Faculty Update
Mark Alznauer was very happy to return to the real, physical classroom this year. He taught two courses on Hegel in the Fall—a close reading of the Preface of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and a wide-ranging course on the legacy of the Philosophy of Right (with Josh Kleinfeld). In the Winter, he taught a Freshman Seminar on Hume and Nietzsche and taught the Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion for the first time (doing badly, no doubt, what Ken Seeskin did so well for so long). He continued as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Critical Theory Minor and continued running the Chicago-Area Consortium in German Philosophy. He has various essays related to a new book on the basic concepts of Hegelian philosophy coming out in a variety of places, and was happy to share some of that work at UIC, Johns Hopkins, and Humboldt University.
Penelope Deutscher continued her role as PI, completing a large Mellon grant on critical theory in the global south. Workshops she organized focussed on critical theory, decolonial and african philosophy. Her articles appeared in the Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophie, Enrahonar, and in an anthology of the work of the French philosopher Sarah Kofman. She read papers at the University of New Mexico and SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy). She is currently enaged in continuing research in the area of biopolitics and reproductive rights.
Kyla Ebels-Duggan: After last year’s isolation, it was a great joy to be back in the classroom with my students. In the fall I taught a course on my two favorite concepts: the right and the good—and on the relationship between them. In the winter I taught my regular Brady Program course, The Moral Life. That class explores the limitations of the consequentialist view that, in deciding what to do, all that we need to think about is how we can produce the most good. We consider what alternative or additional questions we might need to ask and what principles it might make sense to act on.
For years, I’ve ended the course with the question: how should we act, and how should we think about our actions, when others are acting badly? Would standing by our principles in the face of evil be an admirable display of integrity or just hopeless naivete? The last piece we read is an essay written by the pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer shortly before his arrest by Hitler’s government in 1943. There Bonhoeffer discusses the ways in which evil “play[s] havoc with all our ethical concepts.” Bonhoeffer’s work has, unfortunately, come to have more and more contemporary resonance with each passing year. This fall, I published a discussion of Bonhoeffer’s essay in The Raven, a new online magazine of philosophy.
Other writing this year also concerned the source and fragility of our ethical concepts. In one article, I argued that courses in ethics and moral philosophy do essential work in providing students with a wider conceptual repertoire. With new concepts, it is possible to ask new and better questions and to think clearer thoughts, an invaluable skill in our increasingly confusing world. The argument grew out of my opposition to a recent—happily unsuccessful—proposal to eliminate such requirements from Weinberg’s own distribution requirements.
In two other articles I considered the role of experience in making it possible for us to grasp moral concepts. I am especially interested in the way that the experience of love allows us to understand the value of a person—the value that Kant called dignity and contrasted with fungible value or price. These articles, “A Question of One’s Own” and “Buck-passing and the Value of a Person,” are part of a larger project concerning the role and limits of reasoning in moral commitment and the topic of last fall’s class: the relationship between the good and the right.
Sean Ebels Duggan published his first paper that is more philosophy than theorems. He also taught the usual suite of logic courses, and supervised undergraduate research on both non-classical logic and the identity of abstract objects. He presented work on vagueness and mathematical structure at the APA/ASL conference in February, and is thinking about revision to logical systems in light of modern physics. He is also writing a paper on the application of non-classical logic to the paradoxes of Christian theology. (The theology is the least of the worries.)
Sandy Goldberg occupied his time this past year by getting up to speed to teach a new course on the philosophy of humor. The topics of the course included the nature of humor, the ethical dimensions of joke-telling, the connections between humor and tragedy, and the role of humor in the good life. Though he quickly discovered that teaching this course did not make him any funnier, he was pleased nevertheless to be able to explore these topics with insightful students.
Chad Horne taught courses this past year in applied ethics and political philosophy. He was also proud to supervise a pair of excellent undergraduate honors theses. He was faculty advisor for Northwestern’s Ethics Bowl team, which had an excellent showing at the Midwest regional competition in October. Outside of the classroom, he published a paper with Joseph Heath on the significance of market failure for questions of justice in health care. He also wrote a paper on health care for a forthcoming handbook on commodification, to appear next year. He was very happy to be able to travel again; he gave two talks at the PPE society meeting in New Orleans last November, and another at the Sorbonne in Paris in June. He also hosted a workshop here at Northwestern bringing together new work in practical philosophy.
Megan Hyska published work on the relationship between propaganda and irrationality, and completed work on the metaphysics of social organizing and social movements. She presented work in France, Singapore, the UK, and around the US. She has also done some public-facing work on wartime propaganda. In addition to teaching undergraduate classes on language, propaganda, and the history of analytic philosophy, this academic year Professor Hyska also had the pleasure of teaching a graduate seminar on language and politics in the analytic tradition.
Richard Kraut completed his work as co-editor of the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Plato, which will appear in the Fall of 2022. The first edition of this collection appeared in 1992. His co-editor, David Ebrey, formerly taught at Northwestern, and is joining the faculty of the University of Barcelona. Kraut’s 2018 book, The Quality of Life (Oxford University Press) was the subject of an “Author-Meets-Critics” session at the 2022 Central Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. His most recent paper, “Thucydides versus Plato?” was presented at Cornell University for a conference on the themes of Tyrants, Demagogues, Thucydides, and the Republic.
