., an emerging form of capitalism characterized by the incessant collection of information and data, the scalability of the technocapitalist infrastructure leading to oligopolistic tendencies and capital accumulation, and the externalization of labor to a distributed market of precarious laborers. The goal is to provide a Marxian critique of these basic features of technocapitalism, demonstrate how these structures undermine participatory democracy, and then provide details about how we might structure more democratic alternatives to harness technology for the many rather than the few.

Claire Lockard, fourth year PhD student

Claire is spending part of the summer at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Cittá de Castello, located in the Umbria region of Italy. While there, she will be studying works by Hannah Arendt, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Franz Fanon, and Jacques Derrida — lectures are held by leading scholars of each figure. She will also present what a portion of her dissertation: an exploration of a tension that has emerged in her work on the uses and misuses of interpretative charity in academic philosophy. One the one hand, the call for interpretative charity in academic philosophy can (re)produce unjust social, political, and epistemic conditions. On the other hand, the rejection of interpretative altogether can be a distancing strategy that relies on a politics of purity that, in the end, cannot produce a generative approach to problematic texts or thinkers. Claire is excited to work through this tension with her fellow Collegium participants, and to discover new ways that the topics and thinkers to be covered at the Collegium will inform her research.

Gina Lebkuecher, second year PhD student

Gina is developing a paper exploring the work of ancient Chinese Confucian philosopher Mengzi (Mencius), with the goal of showing how an integration of his ethics into (often Western-centric) virtue ethics canon can improve understanding of virtue as a cultivation of natural sensitivity which strengthens and informs the Western model. Through a combination with John McDowell, she argues that Mengzi’s philosophy provides a new understanding not only of the nature of the virtues but also the role of emotion, reason, and the will in virtue cultivation, thus also providing a more comprehensive understanding of how we can come to understand and improve our own virtues. The aim of this paper is not only to provide a comparative study of these two philosophers, but also to demonstrate the value of integrating Mengzi’s work into the philosophy classroom; the paper was presented at the Multicultural Philosophy Conference in Manchester, UK  (July 2019).

The following is the continuation of a series of profiles on Loyola philosophy graduate students, giving you a brief sense of their thoughts on their research, teaching, and the value of philosophy. This profile covers Claire Lockard, 2018-2019 AGSP president.

• What made you become a philosopher?

Looking back now, I notice that I was accidentally doing philosophy back in high school when I took a Great Books class three years in a row – we read from themed anthologies in addition to reading novels that matched the theme. I remember reading Aristotle on happiness and Hobbes on the role of the state, for example. But since the course was sort of billed as an English class, I just thought I was reading cool books with my friends. I ran into my old Great Books teacher a few months back, and he admitted that he didn’t frame the class as one about philosophy, because he wanted students to be excited about it – that is quite funny to me because what it also did (though I don’t think he intended this) was attract lots more women than one typically finds in a philosophy class.

Even my more “formal” introduction to philosophy did not happen in a philosophy class – it happened, funnily enough, in a feminist theory course that was taught by a philosophy professor. Everything that we read and talked about in that class seemed to have this explanatory power that I hadn’t encountered before, even if it did not answer all the questions I had about what kind of a thing gender is, how best to navigate a patriarchal and oppressive social system, what it might mean for so many different feminisms to coexist, etc. I wanted to get better at formulating those kinds of questions, and using those questions to inform how I lived my life.  

• Since you’re just finishing your coursework, what has been the most interesting class you’ve taken at Loyola, and why?

Definitely the Race Theory course that I took with Jackie Scott in the fall of my second year. Taking Jackie Scott’s class allowed me to approach questions of race through additional philosophic frameworks. I was particularly excited to think more about conceptions of race throughout the history of philosophy, and to explore José Medina’s work on epistemic oppression and epistemologies of resistance. Medina even came and visited our class on one of the days when we discussed his book, and I love meeting the philosophers whose work I am engaging with! I used so much of what I learned in the race theory class to write my master’s paper and I am still drawing from that course material to write my dissertation proposal.

• What specific idea or topic are you working on for your dissertation?

I am working on a project about the uses and misuses of the call for charitable interpretation in academic philosophy. Often, philosophers seem to take reading charitably or exercising the principle charity as an unambiguously beneficial approach to engaging with philosophic texts. I want to problematize that assumption, particularly when the call for charitable interpretation is made in response to a speaker’s critique of a text or author’s racism and/or sexism.

