PhilosophyDepartment

G R A D U A T E N E W S • S P R I N G 2 0 1 7 V O L U M E 9 , I S S U E 1

This has been another successful and stimulating year for the Philosophy Department. We are happy to announce the promotion of Dr. Jennifer Bates to Professor in Fall 2016, and in Spring 2017, the promotion of Dr. Jay Lampert to Professor and Dr. Tom Eyers to Associate Professor.

Renowned philosopher Dr. Simon Critchley (New School for Social Research) visited Duquesne University on November 17–18 to give a seminar for the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center’s 35th Annual Symposium “Life, Death and Play: Philosophy in Literature, Sport and Psychoanalysis.”

The Heidelberg Exchange program continues this year, with Heidelberg University hosting Ph.D. student Jiho Oh for the Spring 2017 semester.

Peter Libbey won a DAAD intensive language grant to study German over the summer, as did Aaron Higgins-Brake and Kimberley Tucker last summer. This year’s Philosophy Essay Prize was presented to Colin Bodayle for his essay “Hegel’s Bizarro World,” and Jacob Greenstine was awarded a McAnulty Dissertation Completion Fellowship for the academic year 2016–2017. Jeff Lambert received a Travel Grant from the APA to attend the Pedagogy Workshop at the 21st American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT) Workshop-Conference. Tristana Martin-Rubio

Department News

Duquesne Graduate Philosophy News • Spring 2016 duq.edu/philosophy

Events Philosophy Department Speaker Series 2016-2017GIUSEPPINA MECCHIA (University of Pittsburgh), “Submitting to Time: Historicity and Dystopia in Michel Houellebecq,” September 30.

ANDREW COLE (Princeton University), “The Elements in Hegel and Marx,” October 21.

ANN CAHILL (Elon University), “Must Survivors of Sexual Violence Disclose Their Assaults? Title IX, Mandatory Reporting, and the Role of the Confidant,” November 2.

MICHAL PIEKARSKI (Cardinal Wyszynski University, Warsaw), “Blindness to Normativity,” November 4.

KELLY ARENSON (Duquesne University), “Epicureans on Love, Sex, and Marriage,” December 2.

SASA STANKOVIC (Ryerson University), “Kant and the Imagination,” February 3.

JESSICA GELBER (University of Pittsburgh), “Two Ways of Being an End: Aristotle and Teleology,” March 31.

JEFFREY WILLIAMS (Carnegie Mellon University), “Brave New University,” April 28.

The Examined Life Speaker Series 2016–2017SILA OZKARA (Duquesne University) “Beginnings and Ends: Foundations of First Philosophy and Death,” October 7.

PATRICK LEE MILLER (Duquesne University), “Truth in the Age of Trump,” October 28.

Polansky Grant WinnersRecipients for the 2017 Ronald M. Polansky Graduate Student Scholarship award include:Gizem Atalay (Université du Québec à Montréal [UQAM])Roly Carspecken (Germany)Aaron Higgins-Brake (Germany)Frank (Trey) Weise (France)

Any contributions to the Polansky Endowment Fund can be made directly to the department: c/o Chair of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA 15282.

JACOB GREENSTINE, “Diverging Ways: The Trajectories of Ontology in Parmenides, Aristotle, and Deleuze,” Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics, ed. Jacob Greenstine and Ryan Johnson, 2017.

MARTIN KRAHN, “Der Trieb und das Entlassen der Idee,” Idee, Geist, Freiheit: Hegel und die zweite Natur, ed. Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer and Wolfgang Neuser, 2017.

MACKENZIE LEFOSTER, “The Consolation of Philosophers: Rebuilding Dignity and Self after Sexual Assault,” In the Sphere of the Personal: New Perspectives in the Philosophy of Persons, ed. Simon Smith and James Beauregard, 2016.

JEFFREY LAMBERT, “Absolute Forgiveness: Material Intimacy and Recognition in Hegel,” Philosophy of Forgiveness, Volume II: New Dimensions of Forgiveness, ed. Court Lewis, Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2016.

