News in Brief - June 2024
International News
Rachael Wiseman was a keynote speaker at the Wiener Forum für Analytische Phlosophie Graduate Conference in Vienna. The conference was on Nonsense.
Vid Simoniti gave an online book talk (on his Artists Remake the World) at the Inter Arts Matrix in Waterloo, Canada.
Tom Wyman was in Padua to give an invited lecture on Adorno’s Empiricism.
Katherine Furman discussed ‘Street Corner Epistemologies’ at a Co-Creating Knowledges workshop at VU Amsterdam. She was also at the New Europe College in Bucharest talking about rumours.
Barry Dainton gave a paper on philosophy and technology at a workshop on sci fi and philosophy in Luxembourg.
From 17 to 19 June the Department hosted the 6th International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life, organised by Michael Hauskeller and a team of postgraduate students (Liam Shore, Michalina Bevoor, Neil Williams, and Tom Gardiner), which was not only in name but in actual fact quite international, featuring speakers from Norway, Finland, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Slovakia, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Japan, Israel, the US, Australia, Egypt, Singapore, and India. Our very own John Adams and Christopher Earley also gave talks. The best work from the conference will be published in a special issue, edited by Michael Hauskeller, of the Journal of the Philosophy of Life, which is supported by the Waseda Institute of Life and Death Studies and by the Advanced Research Center for Human Sciences at Waseda University in Japan.
The Department also hosted a visit of Monica Bufill from the Universidad de Córdoba from 17 to 20 June 2024. Monica is writing a PhD thesis titled The concept of simultaneity of living and dying processes: philosophical background and ethical implications under the joint direction of Prof. Ramón Román Alcalá and Prof. María del Carmen Molina Barea. During her visit, Monica participated in the 6th International Conference on Philosophy & Meaning in Life, and a Philosophy seminar on Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.
Publications
Tom Wyman: 'Natalism, Natality, and the Climate Crisis: An Arendtian Argument against ‘Green’ Anti-Natalism' in Inquiry.
Daniel Hill's ‘Separating marriage from the state’ has been published in Research Handbook on Marriage, Cohabitation and the Law.
Other News
Former PhD student Rachel Handley was back in Liverpool for the ‘Current Research in Speculative Fiction Conference’ where she ran a creative writing workshop.
Katherine Furman was one of the speakers at the Nancy Cartwright 80th Birthday Celebration conference in Durham.
Former BA and MA student Anna Woodruff brought the Gateacre School philosophy club to the department for a morning workshop. Laura Gow and Georgie Brighouse gave mini lectures.
Liam Shore, who is one of Michael Hauskeller’s PhD students, has received a grant worth £14,000 from INNOVATE UK’s Cyber Security Academic Startup Accelerator Programme, to work for three months on a project designed to secure quantum federated learning for NISQ devices using genomics datasets.
Michael Hauskeller gave a talk on “what makes life meaningful” at the University of Birmingham’s Visiting Speaker Series.
Robin McKenna spoke on a panel on “non-ideal virtue epistemology” at the Society for Applied Philosophy’s annual conference. He was also interviewed about his book, Non-Ideal Epistemology for The Dissenter podcast. Coming up you can catch Robin this month giving a paper on patient activism at the Association for Social and Political Philosophy’s annual conference and at the Joint Session in a symposium on political epistemology.