Newsletter -  Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies

University of North Florida, Fall 2012

Department News

·         The Department welcomes one new colleague as regular faculty member, starting in August 2012: Dr. Bryan Bannon joins as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, with specializations in Ethics, Environmental Philosophy, Contemporary European Philosophy, and Modern Philosophy. Bryan’s joining the program boots its existing strength especially in ethics, applied ethics, and continental philosophy, and adds the important research and teaching focus of environmental ethics and philosophy to its BA and MA in philosophy.

·         The Department embarked on the philosophy pilot project for the UNF First Year Experience, which includes the requirement of taking one General Education philosophy course by each incoming freshman. The Department developed the project in cooperation with COAS Dean Barb Hetrick, Undergraduate Dean Jeff Coker, and COAS Associate Dean David Fenner. While all students at UNF are required to take one course in philosophy as part of the General Education Curriculum, this new course is based on the Reflective Judgment Model and meets students with philosophical education right at the outset in the first term of their college experience.

·         The Department implemented a new BA in Religious Studies in Fall 2012! This new timely and important BA has been made possible in large part by the work of Religious Studies Coordinator Julie Ingersoll, and is geared toward the comprehensive and comparative study of all major religious traditions.

·         The Department received a $12,000 Engaged Department Grant from UNF’s Center for Community-based Transformational Learning. Those grants are given to Departments with a critical mass of courses in development that will include community experiences for students as part of their content. The Department’s project makes use of the multiple community connections that arise from its emphasis on applied ethics, social and political philosophy, as well as its religious studies program.

Student News

Philosophy & Religious Studies Prize Winners

Theodore Locke, UNF philosophy major, won the Florida Philosophical Association’s Gerrit Schipper Prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Paper in the State of Florida in a Four-Year College or University for the essay: “” in 2011.

Aaron Kenna, UNF philosophy major, won the Florida Philosophical Association’s Gerrit Schipper Prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Paper in the State of Florida in a Four-Year College or University for the essay: “In Defense of Positive Relevance: A Reply to Peter Achinstein” in 2010.

In 2009, Andrew Brenner, UNF philosophy major, won the Florida Philosophical Association’s Gerrit Schipper Prizefor Outstanding Undergraduate Paper in the State of Florida in a Four-Year College or Universityfor the essay: “Aquinas on Eternity, Tense, and Temporal Becoming.”

Departmental Awards

·         Theodore Locke is the Robert W. Loftin Outstanding Graduate in Philosophy 2012

·         Samantha Mizeras is the 2012 Winner of the Philosophy Paper Prize 2012 (Undergraduate) for “Justice, Care, and Universalizability”

·         Benjamin Wooten is the 2012 Winner of the Graduate Paper Prize in Philosophy for “Control and Leaking: On Information and the

          New Weapons for Control Societies”

·         Ruby Peters won the 2012 Neil Gray Religious Studies Paper Prize for “Charismatic Authority at Embassy Fellowship: Can I Get A

           Witness?”

The UNF Philosophy Ethics Bowl team competed successfully at the Southeastern Regional Ethics Bowl competition on Saturday.  They finished in 3rd place and secured a spot in the national competition this February in San Antonio.  Team Members: Ashraf Abdulhalim, Bradley Beall, David Benn, Emily Carter, Lance Stephens.

Honors Theses 2012

• Jennifer Albertson, “Plato’s Theory of Forms Defended: A Solution to the Problem of Participation” Philosophy, Spring 2012;
• Tim Dacey, “On Belief, Knowledge and Truth: A Study of the Discourse Between Evolutionary Theory and Religious Epistemology,” Anthropology  (Philosophy Minor), Spring 2012

Student Placements  since 2011

• Theodore Locke accepted with funding at U of Miami PhD program.
• Daniel Ryan accepted to UF medical school.
• Melissa Schwartz was accepted to the ASPECT Program at Virginia Tech (unable to accept this year).Matthew Lamb was accepted with funding to the MA program in Philosophy at Colorado State University.
• Andrew Vlcek (UNF Honors student philosophy) was accepted with funding to the MA program in Philosophy at St. Johns University in Maryland.
• Paul DiGeorgio (UNF Honors student philosophy) was accepted with funding to the MA program in philosophy at Duquesne University
• Andrew Brenner was accepted with funding to the PhD program in Philosophy at Notre Dame.
• Jeff Haines (UNF Honors student philosophy) was accepted with funding to the PhD program in philosophy at FSU.
• Sean Borelli (MA student philosophy UNF) was accepted with funding to the PhD program in philosophy at FSU

Student Conference Presentations

• Theodore Locke,

              “Is Sylvan’s Box a Threat to Classical Logical Norms?” 

·                  Presented at 57^th Annual Meeting of the Florida Philosophical Association.  Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (November 2011).

·                   Presented at 11th Annual Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research & Scholarship (SOARS) (April 2012)

               “Epistemic Closure and Deductive Defeaters.” 

