Faculty News

Keith Peterson is currently working on the first comprehensive introduction in English to the thought of the early 20th century German philosopher Nicolai Hartmann, as well as on an extended investigation into the philosophical dimensions of veganism. He published a monograph on environmental philosophy entitled A World not Made for Us: Topics in Critical Environmental Philosophy, SUNY series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics, in 2020. He published a translation of Nicolai Hartmann’s Ontology: Laying the Foundations (orig. 1935), appearing in English for the first time, in October 2019. His article “The Very Idea of an Ecological Worldview” appeared in Volume 26, Issue 1 (June 2021) of the journal Ethics and the Environment. You can find more detail about these projects and his other work on his web page.

Jim Behuniak has recently published a two-volume set on John Dewey and Chinese philosophy, entitled John Dewey and Daoist Thought: Experiments in Intra-Cultural Philosophy, Vol. 1 and John Dewey and Confucian Thought: Experiments in Intra-Cultural Philosophy, Vol. 2, both with State University of New York Press.  He has also edited the volume, Appreciating the Chinese Difference: Engaging Roger T. Ames on Methods, Issues, and Roles, also with SUNY Press.

For the past few years, Dan Cohen has been working on developing “Virtue Argumentation Theory” — an agent-based approach to argumentation, with roots in Aristotelian virtue ethics and contemporary virtue epistemology. That work culminated in an invitation to be the keynote speaker for the 10th OSSA conference on the theme of Virtue and Arguments in 2013. As a result, he was then invited to edit a special issue of the European journal Topoi dedicated to that topic, his current project.

Jill Gordon (Emerita) is currently writing a book on Plato’s cosmological dialogue, Timaeus. She makes the case that the differences between women and men as they appear in Timaeus ground and naturalize the dialogue’s hierarchical ontology that has been profoundly influential for over twenty-five hundred years. By unmasking the cultural and misogynist foundations of the dialogue’s account of the differences between women and men, she reveals the power of philosophy—and metaphysics, in particular—to sustain and rationalize inequality.  In 2022, her edited volume, Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece was published; it contains essays by philosophers and classicists, and in her own contribution to the volume is “Listening to the Seventh Letter,” she examines the politics of hearing in the Platonic corpus and argues for a liberation of the senses, especially hearing. From 2019-2021, she served as Director of the American Philosophical Association’s Site Visit Program, a program run through the APA’s Committee on the Status of Women aimed at improving the climate for women and other under-represented groups in philosophy departments across the U.S. and Canada. She also recently published “Black Bodies Matter: A Reading of Ta-Nahisi Coates’s Between the World and Me,” which argues for a materialist reading of Coates’s best-selling book. Her 2012 book, Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death (Cambridge University Press) was translated into Chinese and published in 2020.

Lydia Moland’s Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life, a new biography of an American abolitionist, was published in Fall 2022  (sneak peek here) and was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Review of Books, and The Nation, among others. Her writing on Child has also appeared in publications such as the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Boston Globe. She is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century. Her book Hegel’s Aesthetics: The Art of Idealism was published by Oxford University Press in 2019, and her edited volume All Too Human: Laughter, Humor, and Comedy in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy was published by Springer in 2018. Her research has recently been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. More details are available at her website.