The Emory University Institute for the History of Philosophy (IHP) will host its fifth annual summer workshop on June 4-14, 2012, on the topic of “Peirce, James, and the Origins of Pragmatism.”

The Heidegger Circle will holds its 46th annual meeting May 4-6, 2012 at Emory University (convenor: Andrew J. Mitchell). Further information as well as a conference poster can be found here: www.heideggercircle.org/2012

Emory was well represented at the recent Georgia Philosophical Society meeting. The President of the society, Nathan Nobis, reported that competition was stiff this year with 35 entries vying for three spots all subjected to blind review. The happy result was that the papers selected for presentation were all from Emory graduate students. Congratulations to the successful presenters: Matthew Homan "Spinoza and the Problem of Representation," Jared Millson "What are Questions?" and Jacob Rump "The Possibility of a Logic of Experience."

John Stuhr has been re-appointed Department Chair for a five-year term, 2011-2016.  During fall, 2011, he will be on research leave as a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University (where he will work toward completing book projects in pragmatism and American philosophy and on forgiveness and cosmopolitanism).  During that semester, Michael Sullivan will serve as Interim Chair.

Marta Jimenez accepts the Aristotle/ancient Greek faculty position in our department: We are extremely happy to announce the tenure-track appointment of Marta Jimenez as Assistant Professor of Philosophy, effective at the beginning of the 2011-12 academic year. This spring she will complete her dissertation on “Shame and Moral Development in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics” and receive her Ph.D, following earlier receipt of several awards and honors, from the Collaborative Programme in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at the University of Toronto. She received both her D. E. A in philosophy and her Licenciatura (B.A. with honors) from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and has also held visiting fellowships at the Department of Philosophy at UCLA and the Institut fur Philosophie at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Her teaching and research focus on the philosophy of Aristotle, ancient Greek and medieval political thought, ancient Greek philosophy more generally, moral philosophy, and moral psychology, and she has research skills in Greek, Latin, German, French, and Italian, as well as English and her native Spanish. Anticipating her move to Emory, she writes: "I could not be more pleased about joining the faculty of Philosophy and am very much looking forward to taking up my post in the fall. I am delighted to join such a world-class institution and participate in the vibrancy of academic life at Emory! In addition to teaching, I will continue my research in Aristotelian moral and political philosophy and in contemporary moral psychology. My immediate goals are to develop my dissertation into a book entitled The Virtues of Shame: The Positive Role of Shame in Aristotle’s Account of Moral Development, and to begin a series of papers on the place of moral emotions in Aristotle’s Ethics." 

Professor Melvin Rogers joins our department: We are delighted to report the appointment, effective with the 2012-13 academic year, of Melvin L. Rogers as Assistant Professor of Philosophy. Professor Rogers, now Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia and a visiting faculty member in the department of political science at Swarthmore College, received his B.A. from Amherst College, his M. Phil. in political thought and intellectual history from Cambridge University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. In addition he has held a Ford Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship, an Exchange Scholar position in the department of Religion at Princeton University, and a Scholar-in-Residence appointment in the department of Political Science at Carleton College. His teaching and research focus on political philosophy and democratic and republican theory, American and African-American political thought, classical and contemporary pragmatism, and issues of religion, race, and gender. He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (Columbia U. P., 2008) as well as many articles in Philosophy and Social Criticism, European Journal of Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, Contemporary Pragmatism, and Transactions of the Peirce Society, and other scholarly journals. He states:  “I am deeply humbled by the opportunity to join Emory's Philosophy department and become a member of the wider Emory community.  In addition to contributing to the development of the department, I will continue my current book project that examines the relationship between democracy and faith in the works of women and African-Americans in 19th and early 20th century American philosophy.”

Professor Rudolf Makkreel will be a Keynote Speaker at the First Biannual Meeting of the North American Kant Society to be held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from June 2-4, 2011. He will speak on “Schematizing With and Without Concepts: How the Aesthetic Judgment Recontextualizes the Object of Cognition.”

The 2010 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association included presentations (despite the snowy weather) by four Emory philosophy department members:  Professor Tom Flynn (paper) and Andrew Mitchell (commentary); graduate student Michal Gleitman (paper); and visiting scholar Kipton Jensen (paper).

The American Academy of Religion held its annual meeting in Atlanta in October 2010. The program included a lecture by John Stuhr who spoke on "Pragmatism and Faith" at a session sponsored by the Pragmatism and Empiricism in American Religious Thought Group that focused on the recent book, "The Undiscovered Dewey" by Melvin Rogers (U. Virginia).

Andrew Mitchell's book, Heidegger Among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling, has been published by Stanford University Press.  And Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume II: Understanding the Human World, co-edited by Rudi Makkreel (with Frithjof Rodi) and published by Princeton University Press also appeared in summer 2010.