Recently in Awards Category

Masato Ishida successfully defended his dissertation entitled: Philosophical Commentary on C. S. Peirce's "On a New List of Categoriies": Exhibiting Logical Structure and Abiding Relevance. Vincent Colapietro chaired the doctoral committee, with Dennis Schmidt and Christopher Long as inside members and Stephen Simpson as the outside member of the committee.

Dr. Ishida also received the Department of Philosophy's Joseph J. Kockelmans Award in Philosophy. The purpose of this award is to honor and recognize outstanding achievement by a graduate student in Philosophy who is ABD. Professor Kockelmans was employed as a professor of philosophy at Penn State from 1968 to 1995. He was an important figure in the history of continental philosophy in the United States, being heavily involved in the early days of SPEP, the Heidegger Circle, and the journal Man and World, now known as Continental Philosophy Review. He was also the first "continental" President of the APA Eastern Division.

We congratulate Dr. Ishida on his recent accomplishments.  We will miss him and we wish him the best success in his excellent placement.  
In addition to his recently announced award for the outstanding graduate student essay at the 2008 IAEP, Jared Hibbard-Swanson has also received the 2008-2009 College of the Liberal Arts Outstanding Teaching Award for Graduate Students.

In winning this award, Jared continues a strong tradition of excellence with regard to graduate student teaching in the Department of Philosophy. He is the eighth student from our department to have won recognition for exceptional teaching in the past four years, joining Mary Alessandri, Alex Stehn (2007-08); Michael Brownstein, Leigh Johnson and Alexa Schriempf (2006-07); and Kyle Grady, Bryan Leuck (2005-06).

Jared's nominating letter reads in part:

Mr. Hibbard-Swanson is committed to challenging his students to think more critically about the world in which they live. Although he recognizes that philosophy requires specific skills--the ability to argue coherently, read carefully and write effectively--his vision of a philosophical education centers around, as he says, "making easy things difficult." By this he means engaging with his students in a dialogue with central figures in the history of philosophy in such a way that settled beliefs become open questions for students. The curriculum of each of his courses reflects this commitment both to the specific skills of philosophy and the larger purpose of philosophical education. He works very hard to bring ideas and concepts articulated by philosophers to bear on concrete social and politics questions of the day. As a result, students are made to feel the relevance of what they are doing in the classroom to the wider world in which they live. 

The letters from students indicate that Jared is a very conscientious teacher who works constantly and intentionally to improve his teaching. He is clearly succeeding in making easy things difficult, as one of his students writes: "Sometimes I would leave class with the sheer joy and satisfaction of discovery through thought, and sometimes I left class frustrated and pondering more questions than I had entered with."

Congratulations to Jared!
Jared.jpgCongratulations to Jared Hibbard-Swanson who won this year's Outstanding Graduate Student Essay Prize at the 2008 International Association of Environmental Philosophy society conference in Pittsburgh, PA.  This is an award given to the best graduate student paper presented at the conference.

Here is the abstract for Jared's paper:

Self-Realization or Self-Fashioning? Spinoza, Deep Ecology and the Problem of Ecological Subjectivity

In opposition to the "shallow" environmental movement, "deep" ecologists such as Arne Naess have sought not only to articulate new ecological norms, but also to found these norms upon a quasi-Spinozist philosophy of self-realization. While mainstream environmental ethicists attempt to settle upon an understanding of the relative moral worth of different natural beings in abstraction from our relationship to these beings, deep ecologists argue that these relationships, which constitute the ecological self, are ethically prior to a rational articulation of moral principles. If new ecological values are ever to take hold, we must first seek to unsettle the prevailing non-ecological sense of self.

Naess' strategy of turning ethical theory back upon the constitution of the human subject provides an interesting counterpoint to many of the prevailing concerns in the field of environmental ethics, forcing debates over abstract values to return to the ground of our lived experience of the world. However, Naess' static metaphysical vision of the fully-realized self, derived from his idiosyncratic interpretation of Spinoza's Ethics, may still prove insufficiently attentive to the contingent and situated nature of ecological experience. In this paper I argue that Naess does not unsettle our sense of self and world enough.

The principal aims of my paper, therefore, are twofold. First, I seek to critically examine the quasi-Spinozist theory of subjectivity that underlies the deep ecological ethic of self-realization, drawing attention to its static conception of ecological phenomena and selfhood. Second, relying on Deleuze's interpretation of Spinoza, I attempt to unearth in Spinoza's text an alternate ethic of self-fashioning, rooted in a more dynamic, material understanding of ecological subjectivity that is hopefully more attentive to the shifting and uncertain nature of emerging ecological phenomena.

Congratulations to Mary Alessandri for receiving a Fulbright Award to study in Spain during the 2008-2009 academic year.  She will be studying at the Unamuno archive, which is called the “Casa-Museo de Unamuno” in Salamanca, Spain.  Although it is affiliated with the University of Salamanca, the archive is located in what was Unamuno's house.

Mary's primary work will be to research what Unamuno called “Quixotism” which he considers to be a kind of philosophy and religion. Her research at the archive will add substantively to her dissertation which compares Unamuno's work with Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity.