As the UNF Philosophy Department begins its second year, it welcomes a new faculty member, Assya Pascalev. Ms. Pascalev, a native of Sofia Bulgaria, is a specialist in applied ethics, with a concentration in bioethics. She was trained at Bowling Green State University, an institution internationally renowned for its focus on applied ethics. Her areas of interest in general are: practical and professional ethics, especially health care ethics, moral and social philosophy, metaethics, and the philosophy of death and dying. She is particularly interested in the moral dimensions of biotechnology, and the ethical aspects of art. She will be particularly involved with the UNF Ethics Center and already serves as its Associate Director.

The Department has been named a director of one of the College of Arts and Sciences’ “Interdisciplinary Seminars” and will sponsor the February visit of Professor Robert Pippen, a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. On Thursday February 22 he will be deliver an evening address on the topic “The Erotic Nietzsche: Philosophy without Philosophers.” He will deliver a second lecture Friday afternoon, “Henry James and Modern Moral Philosophy.”

In conjunction with the student Philosophy Club, the Department will cosponsor the 5th Annual Northeast Florida Student Philosophy Conference. The conference will take place March 9-10, 2001. Featured speakers are Owen Flanagan, James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, with a talk on “Mind, Morals, and the Meaning of Life,” and Robert Bernasconi, Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, with a talk on “Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up: On the Racism of Great Philosophers.”

During the first week of April the Department, in conjunction with the Ethics Center, will sponsor a symposium on human cloning featuring Professor Gregory Pence, School of Medicine and the Philosophy Department, University of Alabama. His lecture will be on the topic: “Who’s Afraid of Human Cloning?”

During the Fall 2000 semester the Department sponsored a colloquium with Dr. David Litowitz of the Florida Coastal School of Law, who spoke on the topic “The Social Construction of Law.”

News about the Faculty

Andrew Buchwalter is presently completing two chapters for a book on the contemporary significance of Hegel's thought that will be published by the University of California Press: “The Separation of Church and State and the Unity of Religion and Politics” and “Dialectics, Globalization, and Cosmopolitan Embeddedness.” He will further pursue interests in globalization with students in the seminar he will teach this spring on the philosophy of globalization. Later this year two of his essays will be published in anthologies: “Hegel and Rawls on Political Pluralism” in MIT Press’ Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of Critical Theory and “Law, Culture, and Constitutionalism: Remarks on Hegel and Habermas,” in SUNY Press’s Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism. In addition to chairing the department, Buchwalter continues to direct the University’s Center for Ethics, Public Policy, and the Professions.

David Fenner’s article “Art and Culture” is published in the Encyclopedia of Nationalism (forthcoming San Diego, California: Academic Press, 2001). The article is one of 38 in-depth articles; 640 shorter pieces are also to be included in the encyclopedia. His on-going work centers on revisions of his textbook on introductory aesthetics.

Bert Kögler’s reseach is currently focusing on the multicultural implications of philosophical theories of dialogue as well as the conceptual and methodological foundations of the human and social sciences. He has been invited to give several talks on those issues in the US and abroad, including a conference on “Dialogue and Difference” at the University of London, a research-seminar at the Inter-University Center of Dubrovnik on “Different Conceptions of Modernity,” a conference of “Bahktin’s Philosophy of Dialogue” in Indiana, among others. As its organizer, he is heavily involved in a Faculty-Seminar at UNF, the first of its kind, which tackles general issues related to postmodernism in the humanities and social sciences. He is working on several papers, one of which is entitled “Models of Critique for the Multicultural Public Sphere.” In the spring, he will teach a newly created course “Philosophy of Music” which combines aesthetic, cognitive, and cultural theories to understand music.

John Maraldo returned in August from a year as a senior fellow at the Higher Institute for Philosophy of the Catholic University, Leuven, Belgium, where he gave graduate and faculty seminars and lectures on Japanese philosophy. He is currently working on several papers: on new ways to think about God suggested by contemporary French and Japanese philosophers; on phenomenology and Buddhism; and on knowledge and locale. He will present this last paper at a conference in Tokyo in December. He is also developing some new courses: Lifepaths; East Asian Ethics, and a new version of Phenomenology.

Assya Pacalev’s current research is focused on the ethical, legal and policy implications of genetically altered foods. Her long-term goal is to develop an interdisciplinary program Biotechnology in a Global World: Ethical, Legal and Policy Implication. The program would support research, education and policy initiatives advancing the ethics of biotechnology from a global perspective. In October, 2000, she gave a presentation at the Florida Bioethics Network Annual Fall Conference “Law and Ethics at the End of Life” in Jacksonville on “Case-Based Reasoning in Clinical Bioethics.”

Ellen Wagner published an article “Supervenience and the Thesis that the Soul Is Harmonia” in the Southwest Philosophy Review 16 (2000): 1-20. The paper argues for a new interpretation of a crucial thesis from Plato’s dialogue Phaedo: if this hypothesis is seen as the claim that soul is dependent on body on a certain way, it threatens Plato's famous soul-body dualism. Ellen Wagner’s edited anthology Essays on Plato’s Psychology (Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield) will be published in October, 2001. This anthology dealing with essays on Plato's psychology includes articles on the metaphysics of the soul in second-period dialogues, especially the immortality of soul and the Republic argument for three psychic parts.