Recently in Faculty Category

For those attending SPEP in Pittsburgh this year, here is a list of our students and faculty participating on the program in order of their speaking appearances:

Christopher Long, moderator, Ancient Philosophy Society panel, Thursday, 9am, Salon 2.

Michael R. Paradiso-Michau, "My Genius is in My Nostrils: What and How Nietzsche's Nose Knows," SPHS Program, Thursday, 12pm, Pittsburgh Room.

Jeffrey Nealon, respondent in book session on his book, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984, Thursday, 12:30, Marquis A.

Véronique Fóti, moderator on book panel for Babette Babich's Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Thursday, 3:15, Salon 2.

Michael Schleeter, "The Advent of Desire in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit," Thursday, 3:15, Marquis B.

Len Lawlor, moderator, Plenary Session with Moira Gatens, Thursday, 8pm, Power Center Ballroom, Duquesne Campus.

Michael R. Paradiso-Michau, "Non-Monstrous Doubles and Nietzschean Empathy," Friday, 9am, Marquis B.

Camisha Russell, "African American Sexuality and the Repressive Hypothesis: Reading Patricia Hill Collins with Michel Foucault," Friday, 2pm, Marquis B.

Dennis Schmidt, speaker at the Scholar's Session on Rodolphe Gasché, Saturday, 9am, Marquis C.

Robert Bernesconi, moderator, Contract and Domination by Charles Mills, Saturday, 9am, Center City A.

Alphonso Lingis, "Experience of Mortality: Phenomenology and Anthropology," Saturday, 9am, Salon 2.

Kathryn Gines, "The Existential Philosophy of Richard Wright," Saturday, 1:30pm, Salon 1.

Christopher Long, "Between Natality and Mortality: The Torments of Autonomy," Saturday, 1:30, Center City B.

Len Lawlor, "Auto-Affection and Becoming: Following the Rats," IAEP Keynote Speaker, Saturday, 8pm, Center City A and B.

Jared Hibbard-Swanson, "Self-Realization or Self-Fashioning? Spinoza, Deep Ecology and the Problem of Ecological Subjectivity," IAEP Program, Sunday, 10:45am, Gumberg Library 202.

If you will be in Pittsburgh, please make every effort to attend these sessions and support our faculty and students.

Nancy Tuana, DuPont/Class of 1949 Professor in Ethics, Professor of Philosophy, Humanities and Women’s Studies, and Director of the Rock Ethics Institute, has been named the Society of Women in Philosophy’s 2008 Distinguished Woman Philosopher.  

Begun in 1984, this annual award honors a woman philosopher whose contributions to the support of women in philosophy and to philosophy itself are outstanding and merit special recognition.  A panel and reception celebrating Professor Tuana’s accomplishments will be organized for the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Philadelphia , December 27-30, 2008.

Congratulations to Nancy for this excellent honor!

Professor Robert Bernasconi will join the philosophy faculty at Penn State in Fall 2009 as Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy.  Professor Bernasconi’s primary research and teaching interests lie in critical philosophy of race, particularly in relation to the history of philosophy, and Continental philosophy, especially figures such as Sartre, Levinas, and Heidegger. He is the author of How to Read Sartre (W.W. Norton, 2007), Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing (Humanities Press, 1993), and The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (Humanities Press, 1985).  

He is the editor or co-editor of thirteen books, including Race, Hybridity, and Miscegenation (Thoemmes, 2005), Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (Indiana UP, 2003), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge UP, 2002), Race (Blackwell, 2001), The Idea of Race (Hackett, 2000) and Re-Reading Levinas (Indiana UP, 1991).

We are very excited to welcome Robert to the department.

Professor Kathryn Gines will join the philosophy faculty at Penn State in Fall 2008. In 2008-09 she will be a Philosophy and Africana Research Center Post-doctorate Fellow and beginning fall 2009 she will be an Assistant Professor in Philosophy. 

Len Lawlor will join the Philosophy Department at Penn State in Fall 2008 as Edwin Erle Sparks Professor.  Professor Lawlor received his PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1988. His primary research and teaching interest is contemporary Continental philosophy, including Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Husserl, and Nietzsche. 

It is a great honor for me to be able to participate in the Ph.D. Program which has produced philosophers like Iris Marion Young, Cindy Willett, and Todd May. I look forward to teaching my first seminar next Fall. My first course at Penn State will concern the problem of crisis in philosophy. The primary texts we shall examine are Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences, Merleau-Ponty's The Adventures of the Dialectic, and Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy. I am excited to be able to help the Philosophy Department at Penn State continue its successful tradition.

Over the past few months three of our senior faculty have received recognition from the University for their excellent work.