Jennifer Lackey won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and an Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Fellowship for the 2021-2022 academic year, during which time she completed her book, Criminal Testimonial Injustice. She served as President of the American Philosophical Association’s Central Division, was offered a courtesy appointment in Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law, and published a number of papers in various journals and collections on eyewitness testimony, norms of criminal conviction, disagreement in politics, and epistemic reparations. She served her fourth year as Director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program and was the PI on the second year of a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the project, “Transforming Prison Education.” She continues to serve as Editor-in-Chief of Philosophical Studies and of Episteme: A Journal of Individual and Social Epistemology and Epistemology Subject Editor for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Cristina Lafont was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa Society and APA 2022 Lebowitz Prize for philosophical achievement and contribution (together with Alex Guerrero) on the topic “Democracy: What’s Wrong? What Should we do?”. She was also invited to give the Keynote lecture at the 28th Academic Convention of the German Political Science Association (DVPW), to participate in symposia on her book at the APA Central, Prague, and Granada, and to give talks at conferences at Columbia University, Science Po (Paris), Concordia University (Canada), University of Copenhagen (Denmark), University of Frankfurt (Germany), University of Lima (Peru), and University of Minho (Portugal). Unfortunately, all these events were moved online because of the pandemic. But recently she was able to give two in-person talks at the University of Seville and Valencia in Spain, so there may be light at the end of the Covid tunnel! She taught a course on Hermeneutics & the Possibility of Critique and wrote an article on “Deliberative Minipublics and the Populist Conception of Representation as Embodiment” for a collective volume on Contested Representation: Challenges, Shortcomings, and Reforms (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and a piece on “Which Decision-Authority for Citizens’ Assemblies” for the Handbook of Citizen’s Assemblies (De Gruyter, forthcoming). She is very excited about her new project to write a book together with Nadia Urbinati defending democracy against lottocracy (to be published by Oxford University Press).
José Medina is in the last stages of revision of his new book The Epistemology of Protest: Silencing, Epistemic Activism and the Communicative Life of Resistance, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. The book makes contributions to theories of oppression and theories of liberation by developing an account of resistance against oppression through public protest, elucidating the forms of silencing and epistemic marginalization of grassroot protest movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Gay Liberation Movement. In 2021-22 Medina published essays in A Companion to Public Philosophy, Applied Epistemology, Social Epistemology, Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofía Política, The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy, The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology, and Vice Epistemology, among other venues. He gave talks at CUNY, Harvard, Pittsburgh, Princeton, Tulane University, UIC, University of Georgia, University of Iowa, University of Washington, and at various universities in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Germany, South Africa, Spain, and the UK.
Axel Mueller was promoted to Professor of Instruction in Philosophy during this Academic Year. As for any advance, it took a village, and he is very grateful for all those (within the department and beyond) who have been supporting him over the years, and who have been co-responsible for his getting here. As regards his philosophical endeavors, he continued working in political philosophy, specifically democratic theory and the analysis of populism, and in the analysis of the role of conspiracy theorizing in society. Both carried him to give talks and comments at symposia at the APA and at other venues, and will eventually result in articles on the subjects. Like everyone else, he thoroughly embraced the return to in-person modality for most activities at the philosophy department at NU, where he continued his administrative and curricular work and coordinating function for student groups like Minorities In Philosophy (MAP), WiPhi, the Women Into Philosophy Initiative, its graduate sibling WIPHICA, the Northwestern Undergrad Philosophy Society NUPS, and the NU Ethics Bowl team. It turned out that the return wasn’t, as one might have erroneously expected, merely a resettling in old and known routines but in fact another change into the new, with all the excitement, uncertainty, need to get things moving that this involves. Given that choice, he’s decided to take on the new year with excitement and getting things moving.
Baron Reed (coming)
Gregory Ward is a member of the Department of Linguistics and, by courtesy, the Department of Philosophy. He is also currently serving as Co-Director of The Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN), an interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to promoting research and education on sexuality, gender, sexual orientation, and health in social context. His research and teaching areas are in the philosophy of language (specifically the semantics-pragmatics interface), and he is currently working on a monograph on the pragmatics of demonstratives. He also teaches in the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program (offering courses on language & gender/sexuality). This year, after two difficult and exhausting years teaching on Zoom, he is delighted to be teaching his reference seminar in person again, despite acute anxiety about being in a classroom with COVID caseloads currently on the rise.
Rachel Zuckert enjoyed teaching about some “big” philosophical concepts this winter – the self, history, and race – back in person (if also in masks) and learned a great deal from advising independent studies on existentialism and environmental aesthetics. She is grateful to have received a teaching release from the Kaplan Humanities Institute (at Northwestern), as well as an upcoming fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to support a new book project on Scottish Enlightenment aesthetics. In the meantime, she gave talks on Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and Herder’s aesthetics at international zoom conferences, and has been working on Kant’s views on the sublime and on history, including two essays which appeared in print this year. She is also at work on writing a memorial piece, and on organizing a workshop for fall 2022 (conjointly with Anthony Laden at University of Illinois-Chicago), to honor and mourn Charles Mills, distinguished political philosopher and former colleague in the Northwestern philosophy department, who died in fall 2021. A great loss.