Faculty Honors and Achievements

The faculty have been busy publishing articles and books and presenting papers in the US and abroad. Here is just a sample of some of our accomplishments:

Clare Batty has been invited to write an entry on "Philosophical Perspectives on Smell" for the Encyclopedia of the Mind.  Her paper, "Scents and Sensibilia," has been accepted for publication in APQ.  She is writing a review of Robert Stalnaker's book, Our knowledge of the Internal World, for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  She presented papers at the Canadian Philosophical Association, the Pacific APA, and the Consciousness:  Online Conference.

Stefan Bird-Pollan's article "Hegel's Grounding of Intersubjectivity" appeared in Philosophy and Social Criticism (38.3) this year. Articles on Fanon and Marcuse are forthcoming in 2013 respectively at Critical Horizons and Radical Philosophy Review. Stefan is also completing a book manuscript provisionally entitled The Dialectic of Emancipation: Fanon, Hegel and Freud. He has recently presented his work to audiences at the APA, Law and Society, The Sigmund Freud Universität (Vienna) and the University of Toronto.

David Bradshaw works on the intersection of philosophy and theology in late antique and medieval thought. He is the editor of “The Greek Christian Tradition” in Philosophy in the Middle Ages: A Multi-Cultural Sourcebook, ed. Bruce Foltz (Bloomsbury, 2019) and co-editor of Natural Theology in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition (IOTA Press, 2021). His essays on the essence-energies distinction have been collected as Divine Energies and Divine Action: Exploring the Essence-Energies Distinction (IOTA Press, 2023). His talks and interviews on these and related subjects are widely available on the internet.

Julia Bursten is an historian and philosopher of science specializing in the philosophy of the physical sciences. Her research investigates how theories and models are developed and deployed in nanoscience, with particular attention to how theories are adapted from other sciences to construct the first "science of a length scale." This research has wide-ranging implications for understanding how scientific theories are developed across the sciences, as well as for constructing better tools to investigate material behavior at the interface of classical and quantum physics. Her current projects include investigating the concept of a surface in nanoscience and applying the lessons of that investigation to a broader understanding of inter-theoretic relations across the physical sciences. Dr. Bursten's research has been published in journals such as Philosophy of Science, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Nature Nanotechnology. and she has given invited lectures at institutions including the University of California at Irvine, Purdue University, Boston University, Rice University, and the Technological University of Darmstadt. She is a founder of the Mid-South Philosophy of Science Network and co-chair of the Philosophy of Science Association Women’s Caucus. Professor Bursten's interview with the SCI PHI podcast can be found here.

Brandon Look works on early modern philosophy.  He has published numerous essays on Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant and other figures from the 17th-and 18th-centuries.  He has also published Leibniz and the ‘Vinculum Substantiale’ (Studia Leibnitiana Sonderheft 30, 1999); he co-edited and –translated The Leibniz-Des Bosses Correspondence with Donald Rutherford (Yale, 2006); and he edited and contributed to The Bloomsbury Companion to Leibniz (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2011/2016).  Two other collections, Leibniz and Kant and the The Oxford Handbook to Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy, will appear soon for Oxford University Press.  At the moment, he is co-editing the second edition of Leibniz: Philosophical Essays with Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber for Hackett Publishing and completing a monograph that explores Kant’s reaction to and rejection of Leibniz's philosophy, Leibniz, Kant and the Possibility of Metaphysics.

Natalie Nenadic Natalie Nenadic conducts research at the intersections of the history of philosophy, especially Post-Kantian Philosophy, and contemporary ethical challenges, especially feminist concerns. Following thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, she works within an understanding of philosophy that is guided by experiences of the human condition that philosophy hasn’t traditionally considered but that it helps us understand through creative use of the resources of philosophy’s past (“thinking at the edge”). This approach characterizes her treatment of today’s widespread sexual violence against women and girls and pornographic culture and her own work in the 1990s in conceptualizing what was then the new crime of “rape as genocide.” Her most recent publication is “Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism, and Continental Philosophy: Comments on Towards a Feminist Theory of the State – Twenty-Five Years Later” (2017) in the Feminist Philosophical Quarterly. Recent lectures include “Catharine MacKinnon’s Thought as Philosophy,” presented at the Society for Women in Philosophy – Ireland at University College Dublin (May 2018) and an invited talk on a panel on Robert C. Scharff’s book How History Matters to Philosophy: Rethinking Philosophy’s Past After Positivism (October 2017) at SPEP . In Spring 2019, she is teaching a new introductory course, Philosophy, Law, and the #Me Too Movement, aimed to help students understand topics of recent public discourse, including in their own lives, through their philosophical and legal dimensions. In Spring 2018, she taught a graduate seminar Heidegger, Philosophy, and Nazism that brought her expertise on genocide and the Holocaust to bear in new ways on the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and his Nazism and, generally, on the relationship among philosophy, philosophers, and criminality.