As it stands now, my central claim is that calls for charity are misused when made in response to concerns about authors’ or texts’ racism and sexism, and it becomes a disciplining move that contributes to unjust and oppressive epistemic conditions. “Charity,” as we use it in North American philosophy now, has racial, religious, and colonial history. In the current climate in academic philosophy, when we call on others to be charitable, we can contribute to what what I have come to call the charitability gap: while we are often willing to give generous interpretations to privileged (predominately white, male, upper-middle class) philosophers, that level of charity is not usually extended to marginalized voices. Additionally, the call for charitability is unevenly distributed – marginalized people in philosophy are, I suspect, more often told that we must be charitable in our interpretations and analyses. This charitability gap emerges, I suggest, because the call for charity is misused.

• You’ve published (in Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, an open access journal) some work on use of in-class focus groups in relation to getting more women involved in philosophy. What were your findings?

Our findings were quite specific to the philosophy department at Elon University (where we conducted the focus groups), but we hope that the results are at least suggestive of what might be at play for female-identified students involved in philosophy at other universities as well! We had three central findings:

• Taking only one philosophy class did not necessarily cultivate a growth mindset among female-identified students of philosophy. There is some evidence that female-identified students are more likely than male-identified students to adopt a fixed mindset about learning in general, where one’s skill at a given subject is based on inherent aptitude or genius (not so good for learning, because students are more likely to give up if they think they “just aren’t good at” a subject). Growth mindset, on the other hand, involves the belief that one can improve at something if they practice. We found that exposure to philosophy (by taking one course) did not convince students that philosophy was something at which they could get better.
• Course instructors have the potential to either ameliorate or reinforce students’ (mis)perceptions of philosophy. Many students in the focus groups we conducted mentioned that they stuck with philosophy at least partly because their professor told them that they were talented, or encouraged them in some other way. On the other hand, many students also mentioned that they had some instructors who reinforced the idea that philosophy is only for older white men with beards. Basically, as instructors, we might have more power than we tend to think regarding whether female-identified students feel encouraged to take more philosophy classes.
• Students who have not taken philosophy are likely to see their manner of thinking as being at odds with the manner of thinking required (or thought to be required) by philosophy. We had participants mention that they just don’t think philosophically, even though they had never taken a philosophy course before. Their ideas of what philosophy was and what would be required of them to succeed at it were already cemented, and often were in contrast with how they saw themselves.

That was fairly long summary of our key findings, so to put it another way, we found that there are tons of factors outside the philosophy classroom that are contributing to female-identified students’ reluctance to take philosophy classes, or to see themselves as unlikely to succeed once there.

• That article was coauthored with several other people. What did you find most interesting about co-authoring? What was most challenging about the collaboration process? Are there any pieces of advice for how to go about doing collaborative work?

The most interesting part of co-authoring was the way that, after such a long time (2+ years) working and writing together, we were able to predict the kinds of concerns that others would have, the kinds of changes they’d recommend making, and which part(s) of the project they would want to take the lead on. Co-authoring requires, I think, building a lot of trust over quite a bit of time, but it was an incredible experience that taught me more than most of my individual writing projects have.

One challenge of co-authoring is related to what can make it so generative: not everyone has the time or academic resources to work on a sustained project or to build up collegial relationships outside the context of paper-writing. I’ve done other collaborative work since this paper’s publication, and it is much more challenging when I do not know my collaborators as well!

• During your academic career so far, what have you changed your mind about? Has there been a figure or argument you initially thought was really wrong but have become more sympathetic to (or vice versa)?

I am going to talk about a topic that I thought would be boring, but that turned out to be quit interesting: Aristotle. I’ve never been very interested in ancient philosophy, and so when I signed up for Dr. Ward’s “Aristotle on Friendship” class it was really only because I needed to fulfill my ancient requirement. But I was really interested in the ways he distinguished between kinds of friends (even though I’m not so sure he’s right to do that!), and in the ways his friendship framework applies (or doesn’t) to the Greek tragedies we also read in that class. I even ended up taking a second class in ancient philosophy.

• Is there a figure that you would consider to be underrated that you think more people should engage with more?