FRANK SMECKER, “Mapping the Abstract Essence of Concrete Existence: An Analysis of the Privative Form of Value, an Overdetermined Category,” Crisis and Critique Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2016.

Colloquium PresentationsCOLIN BODAYLE, “Plato’s Cosmology: Number and Ratio in the Philebus,” April 20.

ROLY CARSPECKEN, “The Illocutionary Dimension of Self-Consciousness,” April 7.

ZACH SLANGER, “Transmission, Infection, Contagion: Towards a New Sexual Ethics,” April 7.

ANTHONY CELI, “Tradition and World: Understanding Between Gadamer and Heidegger,” February 10.

ROLY CARSPECKEN, “Spiritual Autopsy: Hegel and Derrida on the Life and Death of Spirit,” February 10.

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Department of Philosophy600 Forbes AvenuePittsburgh, PA 15282

secured a Diversity Project Grant from Hypatia: a feminist philosophy journal in support of the D-WiP conference.

Our recent alumni have also had a busy year. Jim Bahoh, Ph.D. ’16, was awarded a prestigious VolkswagenStiftung/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Bonn. There, he will work on a new research project with the heading, “The Critique of Representation in

German Idealism: The Historical and Systematic Ground of Recent Ontologies of ‘Events.’” More specifically, this project will examine the relation between Heidegger and Deleuze’s theories of events on the basis of their respective engagements with Kant, Maimon, and Schelling. Jim will also teach a seminar on this research during his time in Bonn.

In addition to her several extracurricular commitments to support undergraduate students, Christina Rawls, Ph.D. ’15, assisted in establishing the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) at Brown University’s Pembroke Center, and is pleased to announce the project’s completion. Brock Bahler, Ph.D. ’14, published his monograph Childlike Peace in Levinas and Merleau-Ponty: Intersubjectivity as Dialectical Spiral, and co-edited Philosophy of Childhood Today: Exploring the Boundaries, both with Lexington Books. He was also appointed to their Series Editorial Board for the Philosophy of Childhood series. Nathan Eckstrand, Ph.D. ’14, was hired as a Visiting Assistant Professor by Ft. Hays University to teach at its partner school in China, SIAS University, beginning in Fall 2017. He has also been serving as an Associate Editor for the APA Blog, in charge of posts on Diversity and Research and of its ongoing series interviewing recent graduates and young scholars about their work.

We welcome any news from alumni! Share your news with the Department by contacting thompson@duq.edu.

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EVENTS, continued from cover

MARTIN KRAHN, “The Structure of Logical and Natural Concepts in Hegel’s System,” October 14.

TREY WEISE, “Reading Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ with Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: Apocalyptic Imagination, Utopian Materiality, and Hope for Reconciled Subjectivity,” October 14.

JOSH STURMAN, “On Certainty in Husserlian Phenomenology,” November 11.

COLIN BODAYLE, “Hegel’s Inverted World,” November 11.

Dissertation DefensesJAMES BAHOH, “Heidegger and Deleuze: The Groundwork of Evental Ontology”Director: Dr. Daniel Selcer

JUSTIN HABASH, “Early Greek Philosophy and the Discovery of Nature”Director: Dr. Ronald Polansky

ARIANA RAGUSA, “Vico’s Fabulous Beginnings: From the Forests to the Academies” Director: Dr. Fred Evans

NALAN SARAC, “A Study on Conscience: The Content and Function”Director: Dr. Ronald Polansky

EVAN STREVELL, “Memory, Phantasia, and the Perception of Time: a Commentary on Aristotle’s De memoria”Director: Dr. Ronald Polansky

JAMES TAYLOR, “Techno-Rascism: Heidegger’s Philosophy of Technology and Critical Philosophies of Race”Director: Dr. George Yancy

JEFF LAMBERT (Duquesne University), “The Ethical Questions of Pornography,” November 18.

TRISTANA MARTIN-RUBIO (Duquesne University), “The Places You Will Go: Merleau-Ponty on Life as Adventure,” April 21.

