Chair’s Letter
November 2022
Change is afoot! In summer 2022, Professor Andrea Woody moved into a new role as Divisional Dean of the Social Sciences, giving philosophy a friend in the administration and Andrea an enormous but exciting challenge of new work and responsibilities. Huge congratulations to Dean Woody! It’s wonderful news for UW and the College of Arts & Sciences.
Here in the Department of Philosophy, we are doing our best to carry on without Andrea’s steady presence and… Read more
In October, Professors Colin Marshall and Ian Schnee appeared on Going Public, the Simpson Center’s podcast exploring public scholarship and publicly engaged teaching in the humanities. Colin and Ian discussed the courses they developed using funds from the Mellon Summer Collaborative Fellowship and philosophy as a public practice.
“This made me… Read more
UW Philosophy's Professor Stephen Gardiner and Arthur Obst have collaborated on a new book, Dialogues on Climate Justice, out now from Routledge. Obst discusses their approach to the book:
"We wrote Dialogues on Climate Justice for several reasons. Primarily, we saw a need for an new text that would introduce the reader to the current ethical and justice issues surrounding… Read more
The UW Neuroethics Research Group recently received a new NIH R01 grant in neuroethics (1R01MH130457), “Caring for BRAIN Pioneers: Understanding and enhancing family and research support in neural device trials” under the leadership of co-PIs Sara Goering and Eran Klein. This is a four-year, $1.3M grant that will include funding for a philosophy research assistant and a postdoctoral scholar. The project summary: “BRAIN pioneers are people who take on significant risk as participants in first-in… Read more
José Mendoza's work on immigration and border security is highlighted in the UW Daily.
“A lot of the debates are about values and not so much facts,” Mendoza said. “There's a limit to what social science can do, what political science can do, what anthropologists can do. At a certain point, philosophers have to come in, and we have to fight out these ideas against ideas.”
Read the entire article in the … Read more
Arthur Obst was interviewed on the Common Caws for Sustainability podcast about his dissertation work on wildness and ecological humility, as part of their series on environmental ethics. This podcast, based out of UW Bothell, focuses on sustainability efforts by UW faculty, students, and staff. Arthur was interviewed by Ben Hauge.
Stephen Gardiner was interviewed by the Organization for Defending Victims of Violence to discuss the ethical concerns of climate change and the efficacy of international frameworks to address effects of global warming and extreme weather on human rights.
Q: In your different writings and speeches, you’ve discussed the ethical considerations of climate change and raised the concept of the tyranny of the contemporary. In the underprivileged and developing societies where the most immediate… Read more
Stephen Gardiner discusses why the moral imperative of climate action is not addressed by the world governments with the urgency it requires. This summer in Europe and the U.S., politicians have made compromises with climate policies that prioritized worries of inflations and energy security.
The problem, he says, comes down to the fact that our institutions might not be capable of properly dealing with issues that affect people across the world and through multiple generations. That’s a moral… Read more