Eric Sanday is working on a monograph on the relationship between the nature of intelligibility, as addressed by Plato in dialogues such as the Parmenides, Statesman, and Philebus, and the account of what cannot be explained in terms of participation, focusing specifically on Plato's Timaeus.  This follows-up his book on Plato’s Parmenides, in which he focuses on the transformed account of participation one finds in the so-called "late" dialogues (A Study of Dialectic in Plato’s Parmenides, Northwestern University Press: 2015).  He is the co-editor of A Companion to Ancient Philosophy (Northwestern: 2018, with Sean Kirkland) and Plato’s Laws: Force and Truth In Politics (Indiana: 2013, with Greg Recco). His most recent work on Plato includes: “Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Symposium,” in Knowledge and Ignorance of the Self in Platonic Philosophy (forthcoming, Cambridge), “Philosophical Method in Plato’s Statesman,” in Plato’s Statesman: Dialectic, Myth, and Politics, (SUNY: 2017), and “Truth and Pleasure in the Philebus,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 36.2, (2015). His most recent article-length project is on the nature of justice, gender, and myth in Hesiod and Heraclitus. He is very proud to have served as Dissesrtation Advisor for Michael Wiitala, Truth and Falsehood in Plato's Sophist (2014), Paul DiRado, Perception and Judgment in Plato's Theaetetus (2015), Peter Antich, Motivation and the Primacy of Perception (2017), and Peter Moore, Interpreting the Republic as a Protreptic Dialogue (2018).

Bob Sandmeyer’s book, Husserl's Constitutive Phenomenology: Its Problem and Promise, was published by Routledge in 2009. He is currently studying the work of those philosophers important to the formation of the phenomenological movement in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. He also has an abiding interest in environmental philosophy and is working out the idea of an existential ecology. In this project he takes Hans Jonas's existential interpretation of biological facts as cue but extends this to the ecological conception of land advanced by Aldo Leopold and others. He has recently presented papers at the International Association for Environmental Philosophy, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the Living with Animals conference, and the Husserl Circle. His article, “ Life and Spirit in Max Scheler’s Philosophy,” was published in Philosophy Compass. He is writing a paper on the early reception of Husserl’s philosophy in America for inclusion in a multi-author work to be published by Springer. Additionally, he is author of The Husserl Page, the influential and oldest active web site devoted to the life and work of Edmund Husserl.  

Tim Sundell has two forthcoming papers written with collaborator David Plunkett, of Dartmouth College. They are "Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms," to appear in Philosophers' Imprint, and "Antipositivist Arguments from Legal Thought and Talk: The Metalinguistic Response," to appear in Pragmatism, Law, and Language (Routledge). Over the summer he presented papers at the Arché Research Institute in St. Andrews where he was a visiting scholar, the Northern Institute of Philosophy in Aberdeen, the LOGOS Research Group in Barcelona, at the "Values in Context" workshop in Lisbon, and at the "Semantics of Aesthetic Judgment" panel at the 2013 meeting of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics in Victoria, British Columbia.

Anita Superson published her book, Feminist Ethics, in the Cambridge University Press Elements series (2024).  It provides an overview of feminist contributions to normative ethics, moral psychology, and metaethics, and argues that feminists are advancing a robust view of ideal moral and rational agency that promises to give us better answers than traditional ethics to questions such as how we know our duties, what kind of persons we ought to be, and why we should act morally.  Her paper, "Feminist Ethics," is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Normative Ethics (ed. David Copp, Connie Rosati, and Tina Rulli).  She is currently working on a paper on moral bindingness and a monograph on bodily autonomy.

Meg Wallace's monograph Parts and Wholes was recently published by Cambridge University Press as part of their Elements in Metaphysics series (June 2023). It is an opinionated overview of philosophical issues involving parthood, composition, and identity. Two of her papers, “Mental Fictionalism” and “Mental Fictionalism: a foothold amid deflationary collapse” were published in T. Demeter, T. Parent and A. Toon (eds.) Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations (Routledge: 2022). Meg's teaching interests continue to include a novel project of combing physical movement, performance, and the circus arts with philosophical study with her course PHI 193: Circus and Philosophy. She is writing a synopsis of this experience in "Philosophy through Spectacle" for a collection of essays The Art of Teaching Philosophy" (Bloomsbury: forthcoming).