Duquesne Graduate Philosophy News • Spring 2017 duq.edu/philosophy

Philosophy Faculty NewsDr. Kelly ArensonDr. Arenson’s paper “Impure Intellectual Pleasure and the Phaedrus” was published in Epoche: A Journal for the History of Philosophy. Also, her paper “Epicureans on Marriage as Sexual Therapy” was accepted for publication in Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought. She presented a version of the latter paper to Duquesne’s own philosophy department in December 2016 as part of its Speaker Series. In addition, Dr. Arenson presented “Epicureans on Non-Cognitive Therapies” at the annual meeting of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, at Fordham University in October 2016. She is currently working on articles on Plato’s Timaeus and Epicurean joy. In the spring of 2016, she founded the Hellenistic Philosophy Society (www.hellenisticphilsociety.org), an international organization with over 50 members. The group will hold its first meeting at the 2017 Pacific Meeting of the American Philosophical Association.

Dr. Jennifer BatesJennifer Ann Bates was promoted to Full Professor of Philosophy in Spring 2016. She published an article on Hegel and Shakespeare in the journal Angelaki, and submitted two invited book chapters under contract (for The Philosophy of Theatre, Drama and Acting and The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy). She presented the latter chapter to the Duquesne Women in Philosophy. Bates also submitted her book panel paper from SPEP 2015 (under contract with Philosophy Today). Her current work is a book chapter for Cambridge University Press, on the imagination in Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Solger. Jennifer was a panelist on “Philosophy, Teaching, and Gender,” presented a paper “Kantian Grit: Severus Snape and Shakespeare’s Brutus” to The Examined Life Speaker Series, and was a panelist on The Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center “Seminar with Professor Simon Critchley”. Jennifer co-supervised the Department’s first Cotutelle Ph.D. (with the University of Cologne, of Stephanie Adair’s Ph.D., defended April 2016). Jennifer presented an invited paper on Hegel and Shakespeare at Kingston University London, England, April 1, 2017.

Dr. Faith BjalobokThis year, Faith was invited to speak at Chatham University’s Philosophy Club about the philosophical origins of the animal movement. Her Philosophy of Animals class co-sponsored the Animal Law Conference at Duquesne’s Law School in October. In conjunction with her Philosophy of Law class, Faith Bjalobok organized a seminar on the social justice issues surrounding the United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous People, and first nations’ perspectives on the Dakota Access Pipeline. The event took place on March 29, and featured a presentation from Kelsey Leonard, M.Sc. in Water Science, Policy and Management, and representative of the Shinnecock Tribal Nation as Co-Lead on the Mid-Atlantic Regional Planning Body of the U.S. National Ocean Council.

Fr. Brian CroninFr. Cronin has been spending his spare time editing his forthcoming book on The Phenomenology of Human Understanding. He has been completing final revisions of the text, and correcting the typescript, proofing, and final design and presentation. Still there is the task of producing an index. He thinks it should be finished by Christmas or before. The book presents a phenomenological description of the process of human questioning, understanding experience, and sorting out true from false in the area of truth and value. Our culture seems to have lost the basic distinction between true and false, genuine and fake, fact and fiction. No contemporary philosophy has a tenable or robust defense of truth; we are reduced to relying on advertisements in the New York Times to defend truth! Fr. Cronin offers a clear, systematic, verifiable, comprehensive and critical presentation. He thinks we are in great need of such a text. Maybe Christmas will be too late!

Dr. Fred EvansThe academic year 2016–17 has been productive for Dr. Evans. It has included academic accomplishments and political resistance against Trumpism’s assault on democracy. During 2016, five of his papers were published, three in peer reviewed journals, two as chapters in book collections. He has also completed four other papers, three of which have been accepted for publication and another submitted to conferences. Columbia University Press has sent out his new book manuscript, Citizenship and Public Art: An Essay in Political Aesthetics, to reviewers. He will be on sabbatical for the 2017–18 academic year in order to work on a book about cosmopolitanism. Dr. Evans is delighted that two of his recent students have received tenure-track offers, another two visiting assistant professor positions, and a fifth her Ph.D. Working with these scholars and his previous dissertation students has been one of his greatest joys at Duquesne. The Duquesne Faculty and Staff Social Justice Association (for which he is Coordinator) promoted and provided a bus for the Women’s March on Washington, supported immigrant rights, and is working on other resistance activities. He continues as Coordinator for the Center for Interpretive and Qualitative Research (CIQR).

