Department of Philosophy News

We are very pleased to announce two recent appointment for our graduate students. Sean Cordell has just started as a research fellow at the University of Birmingham, working as part of an E.U. project on the procurement, storage and transfer of human tissues and cells. Along with Professor Heather Widdows he is responsible for the the UK’s contribution, which is focussing specifically on the ethics and governance of biobanking. Tom O’Shea has accepted a three-year post-doctoral position on the AHRC-funded project ‘Deciding for Oneself: Autonomous Judgment in History, Theory and Practice’ at the University of Essex. This will involve producing and disseminating research on the history, value and nature of autonomy, as well as organising conferences, workshops and working groups on the topic.

Oxford University Press have recently published a collection of Bob Stern’s papers on Hegel and related themes, under the title of  Hegelian Metaphysics (OUP, 2009).

FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR POSTGRADUATES

The university has 3 MA and 4 PhD AHRC studentships in the subject area of philosophy to award this year. There is also a wide range of University scholarships for which prospective postgraduates may apply. Note that, if you wish to apply for one of these sources of funding, you should apply for entry onto the relevant postgraduate course in advance of (or at the same time as) applying for funding.

For further information on applying for studentships, see http://www.shef.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/scholarships. Note that the deadline for funding applications is the 15th January 2010. If you would like to discuss funding matters with a member of the department, please email d.gregory@sheffield.ac.uk

Next Meeting of White Rose Aesthetics Forum will be on
Monday 7th December, 1pm to 5pm, York (King’s Manor)

1:00 Coffee
1:30 Aaron Meskin (Leeds) “Instances as Artworks”
3:00 Break
3:15 Peter Lamarque (York) “Art for Art’s Sake”
Ends 4.45

The Forum is a collaboration between those working in philosophical aesthetics at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York. It meets three times a year, twice for afternoons of papers from the participating departments, once for a one-day workshop with invited speakers.

For more details and registration: http://www.shef.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/profiles/wraf.html

In June the Philosophy in the City programme, which is run by students from the Department, ran a very successful Summer school, the second of these annual events. The day event attracted over eighty pupils from three local schools, along with their teachers, and involved talks from Philosophy Department staff and students, seminars run by students and staff, and discussions of how in general PiC might benefit local schools. Our thanks to all those who attended, and especially to the contributors and organisers, under the careful eye of Josh Forstenzer (doctoral student).

This semester the Department welcomes four new members of staff. Ioannis Trisokkas, who recently completed his PhD at Warwick on Hegel, will be teaching Phenomenology and Kant. Camillia Kong, who is completing a doctorate at the LSE, will teach political philosophy. Nils Kurbis, whose doctorate in logic is from Kings London, will teach philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of mind. And Aimee Plourde joins the Culture and the Mind project as postdoctoral researcher.

A team led by David Owens has received a British Academy Research Development Award of £65,000 for a project on ‘Telling and Trusting’. Other members of the Department involved will be Paul Faulkner and Rob Hopkins (co-investigators) and Chris Hookway and Jenny Saul.

The Department has also been successful in bidding for AHRC Research Leave Awards: Chris Hookway has been awarded one for work on Peirce, and Jimmy Lenman one to work towards a book integrating his thinking on normative ethics and metaethical theory.

After nearly a quarter of a century in the Arts Tower, with its long views and charming paternoster, the Department has moved. Its new home is a pair of mid-nineteenth century villas at 45 Victoria St. Our new accommodation offers far more workspace for graduates, as well as its own courtyard garden. It also puts us closer to ‘Arts Quarter’, the many new facilities built for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

We’re delighted to announce a spate of successes on the part of present and recent postgraduates: Julien Murzi, who will complete later this year has been awarded the Analysis Studentship; Davide Rizza (PhD awarded 2009) has accepted a two-year position at UEA; Simon Fitzpatrick (2006) is moving from being a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department to a tenure track position at John Carroll University (Cleveland, Ohio); and Gerry Hough (2005) has accepted a lectureship at the University of Aberdeen.

For more on our excellent placement record, see our placement pages.

Sheffield University has now been allocated six studentships in the subject area of Philosophy, under the Arts and Humanities Research Council´s Block Grant Partnerships Scheme. We have three Research Preparation Masters Scheme and three Doctoral awards. Most EU nationals admitted to the Department of Philosophy to read for our Masters courses in Philosophy, Political Theory or Cognitive Studies are likely to be eligible to apply for the former awards. Most EU nationals admitted to read for the degree of PhD in Philosophy are likely to be eligible for the latter.

