News
Pitt Philosophy in Japan
Adam Marushak will be presenting his paper, "The Language of Reasons", at the Tokyo Forum for Analytic Philosophy on May 9th. The Forum is a weekly speaker-series that brings in philosophers from around the world.
2018-2019 Tamara Horowitz Memorial Lecture
The Pitt Philosophy Department is happy to announce that the Tamara Horowitz Memorial Lecture of the academic year 2018-19 will be given by Professor Ann E. Cudd of Boston University. The lecture will take place on October 19, 2018. Professor Cudd, a former student of Tamara Horowitz, received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 1988. She has been Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University since 2015. Professor Cudd’s philosophical interests include social and political philosophy, philosophy of economics, philosophy of social science, decision theory, and feminist theory.
Inference, Cognition, and Perception
Thomas J. Breed will be presenting his paper "Reasoning with One's Eyes Open" at the Catholic University of America's graduate conference on cognition, which will be held in Washington D.C. on the 6th and 7th of April. He will be joining Alva Noë (UC Berkeley) and Jonathan Buttaci (CUA), who are the keynotes for the conference.
Truth and Fixed-Point Structures
Stephen Mackereth has settled an open problem about fixed-point theories of truth (e.g., Kripke’s theory of truth). A “fixed point” (of the jump function) is, roughly, a possible interpretation for the truth-predicate. He has characterized the possible structures that the set of fixed points of a self-referential first-order language may have, for the strong Kleene and van Fraassen supervaluationist logics. He has also obtained a limitative result for the weak Kleene logic. The work is forthcoming in a special issue of the Journal of Philosophical Logic celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Gupta & Belnap’s The Revision Theory of Truth.
Vivian Feldblyum Presentations
Vivian Feldblyum will be presenting papers at three upcoming conferences. First, she will present “Aristotle on Thumos and Phantasia” at the Pennsylvania Circle of Ancient Philosophy Annual Conference on March 24th at Penn State University. Second, she will present “Aristotle on Kindness, Pity, and Natural Friendship” on April 13th at the conference “Empathy, Sympathy, and Compassion: The Dynamics of Other-Oriented Emotions” here at the University of Pittsburgh. Finally, she will present "Feyerabend and Aristotle: A Return to Common Sense” on May 18th at the 2018 Conference on Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Enactivism and Indeterminacy
Alessandra Buccella will present a poster titled “Enactivism and Indeterminacy” at the conference “Enactivism: Theory and Performance” at the University of Memphis on March 15-17. The conference will feature many important theorists in enactivism and embodied cognitive science, such as Dan Hutto, Erik Myin, Shaun Gallagher, and Tony Chemero.