Our graduate students are actively engaged both within the academy and beyond. Keep up with news of their activities and achievements, and get to know their perspectives on various philosophical issues in this News & Blog feed. To request a news announcement or submit a blog post proposal, current students and alumni should contact the graduate adviser (philgpa@uw.edu).
Graduate Student News & Blog
UW Philosophy PhD candidate Aaron Barker will spend the 2024-2025 academic year as a Fulbright Fellow in Germany. Aaron, whose dissertation project focuses on Schopenhauer’s moral psychology, will be working with Dr. Matthias Koßler, director of the Schopenhauer-Gessellschaft in Mainz. Read further details here.
What a year it’s been. The campus was filled with political activity, including encampments protesting the war in Gaza and a graduate student ASE strike. The Department of Philosophy held its first Town Hall meeting on issues of climate and communication, and undertook an extensive graduate program review. This newsletter contains information on many events from the year, but let me highlight just a few of them:
New faculty
This year, the UW Department of Philosophy welcomed two new faculty… Read more
Philosopher Arthur Obst, a UW doctoral student, thinks that wild places can thrive — if we adjust our definition of wilderness and embrace the idea of letting go. Continue reading on UW College of Arts & Sciences News
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.
Linds Whittaker's open-access project tracking philosophy graduate programs has been featured in The Daily Nous. Whittaker tracks admissions requirements and deadlines for over 100 philosophy graduate programs in multiple countries, providing the information publicly via Google Docs.
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
After a cool, rainy spring, it seems that summer weather may have finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest. Our department still resonates with the sound of celebration as we gathered in-person for the first time in three years to celebrate our students in our annual Department Awards Ceremony and… Read more
On Monday, June 6, the department held a graduation celebration at the wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Intellectual House with our graduates, faculty, family and friends. We were thrilled to be able to hold it in person and celebrate our graduates with applauses they could hear, rather than clapping-hand emojis. Congratulations to the ninety-six Bachelors of Arts, four Masters of Arts, and five Doctors of Philosophy of the class of 2022!
The ceremony included a speech by alumna Mary B. Whisner, B.A. Philosophy… Read more
The Department of Philosophy celebrated the achievements of our students and faculty at our annual awards ceremony on May 20, 2022. We were able to return to an in-person celebration in Savery Hall, and we were thrilled to celebrate our award winners’ accomplishments together. Our heartfelt tradition of sharing personal anecdotes about each recipient continued, to the delight of family, friends, and classmates.
We are proud of the accomplishments of all our department members and look… Read more
The APA interviewed graduate student Cody C. Dout about his philosophical work, which examines “the tacit assumptions within white-dominated philosophical literatures and aims to show how arguments within these encounter moral and epistemic limits when it comes to the theorization of Black life in America.” APA profiles help members get to know fellow philosophers better and build community and connections.
What excites you about philosophy?
I grew up in “inner-city” Baltimore. And… Read more