Sara Ahmed’s work is read super widely in feminist philosophy, queer theory, and critical race theory, but maybe not so widely in other circles. She has written on queer phenomenology, whiteness, affect theory, living as a feminist, politics of diversity in higher education, willfulness, and more. Her work engages tons of figures from the history of philosophy, but always with a creative feminist twist. I find myself returning to her work over and over, for a variety of different purposes. For those new to her work, I would suggest her most recent book, Living a Feminist Life.

• Are there two or three sources–I’m thinking books and articles mostly, but feel free to include any other sources if you want–that you would recommend for thinking about your area of research and why?

I am going to cheat and do four – two articles and two books!

“Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing” by Kristie Dotson.

In this essay, Dotson provides a framework that has been quite helpful to me in thinking about when calls for charitable interpretation are misused. For Dotson, sometimes a hearer of testimony is so ill-equipped to listen properly/justly to a socially-marginalized speaker that once the speaker identifies this “testimonial incompetence, they withhold their testimony. Dotson calls this withholding “testimonial smothering,” which is a kind of coerced self-silencing. Silencing is one branch of epistemic injustice, and so I’ve been using Dotson’s analysis to understand what might happen (or what we risk) when we call for a marginalized speaker to be charitable, rather than engaging seriously with their questions or concerns about a text.

“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You” by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

If you are looking for a charitable reading of the practice of reading, this is the essay for you! Sedgwick talks about the ways that a hermeneutic attitude of suspicion (inherited from Ricoeur) can turn into an unhealthy paranoia, where a reader expects that every text is problematic in some way, and goes looking for those problems from the get-go rather than being open to other, less harmful, readings of the texts. Sedgwick is such a joy to read, and her essay strikes a beautiful balance between acknowledging the reasons that we’d want to be highly suspicious of texts and then offering reasons that we’d want to take on a less suspicious approach as well.

Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times by Alexis Shotwell

Ask my colleagues how often I mention this book to confirm my obsession with it. Shotwell offers a nuanced analysis of “purity politics” – an approach toward the suffering and injustice of the world that assumes one can stand above the fray if only one makes a particular set of good ethical choices on an individual level. Shotwell starts from the assumption that we will always already be implicated in a mess that we cannot solve with our individual efforts (that we cannot solve at all, in fact). From there, she explores what sorts of ways of engaging in the world emerge. She covers issues of disability, environmental degradation, responses to the AIDS crisis, and more. What I take to be useful about her book for my project is that Shotwell helps us understand why we should not entirely reject, or entirely embrace, a charitable approach to philosophy. Either one would be a purity move – assuming that a text can be made to stand outside of its racism or sexism, or assuming that because it can’t, it must be of no use to us.

Epistemologies of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations by José Medina

Medina is interested in both the epistemic injustices that make it difficult for marginalized people to participate in epistemic communities, but also in the resistant ways of knowing and understanding that they/we have developed in response to hermeneutic and epistemic marginalization. I have been using his work to think about how to know when one should offer interpretative charity – Medina suggests that one should allocate more charity when listening to marginalized speakers, because there is a higher risk of not properly understanding their testimony for. I’ve also been thinking about his development of particular kinds of epistemic virtues and vices, and the role the calls for charity might play in cultivating or reinforcing those. I also really recommend his book to anyone who wants to learn more about feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, or epistemic injustice/oppression.

The following is the first in a series of profiles on Loyola philosophy graduate students, giving you a brief sense of their thoughts on their research, teaching, and the value of philosophy. This first profile is on Jacob Andrews, who specializes in medieval philosophy and philosophy of religion.

1. What made you become a philosopher?

Growing up in a household of faith was definitely the biggest influence. It has always been normal for me to suppose that (1) the most important questions a person can ask are the kinds of fundamental questions asked in philosophy and religion, (2) these questions are distinct from the matter of fact questions studied in other disciplines, (3) some of the best answers to these questions are found in books.

2. What is your dissertation about?

My dissertation is on the relation between religious faith and philosophy in William of Auxerre (1156-1231). Lots of people ask whether there is good non-religious evidence for God’s existence (as well as more particular doctrines, like the Incarnation, etc.). Suppose there was such evidence. Wouldn’t having proof or strong evidence for a religious belief make it hard or impossible to have faith in that belief? It seems difficult to say that you can believe some proposition on the basis of faith or trust in someone while also knowing for yourself that that proposition is true. But William says that you can have faith and natural knowledge simultaneously, and my dissertation explores his reasons for thinking so.

