The 6th Annual Ida B. Wells Conference will take place this year on November 16-17. 2012. The Ida B. Wells Conference is organized by the Ida B. Wells Association, founded by University of Memphis graduate students to promote discussion of philosophical issues arising from the African American experience and to provide a context in which to mentor undergraduates with an interest in philosophy. This years keynote speakers will be Dr. Vanessa C. Wills (St. Joseph's University) and Dr. Charles W. Mills (Northwestern University).

Shaun Gallagher will give the The UNESCO Philosophy Day Public Lecture and the Cave Hill Philosophy Symposium Keynote Address at the 8th Cave Hill Philosophy Symposium. University of West Indies. Barbados (15 November 2012).  The title of his lecture will be "Where to look for your body." 

Workshop on Schizophrenia: Levels of interpretation -- Subpersonal, personal, and social

The Department of Philosophy, with support from the Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Award, will sponsor an international and interdisciplinary workshop on Schizophrenia: Levels of interpretation to take place on October 25-26 at the Doubletree Hotel, Downtown Memphis. The workshop is organized by Prof. Shaun Gallagher, the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence. Featured speakers include Jorge Dávila (Psychiatry, Universidad Nacional – Bogotá, Colombia), George Graham (Philosophy, Georgia State University), John Lysaker (Philosophy, Emory University), Paul Lysaker (Psychiatry, Indiana University), Albert Newen (Philosophy, Bochum University), Jean-Michel Roy (Philosophy/Cognitive Science, ENS, Lyon), Michael Schwartz (Psychiatry, Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Medicine), Anna Strasser (School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt University, Berlin), Somogy Varga (Philosophy, University of Memphis), Gottfried Vosgerau (Philosophy, Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf), Osborne Wiggins (Philosophy, University of Louisville). Program and more information to the workshop webpage here.

The 31st Annual Spindel Conference, entitled “Freudian Futures,” will take place on October 4-6, 2012 under the direction of Pleshette DeArmitt. Keynote speakers include Elissa Marder (Emory University) and Philippe Van Haute (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen). Further details and conference information can be found here.

Prof. Shaun Gallagher, the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy, was one of seven researchers in humanities and social sciences awarded the Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation on September 13, 2012 in a ceremony at the University of Heidelberg. The award was presented by Dr. Annette Schavan, Germany’s Minister of Education. This new 5-year Humboldt Fellowship was awarded for the first time this year. It is designed to promote the internationalization of the humanities and social sciences in Germany. The award amount of EUR 250,000 will be used to support research collaborations between the University of Memphis and the Ruhr University, Bochum, in Germany, including short-term research visits by Ph.D. students and post-doctoral researchers at both institutions. Researchers are nominated by collaborative partners at German universities and research institutions.

The other six award winners were Katharina Boele-Woelki from the Netherlands one of Europe's leading researchers on international and comparative family law; James Conant a philosopher at the University of Chicago, medievalist historian Patrick Geary from the Institute for Advanced Research, Princeton University; social psychologist Michele Gelfand from the University of Maryland, Australian linguist Nicholas Evans, and anthropologist of religion, Birgit Meyer from the Netherlands. The awards are funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and named after the philosopher and historian of science Anneliese Maier (1905 in Tübingen, Germany - 1971 in Rome, Italy) who conducted research on the emergence of modern scientific thought from the 14th to 18th centuries, particularly in the natural sciences.

Luvell Anderson joins the department as an assistant professor. He received his BA in philosophy from the University of Missouri at St. Louis and completed his PhD in philosophy at Rutgers University. He specializes in the philosophy of language and philosophy of race and has published articles on racial slurs. His work concentrates on the semantics and ethics of racial language and racist humor. Luvell also has interests in social and political philosophy and the philosophy of mind.

Melissa Ebbers joins the department as an instructor and online coordinator. She received her Bachelors of Art in Philosophy and her Bachelors of Science in Psychology at the Ohio State University, her Masters in Philosophy from Western Michigan University, and her Doctorate in Philosophy from University of Maryland, College Park. Her primary research interests include philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of food (including food ethics).

