News in Brief - January 2025
Featured News
The Ethics Cup Returns to Liverpool
Rachael Wiseman was on BBC R4’s Free Thinking to discuss ‘Common Sense’, 100 years since G. E. Moore’s famous essay.
Liverpool Hosts Interdisciplinary Cognitive Diversity Workshop
International News
Robin McKenna was a keynote speaker at the ‘(Dis)trust in Science Reframed’ conference at the University of Pavia, Italy. Robin also spoke on a panel at an invited symposium on “the epistemology of motivated reasoning” at the Eastern APA in New York.
Rachael Wiseman will be teaching at a 5-day summer school in Vienna on the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch (14-18 July 2025). The summer school is intended for PhD and postdoctoral students. Contact Rachael for further information.
Philosophy in the Wild: Finding Hope in Mixed Communities will launch in March. This is a year-long interdisciplinary public engagement project, involving a global network of academics.
Tom Buyard’s book on Debord has been translated into Spanish and made available in open access.
Katherine Furman gave a talk at the History and Philosophy of Science Department at University of Cambridge on ‘Pulling Away from Science, Epistemic Self-Reliance, and the Tale of Thabo Mbeki’
Publications
Michael Hauskeller has published a new edited collection of papers on “Philosophy and Meaning in Life”, which can be freely accessed here. His new monograph “Meaning in Life. A Subjectivist Account” will be out in March and can already be preordered on Amazon.
Tom Bunyard’s ‘Tragic landscapes: TJ Clark and Gillian Rose on modernity and the future’ has been published in Thesis Eleven
PhD researcher Rossella Vingelli had an essay accepted by the journal Think: “Are Cyborgs Alive? Rethinking Life in a Posthuman Era”.
PhD researcher Liam Shore co-authored an invited commentary with Michael Hauskeller for the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics on “What are the most salient ethical implications of epigenetic age testing?”
Thomas Schramme has two papers out. ‘Sustainable Sufficientarianism: Combining “Enough for all” with Eco-Sufficiency’ and ‘Skeptical Psychiatry: Critical Approaches to Mental Illness’
Tom Wyman has a chapter entitled ‘Natality, Parenthood, and Climate Hope’ in The Philosophy of Environmental Emotions: Grief, Hope, and Beyond (edited by Ondrej Beran, Laura Candiotto, Niklas Forsberg, Antony Frederiksson and David Rozen; Routledge.
Other news
Rachael Wiseman was the guest on Philosophy Talk radio, discussing G. E. M. Anscombe as part of their ‘Wise Women’ series. Listen here
Thomas Schramme’s paper on the WHO definition of health is the most downloaded paper in Public Health Ethics. In 12 months it’s been downloaded 75K times and already been cited 37 times.
Tom Whyman spoke at (and helped organise) a workshop at UCD (sponsored by Mind) on the Philosophy and Politics of Despair. His paper was titled ‘Is despair the opposite of hope?’
Tom Wyman has a contract with Bloomsbury for a book project with the working title A Humanism for the 21st Century: Recovering the Ethical Value of Humanity. The book will articulate and defend a position that I call ‘minimal humanism’, which I constitute via some novel hybrid of Adorno, Marx, and Mary Midgley, and that I argue either is or should be foundational for ethics.
Daniel Hill gave a presentation on behalf of the Entrapment Team at the launch of the University’s Criminal Justice Unit
Upcoming Events
Our first Stapledon Colloquium of 2025 will be on 20th February, with Dr Ben Davies (Sheffield).
Women in Parenthesis Research Seminar (online). 11th February 2025, 10am GMT: Peter Robinson on ‘Philosophical Plumbing of the Australian Vocational Education Framework’ (contact Rachael Wiseman for a zoom link)
There will be a pre-doctoral (undergraduate and masters students) ‘Wartime Quartet Conference’ at Trinity College Cambridge (in person and hybrid), 28-29 June 2025. Keynote speakers are Jane Heal and Sabina Lovibond. The deadline for abstract submission is CFA is 31 March. Contact Rachael Wiseman for more information.