Research
The Department of Philosophy maintains an active research profile. Please see the faculty profiles for a description of research interests, current projects, research initiatives, and online papers. Ongoing colloquia and other events are regularly held.
Research Update Fall 2011
Here are some reports on student and faculty research:
Undergraduate Sean Dudley presented a paper, “Epistemic vs. Phenomenological ‘Seeming’ and the Unreliability of Naïve Tomato Inspection” at the Ohio State University undergraduate philosophy conference in May.
Berman Chan, an MA student, presented his paper “Knowing the Odds of Divine Unhiddenness in the Face of Evil?” at the Northwest Student Philosophy Conference in May.
Mark McPherran has a paper forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy: “Socrates’ Refutation of Gorgias: Gorgias 447c-461b.” He also presented a paper, “Socrates and Aesop in Plato’s Phaedo”, at the 4th Western Plato Workshop.
Kathleen Akins hosted an exciting multi-disciplinary workshop and conference on Human Cortical Colour Vision, in Vancouver August 4-7, 2011. The conference was supported by both the McDonnell Foundation and a SSHRC Workshop Grant awarded to Dr. Akins, as well as the SFU Philosophy Department and others.
Holly Andersen has had two papers appear: “The Case for Regularity in Mechanistic Causal Explanation” Synthese Special Issue: Neuroscience and its Mechanisms, Online First access; “Mechanisms, Laws, and Regularities” Philosophy of Science 78(2): 325-331. A third paper is forthcoming: “The Development of the ‘Specious Present’ and James’ Views on Temporal Experience” in Subjective Time: the Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality, edited by Dan Lloyd and Valtteri Arstila, MIT Press. She has presented papers at the Causality in the Sciences annual conference at the University of Ghent, a conference at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Philosophy of Science on Mechanisms, and a conference on Causality in the Biomedical and Social Sciences at, Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She was recently awarded a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for a project on Causation in Complex Systems.
Sam Black is completing a paper on collective responsibility for state action with Endre Begby in preparation for his Fall course on Political Philosophy. He is also running a study group on moral responsibility for graduate students over the summer.
Lisa Shapiro presented papers at a conference on ‘Passionate Minds’ at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, the University of Toronto, and UBC. She travelled to the UK this summer to present a paper at the Hume Society Conference in honor of Hume's 300th birthday in Edinburgh, “Hume, Condillac and the Empiricist problem of self.” She’s also rooting around in libraries for 18th century case histories of defects of sense perception. With her co-editor Martin Pickavé, she is completing the editorial work on a volume of essays, Emotion and Cognition in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, to be published with Oxford University Press.