·                   Presented at 49^th Annual Meeting of the Alabama Philosophical Society.  Pensacola, Florida (September 2011).

                    Winner of Alabama Philosophical Society: 2011 Undergraduate Essay Competition.

• Jennifer Albertson, “Plato’s Theory of Forms Defended: A Solution to the Problem of Participation”                                                              

·                  Presented at 11th Annual Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research & Scholarship (SOARS) (April 2012)

• Tim Dacey, “On Belief, Knowledge and Truth: A Study of the Discourse Between Evolutionary Theory and Religious Epistemology”
• Presented at 11th Annual Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research & Scholarship (SOARS) (April 2012)
• Presented at 15^th Annual Northeast Florida Student Philosophy Conference (March 2012)

• Bradley Beall “An Amoral Ethic: Foucault and Nietzsche”

·             Presented at 15^th Annual Northeast Florida Student Philosophy Conference (March 2012)

• Tyler Andrews’: “The Problem of Global Suffering,” for SOARS conference, April.

• Jeannemarrie Celentano-Halleck’s, Midwest Political Science Association April meeting in Chicago.

• Alec Degnats, presented paper on aesthetics and Buddhism at the SOARS conference.

Graduate Program News

The MA in Practical Philosophy & Applied Ethics welcomes its new incoming class of 2012, as well as its returning graduate students, hailing from Florida and throughout the country.

These following MA theses and internships were completed in the last three years:

• Dathan Kahn Auerbach “Now I Am Become Internet, The Destroyer of Selves: The Destruction of Identity Coherence through Electronic Socialization” April 2009
• Cathleen Jensen-Gall “UNF’s Institutional Review: An Internship Report” April 2009
• Sarah Fernandez “A Theory of Cultural Glocality” June 2009
• Meghan Orman, "Reinventing Political Participation: Democracy and Education in the Early 21st Century," Spring 2011
• Michael Bailey, “The Role of Consensus in the Neutrality/Advocacy Debate,” Summer 2011
• Benjamin Hoffman, “Reflexivity and Social Phenomenology,” Summer 2011
• Drew Dixon Taking Ethical Theory to Practical Application in Business December 2011
• Melissa Schwartz Embodied Ethics: Transformation, Care, and Activism through Artistic Engagement April 2012
• Lorivie Apabo Advertising the Self: The Importance of Being Authentic and Creating an Authentic Self April 2012

The 2011 College of Arts & Sciences Dean’s Outstanding Master’s Degree Thesis Recognition was awarded to Benjamin Hoffman for his MA thesis “Reflexivity and Social Reflexivity.”

Faculty News 2012

Bryan Bannon recently presented several works in progress: “Nature and the ‘Silent Science’: A Phenomenological Account of the Laws of Nature” at the Merleau-Ponty Circle, “Time and the Domination of Nature” at the International Association for Environmental Philosophy, and “Friendship and Nature:  Virtue Ethics without Anthropocentrism” at the International Society for Environmental Ethics.  His essay “From Intrinsic Value to Compassion: A Place-Based Ethic” is due to be published in Environmental Ethics in the spring of 2013. 

Andrew Buchwalter published Dialectics, Politics, and the Contemporary Value of Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (Routledge) last November.  In May he published the edited collection Hegel and Global Justice (Dordrecht). His essay “Religion, Civil Society, and the System of an Ethical World: Hegel on the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” is forthcoming in Hegel on Religion and Politics, ed. Angelica Nuzzo (SUNY Press). In July he presented “The Dialectic of Human Rights and Democracy under Conditions of Globality,” at the annual Interpretative Policy Analysis conference in July in Tilburg Netherlands.  Also in July he presented “Universal Human Rights, Social Membership, and Historicity: Hegel and the ‘Right to have Rights,’” at the World Congresss of the International Political Science Association, in Madrid Spain.  In addition, he was an Invited participant in July 2012 symposium on “Norms and Institutions” sponsored by the Academy of Science of the State of Saxony, Leipzig Germany.  In October he presented the paper “Hegel, Arendt, und das Rechte, Rechte zu haben, at the meeting of the Internationale Hegel-Gesellschaft, Istanbul Turkey.  In September he was an invited participant in the University of Heidelberg Alumni Research Network Workshop in Boston.  He also served as program chair for the October 2012 biennial meeting of the Hegel Society of America, Depaul University Chicago.

Brandi Denison spent the summer in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming archives through a UNF Faculty Development Grant to complete the research for her book, _ Reconciliation, Religion, and Land in the American West_. She presented a paper titled: "'Playing Indian': Eastern Utah Religious Borderlands, 1910-1940" at the Western Historical Association in October 2012.  In February of this year, her essay "The Meeker Massacre: Religious Identity as Cultural Exchange,” in _Native American Adoption, Captivity, and Slavery in Changing Contexts_, edited by Max Cacori and Stephanie Pratt and published by Palgrave Press.