Lucien Manning Garrett joins the department as a senior lecturer. He received his MA from Louisiana State University and his PhD from the University of Georgia. His research interests include philosophy of religion, free will and determinism, and contemporary epistemology. Manning teaches courses for our department at the Lambuth Campus in Jackson, Tennessee. He is the 2012 president of the Tennessee Philosophical Association.

Somogy Varga (PhD, Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main) joins the department as an assistant professor. He has worked at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt and has conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück. He was also a visiting researcher at the Centre for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. His primary areas of research are philosophy of psychiatry/mind, moral psychology, social philosophy, and critical theory.

Tobias Starzak studied philosophy, musicology and romance philology at University of Cologne, Germany, and graduated with a Magister Artium degree in 2008. There, his main interests were epistemology and philosophy of mind, and his philosophical thesis was a critique of David Chalmers property dualism, titled „Warum Zombies doch nicht möglich sind“ (Why Zombies aren´t possible after all). Since 2009, he has been working as a research assistant at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, and currently is working on his PhD thesis about animal cognition, cultural evolution, and anthropological difference. His philosophical interests focus on philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. 

Massimiliano (Max) Cappuccio is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy of the United Arab Emirates University (Emirate of Abu Dhabi), where he teaches Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science; he is also a correspondent member of the Laboratory of Neurophilosophy of the State University of Milan. His undergrad studies at the University of Milan included one year as Erasmus student at the University of Amsterdam (ILLC). His MSc thesis on Alan Turing and the origins of computationalism was awarded with a national prize in 2006 and subsequently published as a book. His doctoral studies at the State University of Pavia included a two-year period in Paris (CREA - École Polytechnique; ENS): his PhD dissertation, defended in 2008, attempted to link mirror neuron theory with E. Husserl’s doctrine of empathy. In 2009, a fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh allowed him to spend seven months as visiting researcher at the University of Stirling, to work on the Heidegger-inspired approaches to situated cognition. This period was followed by one year as post-doctoral research fellow at Bentley University (Boston), working on joint attention. In 2011, he spent a period of research visit at the Center for Subjectivity of the University of Copenhagen with a fellowship from the Danish Government.

Anne Gléonec is a Doctor and Professor agrégée of Philosophy. After teaching for five years in France, she continued to pursue professional activities at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University, Prague, where she has taught and conducted research since 2009, while serving as the leading francophone professor for the Erasmus Mundus Europhilosophie program. Her philosophical interests focus on phenomenology and phenomenological thinking, following two primary axes: phenomenology of the body and its critical relation to the sciences via the work of Merleau-Ponty, and phenomenology of the political. She will teach a graduate course entitled A path into Merleau-Ponty’s Work : the notion of Institution, or from the phenomenology of perception to the phenomenology of action.

Dale C. Matthew (PhD, York University, Toronto, Canada) is Visiting Assistant Professor and Diversity Post-Doctoral Fellow in the department. He works mainly in political philosophy and the philosophy of race. He defended his dissertation, Racial Discrimination and the Site of Distributive Justice, in July 2012.

Anna Welpinghus, Humbolt Visiting Scholar, studied liberal arts and sciences at University College Maastricht where she had the opportunity to take classes in a wide range of subjects. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in January 2006. In October 2004, she took up her studies in philosophy, political science and psychology at Humboldt-University in Berlin. She received her “Magister Artium” degree in 2009. The title of her philosophical thesis was: “On criteria of Appropriateness for emotions. A case study and some meta-theoretical considerations.” Since January 2010 she has been writing a dissertation (“Seeing and Understanding Emotions” working title) at University of Bochum, which is part of the interdisciplinary project “Understanding Other Minds” supervised by Albert Newen (philosophy) and Georg Juckel(psychiatry).She worked as a student assistant from 2006 until 2009, at first teaching tutorials in logic, later assisting the chair for philosophy of science at Humboldt-University.