Dr. Tom EyersTom Eyers’ third book, Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present, was published by Northwestern University Press on March 15th of this year; celebrations are planned at the University at Buffalo, at Princeton University, and at Duquesne. Articles have appeared or are imminent in Critical Inquiry, Boundary 2, Mediations and Revue Internationale de Philosophie. A new book project, Determined and Unmoved: Romantic Materialities, is about a third complete. Over the last year, Eyers has spoken at, among other places, Penn State, Harvard, Princeton, and the Modern Language Association meeting in Philadelphia. Eyers was pleased to receive tenure and promotion, and he acquired a cat named Henry, by far the most important achievement of the year.

Jacob Greenstine and recent Duquesne alumnus Ryan Johnson have co-edited a book entitled Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics with Edinburgh University Press. David Hoinski, Ph.D. ’14, and Dr. Ronald Polansky contributed chapters to the volume.

Boram Jeong has been hired as a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver. She will begin her teaching responsibilities in Fall 2017.

Matt Lovett has renewed his contract as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh’s Women, Sexuality, and Gender Studies Department. He has also been invited to give two talks this year. On March 17, he gave a paper entitled “On the Sexual Genesis of Thought in Deleuze” at the University of Pittsburgh, and on March 27, presented “Capitalizing on Women: Globalization and the International Sex Trade” at Florida Southern University.

Our graduate students have had an ambitious year, bringing three conferences to Duquesne University. The Pennsylvania Circle of Ancient Philosophy, represented by Jacob Greenstine and Aaron Higgins-Brake, took place March 3–5, featuring papers from graduate students and faculty working in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy across Pennsylvania and keynote addresses from Dr. Jim Lennox (University of Pittsburgh) and Dr. Melanie Subacus (Villanova University). Our Graduate Students in Philosophy organization (GSIP), under the direction of Jeff Lambert, hosted their 10th annual workshop “On Forgiveness and War” on March 17–18 with invited keynote Dr. Adrian Switzer (Western Kentucky University). The Duquesne Women in Philosophy (D-WiP), under Tristana Martin-Rubio’s leadership, held their fourth annual conference, “Critical Philosophies of Life,” on March 24–25. The conference included a roundtable discussion on diversity in philosophy and a series of papers from graduate students and faculty of all levels, with a keynote address by Dr. Cynthia Willett (Emory University). The conference was generously supported by Hypatia: a feminist philosophy journal, with additional support from the Philosophy Department, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, MAP, the Office of the Dean, and the Duquesne Program Council.

Duquesne’s Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) chapter has held bi-weekly reading sessions on issues related to philosophy and race, gender, sexuality, class and post-colonialism, with an emphasis on texts that are suitable for introductory courses. MAP also hosted a seminar with Dr. Jim Vernon (York University) called “Let’s Get Free: Hegel, Hip Hop, and The Art of Emancipation” on February 4.

2016 Masters Student PlacementNICHOLAS BROWN – Ph.D. in comparative literature, CUNY Graduate Center

THOMAS CANTONE – Ph.D. in philosophy, The New School for Social Research

ANTHONY CELI – adjunct instructor, Brookdale Community College

KIMBERLY TUCKER – Ph.D. in philosophy, Duquesne University

LUKE SCHUMACHER – Ph.D. in philosophy, Fordham University

Conference PresentationsSeptember 10, COLIN BODAYLE, “Metaphor, Metaphysics, and Marx: On a Paragraph from Heidegger’s ‘What is Metaphysics?’,” Pittsburgh Area Philosophy Colloquium, Washington, PA.

October 20–22, NICHOLAS BROWN, “Making History: Power, Discourse and the Possibility of Change,” Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), Salt Lake City, UT.

October 28–30, JACOB GREENSTINE, “Not-Being and the Most General Principles,” Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy (SAGP), New York, NY.

