Philosophy, University of Otago

From January until June this year we are delighted to host, as Dan & Gwen Taylor Fellow, Samantha Brennan. A Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Western University, Canada, she was Department Chair at Western from 2002-07 and 2008-11. Sam is also a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, an affiliate member of the Department of Women's Studies and Feminist Research, and a member of the graduate faculty of the Department of Political Science. Sam's main research interests lie in the area of contemporary normative ethics, particularly at the intersection of deontological and consequentialist moral theories. She also has active research interests in feminist ethics. Sam received her BA from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and her PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago in the United States. She was a Visiting Faculty Fellow in Philosophy, RSSS, The Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, Sept to Dec 2011.

We are delighted to announce that Professor Alex Miller will be joining the Department in July 2012. Currently at the University of Birmingham, Alex did his undergraduate work in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Glasgow and his graduate work in philosophy at the University of St. Andrews and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Alex works mainly in the areas of philosophy of language and mind, metaethics and metaphysics and has published widely on these topics. He is currently working on the role of normativity arguments in the theory of meaning and metaethics, and on developing a new interpretation of Kripkes Wittgenstein's skeptical argument about meaning.

We are delighted to announce that Dr Zach Weber joined the Department at the start of 2012. Zach received his doctorate from Melbourne in 2009; his thesis, Paradox and Foundation, was on the philosophy and mathematics of set theory and was supervised by Graham Priest and Greg Restall.

From September 2008 to May 2009 Zach was a research fellow at the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science, University of Sydney, under the direction of Mark Colyvan. He worked on the ARC funded project A Paraconsistent Approach to Vagueness.

From June 2009 to February 2010 Zach was with us at Otago, tutoring and guest lecturing in logic, and working as a research assistant with Heather Dyke. Since then he has been a postdoctoral research fellow on the ARC project Paraconsistent Foundations of Mathematics at Melbourne.

Zach's work has appeared in journals such as Mind, the Journal of Philosophy, Analysis, and the Journal of Philosophical Logic.

This Special Collections exhibition is open until 23 September. Combining classics from the past and cutting-edge works of the present day, it brings together books on philosophy, science, literature and medicine. Together they illustrate the theme of Experimental Philosophy as it was understood and practised 350 years ago and as it is understood today. The on-line version can be viewed here.

We are delighted to announce a new book, from Harvard University Press, by Departmental Associate Annette Baier. The publisher's blurb reads as follows: 'Marking the tercentenary of David Hume’s birth, Annette Baier has created an engaging guide to the philosophy of one of the greatest thinkers of Enlightenment Britain. Drawing deeply on a lifetime of scholarship and incisive commentary, she deftly weaves Hume’s autobiography together with his writings and correspondence, finding in these personal experiences new ways to illuminate his ideas about religion, human nature, and the social order.'

We are pleased to announce that the Appeal to honour Professor Alan Musgrave has now raised sufficient funds to enable the establishment of a scholarship. For more details visit the Appeal site.

The University of Otago Library has launched a new and much expanded Subject Guide for Philosophy. The new site includes guides to finding philosophy articles, books and reviews; fun and useful philosophy websites; links to popular philosophy publications; and a constantly updated list of the library's new philosophy titles.

Professor Peter Anstey is currently the Principal Investigator of a Marsden-funded project (2009–2011) on 'Experimental Philosophy and the Origins of Empiricism'. Other researchers on the project include Alberto Vanzo, Juan Manuel Gomez, Kirsten Walsh and Dr Richard Serjeantson (Trinity College, Cambridge). You can visit the project blog here .

An edited collection, Hume on Is and Ought has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.

It ‘seems altogether inconceivable’, says Hume, that this ‘new relation’ ought ‘can be a deduction’ from others ‘which are entirely different from it'. The idea that you can’t derive an ought from an is, moral conclusions from non-moral premises, has proved enormously influential. But what did Hume mean by this famous dictum? Was he correct? How does it fit in with the rest of his philosophy? This collection, the first on this topic for forty years, assembles a distinguished cast of international scholars to discuss these questions.

Pigden Is and Ought

The book is available from Amazon here.

An edited collection, Hume on Motivation and Virtue has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. It is edited by Charles Pigden and contains essays by, among others, Annette Baier, Rosalind Hursthouse, Richard Joyce, Graham Oddie, and Michael Smith.

Pigden Hume Motivation and Virtue

In 2007 the Otago Philosophy Department was the top-scoring philosophy department, the top-scoring department at the university and the top-scoring research department of any kind in New Zealand, according to the PBRF (the New Zealand equivalent of the British RAE). In the 2003 PBRF round, the Otago department also came top, but in 2007 we improved our score, going up from 6.6 to 7.5.

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