The University also has a number of University Studentships and Fee Studentships for which applicants for AHRC Block Grant Partnership awards can also apply.

There is a single application form for all three studentships. The relevant forms, and further details, are available here.

The latest Research Assessment Exercise has confirmed the Department as one of the very best in the country as a place to pursue research. Of the Department’s total submission 35% was judged to be 4* (world-leading) and 35% 3* (internationally excellent). That puts the Department fourth in the country by the average grade attained per member of staff submitted, and fourth in the ‘medals table’ (ranking first by percentage of 4*, then by percentage of 3*, and so on). This excellent showing is all the more impressive given that every permanent member of staff was submitted for the exercise.

Bob Hale has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for 2009-11. This makes Bob the third member of the department in as many years to hold one of these prestigious awards (after Bob Stern and David Owens). Bob will be trying to develop and argue for three main claims: that we should accept facts about necessity and possibility as fundamental and irreducible, that questions about what kinds of things there are have an irreducibly modal dimension, and that a proper understanding of the relations between ontology and modality supports an account of second-order logic, possible world semantics and much of mathematics which renders their ostensibly very considerable existential commitments much less philosophically problematic than they are commonly taken to be.

We are delighted to announce that Chris Bennett and George Botterill have both been promoted to Senior Lecturer.

Stephen Stich will be Leverhulme Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy from 1 March 2009 – 30 May 2009.

Prof. Stich will deliver a series of four Leverhulme Lectures in May (open to the public) and will also be teaching a postgraduate course on Experimental Philosophy.

Along with the Departments at Leeds and York, the Department has established a new forum for reseach into aesthetics — The White Rose Aesthetics Forum. The plan is to meet twice a year for afternoons of work-in-progress, and once for a one-day workshop on a particular theme.

Paul Faulkner has been awarded AHRC research leave funding to work on papers on trust.

Jimmy Lenman and Yonatan Shemmer have been awarded a £25K grant from the AHRC Research Networks and Workshops Scheme to run a series of workshops and a conference on the subject of constructivism in practical philosophy here at Sheffield over the next year.

Helen Frowe has been awarded a two-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. She plans to write a book provisionally entitled War and Innocence. The main claims of the book will be that the rules of national defence are based on the rules of self-defence, and that the rules of self-defence cannot support the Principle of Non-Combatant Immunity. The award comes with a generous research allowance that will be spent on a series of workshops exploring key issues in permissible killing, and a conference on the overall theme of the book.

The Department has launched a new MA in Cognitive Studies, to be run jointly with Archaeology, English Language and Linguistics, Human Communication Sciences and Psychology.

This special edition is now available at http://www.abstracta.pro.br/english/Default.asp

Special Issue I – 2008 Table of Contents:

Editorial
Précis of The Human Animal: Eric Olson
Big-Tent Metaphysics: Lynne Rudder Baker
Three Problems for Olson’s Account of Personal Identity: Ned Markosian
Problems for Animalism: Dean Zimmerman
Replies: Eric Olson
Response to Eric Olson: Lynne Rudder Baker

Bob Hale will give his inaugural lecture ‘The Problem of Mathematical Objects? A Modest Sober Platonism’ on Wednesday 5 March at 1715, Humanities Research Institute. Entrance is by ticket only from Julie Banham, j.p.banham@shef.ac.uk

The department is pleased to announce the employment of Kerstin Budde and Tim Storer as temporary lecturers.
Kerstin Budde studied as an undergraduate in Germany, and then completed her PhD in Cardiff in 2007. Her main research interests are political philosophy, especially Kant´s moral and political philosophy, Rawls and Social Contract theories. Tim Storer did his BA in Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, then the MPhil in Philosophy at King’s College, London. He is currently finishing a PhD at Cambridge on the philosophy of mathematics. Tim’s interests include mathematical and philosophical logic, and the history of early analytic philosophy.

We are very pleased to announce that Steve Makin has been promoted to a Readership, from 1st January 2008.

Bob Stern has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for 2008-10. His research will be on ‘Autonomy, Self-Legislation and Moral Realism’. This project will consider whether there is a coherent argument from autonomy to some form of antirealism or constructivism in ethics: if we are autonomous agents, does it follow that moral realism should be rejected? Bob aims to establish that this argument from autonomy to anti-realism is mistaken, and will show (particularly by reference to Kant and Hegel) that its uncritical adoption has also distorted our understanding of the history of ethics.