The University of Pittsburgh is ranked as one of the best philosophy departments in the country.
About
A major in philosophy provides excellent preparation for such professions as law, medicine, and business. The conceptual sophistication imparted by training in philosophy is invaluable in virtually any field of learning or any serious profession.
Highlights
Derrick Darby elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The department congratulates alumnus Derrick Darby (PhD 1996) on his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Daniel Webber to Stanford Ethics Center
The department congratulates Daniel Webber on his appointment as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Embedded EthiCS at the Center for Ethics in Society and the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University, beginning in Fall 2023.
Alnica Visser to TCU
The department congratulates Alnica Visser on her appointment as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Christian University in the Fall of 2023!
James Shaw’s new book outlining a distinctive ‘bipartite’ reading of the rule-following sections of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations has recently been published with OUP (November 2022).
Mark Wilson’s new book, Imitation of Rigor, provides an “alternative history” of how analytic philosophy might have developed had the diagnostic insights of its philosopher/scientist forebears (e.g. Heinrich Hertz and Ernst Mach) not been cast aside in the vain pursuit of inappropriate standards of “ersatz rigor”. (OUP, 2022)
To treat some human beings as less worthy of concern and respect than others is to lose sight of their humanity. But what does this moral blindness amount to? What are we missing when we fail to appreciate the value of humanity? Oxford University Press has recently published a collection of essays addressing these, and related, questions. It is co-edited by Sarah Buss and Nandi Theunissen.
Editors Matthew Boyle and Evgenia Mylonaki gather influential minds to clarify and criticize John McDowell’s arguments for nonreductive naturalism. HUP, 2023.
Normal functions are activities that parts of biological systems are, in some minimal sense, supposed to perform. In this paper, Goldwasser argues by example that cancer biologists regularly ascribe normal functions to parts of cancers. He argues that such ascription poses difficulties for standard accounts of function, opening the way for a novel pragmatist-inspired account of function which he calls the Modeling Account of Normal Function.