3. What has surprised you most during the process of writing your dissertation? Has writing this dissertation substantially changed your opinions? Are there any arguments or philosophical figures that you came to appreciate more as you went along, or any arguments that you are more skeptical of now than when you started?

Several times I have found William or other writers making a distinction or pioneering a concept or argument in order to solve a theological problem, and the distinction or concept ends up enriching, challenging, or changing my purely philosophical thought. William is talking about whether it’s permissible for Christian theologians to give proofs for God and the Trinity, but he ends up with valuable insights into the nature of trust and belief in general.

William’s religious epistemology is complicated for me. It is an odd blend of intellectualism (prizing rational argument above religious faith) and what seems a times like fideism (rejecting rational argument and evidence as inappropriate for or dangerous to religious faith). He thinks that faith is a kind of perception of God, such that someone with proper Christian faith really knows that Christian doctrine is true, and so must refuse to rely on any other evidence (he’s rather Kierkegaardian in this regard, and both are accused of fideism for this reason- I think falsely). On the other hand, precisely because faith is knowledge, other forms of knowledge present no danger to it: someone who already relies on their faith that God exists and is triune, can also merely possess rational arguments for these doctrines, while still having faith that those doctrines are true. William seems to think that having some argument or evidence Z that justifies belief in P is not the same as actually believing in P on the basis of Z. For example, I have ample justification for believing that the Leuven is a city in Belgium on that basis of testimony (of friends, professors, Wikipedia, etc.). But I do not actually believe that Leuven is in Belgium on that basis: I believe it because I lived there once. Likewise, someone could possess a sound and valid argument for God’s existence, but nevertheless believe that God exists on the basis of faith.

I remain attracted to this view of faith, which gives maximum power to both the radical commitment of religious faith and the God-given expansiveness of human reason. It seems superior to the view of Aquinas, who thinks that faith is not a form of knowledge, but a supposition which requires an act of the will to push the intellect toward certainty. But recently I have become more appreciative of Aquinas’ position. There are important phenomenological features of faith- personal trust in God, the ability to waver and doubt while still believing- that are difficult to explain on William’s account, but easy on Aquinas’.

4. How have you found the writing process? Are there any tips you would recommend for other graduate students to follow?

1. Write every day. I mean new philosophical prose, not just notes or editing, even if it’s just especially polished freewriting or a blog post. Get in the habit of articulating your thoughts to an actual or potential public.

2. Keep a steady pace. There will be seasons when you can write like a madman all day long. As hard as it is when you’re coming up on a deadline, resist those urges, lest you end up the next day with nothing to write and kill your habit. Once you hit your word goal for a day, work on outlining the next day’s work, so that you can jump right into writing the next day.

3. Read philosophers who write well. As a newbie writer, I’m a big mimic. If I’m reading Plantinga or Zhuangzi or Hume, I’ll start to write like Plantinga or Zhuangzi or Hume. Unfortunately, that means that if I’m reading a poor writer, I’ll write like them, too. You can’t avoid bad writers, but you can regularly refresh your palette with good ones.

4. Reward yourself. The kind of work we’re in doesn’t generate automatic rewards: it’s a long path, sometimes years, from conceiving an idea to publishing an article. You don’t even get the satisfaction of clocking out of a shift! To keep yourself going, set concrete goals between starting and finishing and reward yourself for meeting those goals.

5. You’ve had some experience with teaching. What topic have you found most interesting to teach, and why? What have you found to be the most difficult aspect of teaching, and how have you tried to address that?

Logic is just fascinating to me, and I enjoy teaching it in any class. I love showing students how a little bit of skill in logic can illuminate so many practical and theoretical problems. If, at the end of every semester, one student comes away knowing how to find and correct flaws in their own thought, or how to locate fundamental disagreements and discuss those rather than yelling at or talking past their opponents, I have done my job.

The most difficult is also the most important: getting my students to really see what philosophy is; to get behind matters of fact and to see fundamental questions; to see why it is vital that they do so, to impress on them their duty and privilege as human beings to seek and hold onto truth. It isn’t that they’re opposed to this line of thinking; they just haven’t even considered it, and their environment conditions them against considering it. How do I do counteract this? Currently, I’m teaching ethics, with an emphasis on classical Chinese ethics. I began the first session with a little talk on relativism and skepticism; it’s important that I empower my students to imagine that they really can discover truth for themselves. I try, as much as possible, to apply the theories we’re studying to situations my students may actually encounter, especially to universal human experiences of family loyalty, friendship, death, etc. And I always make a point of including material from non-contemporary and non-Western sources, to show students that philosophical questions are perennial human questions, not just Western or modern ones.