Erinn Gilson has spent the year at work on her manuscript, The Ethics of Vulnerability, which will be published by Routledge next year. She presented parts of the manuscript at conferences such as the International Merleau-Ponty Circle, the Society for Analytical Feminism, and the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative at Emory University. Her entries on Michel Foucault’s concepts of “Actuality,” “Event,” and “Multiplicity” will be published in The Foucault Lexicon (ed. Leonard Lawlor and John Nale, Cambridge University Press) in Spring 2013. Next semester she looks forward to working on an essay on food, choice, and responsibility, as well as teaching a new course on Race, Racism, and Self-Identity in UNF’s Honors Program and continuing to co-direct the Gender Studies Minor.

Mitch Haney has a co-edited volume (with Berrin Beasley in Communication) called Social Media and the Value of Truth coming out in December with Lexington Books. He has folded his work on the nature and value of slow living into a more general project on the philosophy of leisure, and he continues to develop his ideas on corporate responsibility. He gave a number of talks this past year on leisure, corporate moral personhood, business ethics in the U.S. and corporate social responsibility. The last two were invited talks at the Hochschule Bremen, in Bremen Germany. Last year he also led a study-abroad opportunity for UNF students to Germany, and this year will be a co-leader for a trip to the Netherlands.

Bert Koegler helped as chair to set up the Department’s Community-based Transformational Learning Grant as well as the First Year Experience project based on the Reflective Judgment Model. Besides appearing locally on WJCT’s First Coast Forum on civility and at a symposium on public prayer, he was invited by Auckland Technological University, New Zealand, to give a faculty workshop on critical hermeneutics and cosmopolitanism, a plenary talk on cosmopolitanism at the 11^th annual meeting of International Social Theory Consortium, Flagler College, and a keynote address on that topic at the University of Pecs, Hungary, at an Education & Society conference. He also published a series of essays, including (in English) “Hermeneutic Cosmopolitanism—or, Toward a Cosmopolitan Public Sphere:” Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, (Ashgate 2011); “Agency and the Other: On the Intersubjective Roots of Self-Identity.” Special issue on ‘Human Agency and Development,’ in New Ideas in Psychology, (Elsevier 2012); (in German) “Interpretation als Prima Philosophia: Rorty und die normativen Wurzeln des Dialogs” special issue on Richard Rorty’s pragmatic hermeneutics, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, (Meiner 2011), and in Italian translation: “Essere in quanto dialogo, o le conseguenze etiche dell’interpretazione, tr. it. di Andrea Lugoboni, in In Philosophical News, ( Milano 2011).

Julie Ingersoll writes about the religious right, the tea party and islamophobia for Religion Dispatches and for the Huffington Post and was, most recently, cited in the New Yorker Magazine.  She served as an expert witness in the high profile capital murder trial Komisarjevsky v. Connecticut and as a panelist ay “America as A Christian Nation” sponsored by People for the American Way at the National Press Club in Washington DC.  This fall she served as a panelist at the UNF symposium on public prayer, hosted by President Delaney and will give the inaugural lecture in the  Nancy Hardesty Memorial Lecture Series at Clemson University. She continues to work on her book on Christian Reconstructionism which is under contract with Oxford University Press.  Dr. Ingersoll also serves as the Religious Studies Program Coordinator, which has recently launched a new UNF major in Religious Studies.

Jonathan Matheson is co-editing (with Rico Vitz) The Ethics of Belief: individual and Social, under contract at Oxford University Press.  He has recently published “Epistemic Relativism” for Andrew Cullison (Ed.) Continuum Companion to Epistemology and “How Skeptical is the Equal Weight View” (with Brandon Carey) for Diego Machuca (Ed.) Disagreement and Skepticism.  He is currently working on several papers on the generality problem, and is presenting parts of these projects this year at the Alabama Philosophical Society, Florida Philosophical Association, and Eastern American Philosophical Association.  He is also currently organizing two conferences: the Southeaster Epistemology Conference (in October) and the Northeast Florida Student Philosophy Conference (in March).  In addition to his teaching, he also continues to coach the UNF ethics bowl team and is the faculty advisor for the UNF philosophy club.

Sarah Mattice is enjoying her second year at UNF. She is teaching Confucianism and the Japanese Mind this fall. Her paper, “Artistry as Methodology: Aesthetic Experience and Chinese Philosophy,” will be published this fall in the journal Philosophy Compass. She has just returned from a conference where she presented a paper entitled, "Confucian Role Ethics in the 21st Century: Gay Marriage, Wife Beaters, and Family Values". She is currently working on a manuscript on the relationships between metaphors and metaphilosophy. 

Alissa Hurwitz Swota is lead organizer for the Fifth Annual Pediatric Bioethics Conference, scheduled for November 2, 2012 at the UNF University Center. Dr. Swota has recently given talks at the national meeting of the American Osteopathic Association, and is scheduled to speak at National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization's annual conference.