October 29–30, KELSEY WARD, “A Teleological Interpretation of De finibus v,” Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy (SAGP), New York, NY.

November 25–26, JACOB GREENSTINE, “On the Several Senses of Not-Being in Aristotle,” 2400 Aristotle, Bucharest, Romania.

December 12–14, ALESSIO ROTUNDO, “Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Form as Return to and Departure from the Aristotelian Tradition of the Schichtungsgedanke,” Aristotle and Phenomenology: Departures and Returns, Leuven, Belgium.

January 28–29, M. V. KRAMER, “Toward a Gadamerian Hermeneutic of Religious Experience,” 13th Annual Gonzaga Graduate Philosophy Conference, Spokane, WA.

February 25, KELSEY WARD, “Cicero’s Appeal to the Young in De finibus v,” Pitt Visitors’ Philosophy Conference, Pittsburgh, PA.

March 3–5, COLIN BODAYLE, “The Ambiguity of the Philosopher in the Sophist,” Pennsylvania Circle of Ancient Philosophy, Pittsburgh, PA.

March 3–5, KELSEY WARD, “Transparency in Cicero’s De finibus,” Pennsylvania Circle of Ancient Philosophy, Pittsburgh, PA.

PublicationsJACOB GREENSTINE, “A Thousand Antiquities,” Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics, ed. Jacob Greenstine and Ryan Johnson, 2017.

Graduate News

Dr. C. D. KeyesDr. Keyes has been teaching undergraduate and graduate students in his Christian Philosophy course and his graduate seminars, Is God Illusion? Nietzsche & Kierkegaard, and Ricoeur’s Symbolism of Evil. He also co-authored an article entitled “Contemporary Leveling in the Spirit of Kierkegaard,” Thinking About Religion, Vol. 12, with Richard A. S. Hall of Fayetteville State University.

Dr. Jeffrey McCurryIn Fall 2016 Dr. McCurry helped put on the 35th Annual Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center Symposium on “Life, Death, and Play: Philosophy in Literature, Sport, and Psychoanalysis” with Prof. Simon Critchley. In October 2016 he also presented papers entitled “Freud and the Psychoanalysis of Consciousness in the Culture of Modernism” at the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, and “The Phenomenological Freud” for the Duquesne University Student Counseling Clinical Staff. He has a paper accepted at the Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology Conference of the Polish Phenomenological Association in Warsaw, entitled “A Phenomenological Embrace of the Phenomena: Psychology, Moralism, and Therapeutic Action in the Very Early Freud”.

Dr. Patrick MillerDr. Miller has been inspired by the recent American election to work on political philosophy in both his teaching and his writing. In Spring 2017, he taught a new course, “America & Antiquity,” in which his students are reading the founding documents of the U.S.A., and the contemporaneous debates about them, all against the background of the ancient authors whose stories and arguments the framers used to avoid the pitfalls of ancient tyranny. With the same intent,

in Fall 2016, he wrote “Truth in the Age of Trump,” which he first gave as a talk to the Department’s Examined Life series, and then later to the Northeastern Political Science Association, before

publishing it here: www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/11/truth-in-the-age-of-trump.html. He will be on sabbatical in the coming fall to expand this piece into a book.

Dr. Daniel SelcerDaniel Selcer did nothing during the fall semester: In early September, he delivered a lecture on Descartes’s concept of ‘nothing’ as the keynote address for the 2016 Pittsburgh Area Philosophy Colloquium at Washington and Jefferson College; in early October he presented work on images of the void and other early modern diagrammatic ‘nothings’ at a University of Pennsylvania interdisciplinary symposium on the materiality of scientific knowledge; in early November he delivered the keynote address for Vanderbilt University’s Tennessee Philosophical Association Conference, speaking on political ontology in Hobbes and Spinoza (the key to which was demonstrating that, according to Hobbes, the ‘multitude’ is precisely ‘nothing’); and, finally, in early December he delivered “Cartesian Sound and Atomic Fury” on Cartesian vs. neo-Epicurean ‘nothings,’ through the Miami University of Ohio graduate colloquium series. This spring, he looks forward to working on something.

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