News in Brief - September 2022
Featured News
Rhys Jones, who just graduated, edited this year’s Final Year Anthology, which includes a selection of undergraduate dissertations and digital inquiry projects. Hard copies of the Anthology will be available in the ground floor common room, or you can read it online here.
Former PhD student Rachel Handley will launch her debut short story collection Possible Worlds and Other Stories at Blackwell’s Liverpool on 22nd October, 5pm. She’ll be reading a few of her stories and discussing the philosophical ideas and theories behind them. More about the event plus tickets here.
News
Dr Claire Anscomb, our British Soc of Aesthetics Postdoc, mentored by Dr Vid Simoniti, has been appointed as a full-time, permanent Lecturer in Fine Art at De Montfort University in Leicester. She will be starting in September. Claire will continue to work both as philosopher and artist in this role.
Rachael Wiseman was at the Scouts annual Reunion event to promote a new partnership between Scouts and The Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Laura Gow presented her paper, ‘Wannabe Representation’ at the Metaphysics of Experience hybrid-conference, hosted by Ruhr-University Bochum.
Robin McKenna submitted his book MS!
Rachael Wiseman and Clare MacCumhaill were on the Guilty Feminist Podcast and the Iris Murdoch podcast, talking about their book, Metaphysical Animals.
Claire Anscomb was at the Drawing Conversations: Engaging with Sites of History and Narrative conference at University of Huddesfield to discuss ‘Drawing Attention: Engaging with sites of History in a Visually Selective Mode’.
Publications
Lizzy Ventham has had a paper accepted in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. Its current title is "The Division of Normativity and a Defence of Demanding Moral Theories". Lizzie would like to thank who attended her online Work in Progress just over a year ago, and gave helpful feedback both at the time and via email afterwards.
Claire Anscomb’s ‘Look a Little (Chuck) Closer: Aesthetic Attention and the Contact Phenomenon’ is in The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 62, Issue 3.
Ian Dunbar has another letter in the New Scientist. This time it is about elementary particle metaphysics. The as-published text is as follows.
"David Werdegar asks whether the Higgs field is like the luminiferous ether. The answer is no.
According to quantum field theory, fields, like the Higgs field and the electromagnetic field, are fundamental dynamical systems. The things we perceive as particles are excitations of these systems and couplings between fields correspond to interactions between particles. We exist at the level of the particles, and all we know of fields comes from our interactions with other particles.
When enough particles get together – in the air, for example – these systems can have their own excitations, sound waves in this case, that constitute a third level. The ether was meant to be a system at the same level as air, and light an excitation at the same level as sound. These were shown not to exist, but that doesn’t rule out an electromagnetic field at the first level. Indeed, all we know about elementary particles suggests they are field excitations. To conflate the Higgs field (level one) with the ether (level two) is a category error."
Future Events
Former PhD student Rachel Handley will launch her debut short story collection ‘Possible Worlds and Other Stories’ at Blackwell’s Liverpool on 22nd October, 5pm. She’ll be reading a few of her stories and discussing the philosophical ideas and theories behind them. More about the event plus tickets here.
Rachael Wiseman and Clare Mac Cumhaill are organising a conference: ‘Wartime Quartet: Significance, Legacy, Spirit’, at the St Aidan’s College, University of Durham, 7th-9th June 2023. The call for abstracts (for talks and poster presentations) is here (deadline 20 September 2022).