6. Are there any pieces of advice that you wish you had known earlier on in your philosophical career?

1. Treat your graduate work like a 9 to 5 job. Commit to 7-8 hours a day, at least, of real philosophical work: close reading and careful writing. Keep a log or homespun timecard, if that sort of thing helps you (it helps me).

2. Use the flexibility of an academic career to your advantage. Setting my own schedule is a pain, and a great temptation to laziness; but it means that I can provide childcare for my son while my wife works. I can have a long lunch with my grandmother and work after dinner to make up for it. I can decide for myself what times of day are most productive for writing, and make sure that my schedule is clear at those times. Don’t overcommit, but use what you’ve been given.

3. Try to unify your research interests. Once you find your avenue of dissertation research, however vague, bend all your work toward it. Keep your conference papers on that topic. Wrestle all your term papers into its mold. Be like Confucius, whose work “could be strung together on a single thread” (Analects 4.15).

4. Read widely. Get grounded in the philosophical tradition by reading widely in different eras, cultures, and subdisciplines. Make a discipline of reading off-topic philosophy. If I hadn’t taken an unproductive detour into Chinese thought a few years ago, I wouldn’t be teaching the class I am today!

5. Stick to primary texts.The philosophical classics of any culture are generally easier to understand and more profound than the newest articles. If you have to choose between reading Aquinas and reading about Aquinas, just read Aquinas.

7. Are there two or three sources that you would recommend for thinking about your area of research, and why?

Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief. An accessible introduction to what’s at stake in religious epistemology. In particular, he does an excellent job exposing and exorcising the intellectual bogeymen that often attend modern inquirers (religious or not) into questions about God and religion.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles. The discursive style is more palatable for modern readers than the quaestio format of his other, more famous Summa. Chapters 3-8 of Book 1 give a quick and dirty explanation of the need for divine revelation and its compatibility with natural reason.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The film and TV industry never seems to get the experience of religious people. But DS9 comes close. A normal, secular Starfleet commander is declared the messiah of an alien religion. He wants nothing to do with it- but then he meets their gods. In particular I’d recommend the following episodes: 3×15 “Destiny,” 5×10 “Rapture” (despite a truly awful conversation about faith- you’ll know it when you see it), 7×09 “Covenant.” But you really should just watch the whole show, which isn’t even mostly about religion.

Jacob working with his son, Ivan.

Graduate student Drew Thompson wrote an article for the Ethics and International Affairs Journal: “The Zero Tolerance Migration Policy: Two Moral Objections.” In the article, Thompson discusses the Trump administration’s policy that allows migrant children to be separated from their parents:

Ethical debates about migration concern a number of reasonable disagreements over whether—and the extent to which—political communities have the right to enforce their borders. What is hardly ever in doubt, even among those who support the “right to exclude” (at least those who defend the right on moral terms), is that there are limits to a political community’s exercise of this right: states cannot use force against those seeking asylum or basic human rights protection, and some means of policing borders are morally unacceptable.

Although I am skeptical of arguments in defense of the right to exclude, here, I will assume that a convincing argument can be given. On this assumption, I will evaluate the Trump administration’s current zero-tolerance migration policy, which entails the separation of migrant children from their parents. I raise two moral objections to the policy, though this is certainly not an exhaustive list. First, I argue that the policy interferes with the United States’ duties to foreigners suffering human rights deprivations. Secondly, I argue that the policy—subjecting children to trauma as a means of deterrence—is an impermissible means of enforcing what may be an otherwise legitimate goal. The ends do not always justify the means, especially when children are involved.

Read the entire article on the Ethics and International Affairs website.

Congratulations to Dr. Ndidi Nwaneri, Justin Nordin, and David Atenasio for their awards this year!

Dr. Ndidi Nwaneri was awarded the Dissertation of the Year in Humanities Award and Justin Nordin was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award, both from the Graduate School. David Atenasio was awarded the Philosophy Graduate Student Teaching Award from the Philosophy Department.

