Philosophy, University of Otago

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 will be joining the Department at the start of 2012. Currently a postdoc at the University of Melbourne, 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.

The University of Otago Summer Workshop in Philosophy of Biology an informal meeting to present new work in philosophy of biology. It is sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago.Those wishing to attend the workshop could email the organiser (James Maclaurin) as soon as possible as the space is limited (particularly at the Ecosanctuary).

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.'

Applications are invited for the Alan Musgrave Master’s Scholarship in Philosophy. The scholarship was established to provide support for high calibre international students to study towards a Master’s degree in Philosophy at the University of Otago. Applications close on 1st November 2011. For more information, including details on how to apply, visit here .

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.

James Maclaurin receives University of Otago Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award

We are delighted to report that our Head of Department was one of three recipients of this prestigious award. For more information go here.

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.

The Australasian Association of Philosophy holds an annual conference for professional philosophers in the region. In 2011 Otago hosted this major conference. Further information about the conference is available here.

The Department of Philosophy is delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Jc Beall to a fractional position within the Department. His initial visit to Otago will be from mid-June until mid-August 2011.

In addition to being a professor at Otago, Jc is a professor in philosophy at the University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT, USA), where he is also the director of the UConn Logic Group, and an associate research fellow at the Northern Institute for Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and at the Arche Centre at the University of St Andrews (Scotland).

Jc's research interests are logic, metaphysics, and, generally, 'formal philosophy'.

William Evans Visiting Fellow Stathis Psillos (Athens, Greece), Philosophy and History of Science, July 2012

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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