The Philosophy Department is hosting a lunchtime workshop with Dr. Christopher Manning on diversity issues in the classroom. Whether it’s how to get students to have productive conversations about race or gender in the classroom, or how to rebuild the classroom dynamic when you misgender one of your students, there’s a bunch of things we can all learn about to become more effective teachers. Lunch will be served!

Workshop is Wednesday April 11, 12-1:30 PM in Crown 200 East (2nd floor of Crown, across from the auditorium).

This event is intended for Loyola graduate students and faculty. Please RSVP to Jay Carlson (rcarlson3@luc.edu).

Recent graduate Sean Petranovich recently published “Trust and Betrayal from a Husserlian Standpoint” in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies! The article can be found at the International Journal of Philosophical Studies. Great work, Sean! Here’s the abstract:

This paper provides an interpretation of trust and betrayal within political communities from the perspective of Husserl’s concept of social communities. I situate the paper amidst Margaret Gilbert’s theory of political obligations, arguing that at least one outside conception of trust fills a gap left in her theory. More specifically, I argue for the supplementary fit that Karen Jones’s conception of trust understood as ‘basal security’ provides for Gilbert. From there, I tie this conception of trust and betrayal to Husserl’s notions of ‘original belief’ and socio-cultural crisis. There is thereby a phenomenological elucidation of features within the social world that allow such crises to occur in the first place.

The Philosophy Department’s History of Philosophy Roundtable (HOPR) presents Peter Rosa (LUC), “A Mereological Reading of Spinoza’s Metaphysic” at 2:35! 

Please note the format of this roundtable: A draft of the presenter’s work will be circulated around one week ahead of the roundtable. During the first 10-15 minutes of the meeting, the presenter will situate the project of the paper in its research context and suggest directions for helpful feedback. The remaining hour will then be a discussion based on the attendees’ reading of the draft, along the lines suggested by the presenter.

For more information and to be added to the HOPR e-mail list, please e-mail Peter Hartman (phartman@luc.edu) or Kristen Irwin (kirwin@luc.edu). 

The Phenomenology Research Group (PRG) presents Kay Park (LUC), “Sellars and McDowell on Kant’s conception of sensation” at 4:00! 

McDowell follows Sellars’s suggestion that intuitions should be construed as conceptual representations in Kant’s dominant usage of the term. For Kant often construes an intuition as a representation of an individual object, and takes such a representation to be the result of the synthesis of the productive imagination which follows the rules derived from the concepts of the understanding.

However, McDowell disagrees with Sellars’s interpretation of the notion of sensation which Kant characterizes as the matter of an empirical intuition. First, while Sellars argues that Kant implicitly presupposes the existence of sensations which do not involve the synthesis of the productive imagination, McDowell argues that such a postulation of the non-conceptual cannot be attributed to Kant. Second, while Sellars argues that the postulation of the non-conceptual representations of sheer receptivity is necessary in order to make the receptive aspects of our perceptual experience intelligible, McDowell argues that the receptive or non-discursive aspects of our perceptual experience can and should be explained in terms of the conceptual capacities operating in our empirical intuitions.

In this paper, I defend Wilfrid Sellars’s suggestions against McDowell’s conceptualist reading of Kant. First, I argue that Kant presupposes the existence of sensation which is not structured in terms of spatiotemporal intuitions through the analysis of Kant’s theories of intensive magnitude and transcendental reflection. Second, although McDowell’s conceptualist approach of an intuition attempts to secure the receptive aspects of our sensory intuition by characterizing it as comprising a non-discursive content, I argue that a conceptual content which is not discursive cannot be conceived. 

The Philosophy Department is pleased to announce a presentation by Dr. Gregory Pence (University of Alabama at Birmingham): “Is a Famous Study in Neuroscience by American Researchers like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study?”

Monday, March 19th at 3:30 PM
Crown Center Auditorium 

From his UAB page: Gregory Pence studied applied ethics with famous ethicist Peter Singer at NYU and helped found the new field of bioethics. For 34 years he taught a required, graded course to 200 medical students at UAB. Between 1984-1985 he chaired the Board of Directors at Birmingham AIDS Outreach, and from 1985 to 1995 the UAB Speakers Committee.

He is known in bioethics for his best-selling Medical Ethics textbook, now in its 27th year and eighth edition, and his defense of humane biotechnology, such as cloning and genetically modified crops. In 2000 he testified against bills to criminalize cloning before Congress and before the California Senate. He then defended cloning on national television on the CBS Morning Show, Talk Back with Gretta Van Susteren, and CNN News with Wolf Blitzer. He has published over seventy op-ed essays including ones in Newsweek, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Wall Street Journal.

The Publisher of The Review of Metaphysics, the Philosophy Education Society, Inc., announces its annual Dissertation Essay Competition. The competition is open to all participants who have been awarded the Ph.D. degree in philosophy in the United States or Canada during 2017. Entries must be either a chapter from a dissertation or an essay based directly upon a dissertation. Essays may be on any topic dealt with in the dissertation. Essays will be judged anonymously. The author of the prize-winning essay will receive $500. It is expected that the winning essay will be published in The Review of Metaphysics.

Participants are requested to employ the following procedure for submitting essays:

• Essays should be no more than twenty-five double-spaced typewritten pages and should be submitted in triplicate.
• Essays should be free of all identifying marks, both in the body of the paper and in the footnotes.
• Entries should be accompanied by a letter indicating the author’s name, the university from which his or her degree was received, and the title of the dissertation from which the essay was taken. Entrants who would like their manuscripts returned should also send a stamped return envelope of suitable size.
• On matters of style and form, The Chicago Manual of Style and a recent issue of The Review of Metaphysics should be consulted. A style sheet is available upon request and on the Review’s website.
• Entries must bear a postmark no later than 31 March 2018 and should be sent to The Review of Metaphysics, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. 20064. Envelopes should be marked “Dissertation Essay Competition.”

Additional inquiries concerning the competition may be directed to mail@reviewofmetaphysics.org. The results of the competition will be announced by 30 June 2018.

Add us on Facebook and Twitter! If you have upcoming events or would like to share relevant articles on our social media sites or this blog, feel free to email them to this semester’s Outreach and Communications graduate assistant, Rebecca Valeriano-Flores (mvalerianoflores@luc.edu).

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/philosophyluc/
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Next week, the Phenomenology Research Group will host a talk from Zachary J. Joachim (Boston University):

It is well known that in Ideen 1, Husserl drops the ‘act-content-object’ schema in favor of ‘noesis-noema.’ But just what are these schemata for? Both are attempted answers to the question, ‘How must the world be such that one’s state of subjectivity counts as being of or about anything?’ Such schemata, then, are ontological: they describe the way the world must be. But they are also logical in the sense that interests Husserl from beginning to end: they describe not the law of inference (formal validity), but the law of thought or thinkability per se (objective validity). This identity of ontology and logic is what Kant and the German Idealists take the subject-matter of philosophy to be, whose successful clarification as such would allow philosophy in the modern era to begin. ‘Idealism’ is their name for that clarification. Husserl understands his idealism in this sense, too. He differs, though, in holding perception’s (not judgment’s) form of self-consciousness as the source of logical form, i.e., of thinkability or objectivity. His commitment to that difference is constitutive of his shift to noesis-noema as the schema expressive of philosophy’s proper subject-matter. In this paper, I offer first steps towards elucidating that schema in the above-mentioned way, starting with ‘noema.’ I argue that a noema is the objectivity of an object, i.e., its apparent unity, and that since ‘noema’ replaces the ‘content/object’ distinction, Husserl therewith espouses a no-content view of intentionality.

The event will take place on February 23, 3:30 to 5:30 PM in Cuneo Hall 212.

Loyola’s Center for Catholic Intellectual Heritage presents Perspectives on Personhood, a conference taking place on our Lakeshore campus next Tuesday!

Perspectives on Personhood: Resources in Science, Technology, and Theology 
Tuesday, Feb. 20, 1PM to 6PM
Information Commons, 4th Fl.

Keynote address by Dr. William Jaworski (Fordham): “Can Science Study the Human Soul?”
Response by Dr. John McCarthy

Panel 1: Personhood and Evolution 
Dr. CJ Love, Dr. James Calcagno, and Dr. Pauline Viviano
Moderated by Dr. Hans Svebakken

Panel 2: Personhood and Reductionism 
Dr. Susan Ross, Dr. Rebecca Stilton, and Dr. Paul Voelker
Moderated by Dr. Joseph Vukov