Fall 2024
Greetings Friends of Philosophy,
I’m thrilled to share updates from the Mason Philosophy Department!
This fall, we are welcoming two new members of the department: Professors Dasha Pruss and Christopher Merwin. Dr. Pruss’s research focuses mostly on algorithmic decision making in the criminal justice system and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. Among other ventures, she is helping to launch the department’s new minor in Ethics and AI. We are also thrilled to host our first ever Postdoctoral Fellow in Continental Philosophy, Christopher Merwin. Coming from a position at Emory University, Prof. Merwin’s scholarly interests are in phenomenology (especially the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty), the metaphysics of time in the history of philosophy, environmental philosophy and the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of science and technology, and ancient philosophy. He is at work on a monograph tentatively entitled Dwelling with Mountains: Nature and Relationality.
Other faculty highlights include the promotions of Professors Wesley Buckwalter and Davis Kuykendall. We are celebrating this and the many other achievements of both. Prof. Kuykendall received a host of accolades last year including: a nomination for the Stearns Center Best Teacher Award (Fall 2023); a Thank-a-teacher recognition from Stearns Center (Fall 2023); recognition by students from Honors College as their most impactful instructor (Fall 2023); and recognition by GMU Career Services as making an impact on student career goals (April 2024). His paper, “In Defence of the Agent and Patient Distinction: The Case from Molecular Biology and Chemistry,” was published in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science this year. Prof. Buckwalter served as cohost for the Virginia Philosophical Association conference at Mason in Fall 2023 and is soon to be the organization’s Vice President. He has a forthcoming paper in Nous, on knowledge ascriptions, and another in Nature Communications, on perceptions of wisdom, among other articles to his credit this past year.
Prof. Ted Kinnaman, our internationally acclaimed Kant scholar, has been speaking and publishing papers on Kant and aesthetic normativity, along with Kant and liberal capitalism. Rose Cherubin, our renowned professor in Ancient philosophy continues her pathbreaking research. To take one example, her paper, “Different Ways of Being Different, Different Ways Not to Be: Parmenides and the Critical Relativism of Alain Locke,” is forthcoming in a volume under contract with SUNY.
Kurt Brandhorst, Assistant Term Professor and former Undergraduate Director, working with Associate Professor Rachel Jones, continues to grow Philosophy’s contribution to the Study Abroad program. These two faculty members will take students to memorial sites in Germany and Poland, as a companion to the Philosophy after Auschwitz course. Professor Jones, moreover, was awarded a Residential Fellowship with Mason’s Center for Humanities Research to work on one of her current projects, Between Lisbon and Haiti: Sexual Difference, Race and the Human After Kant. She has been busy all spring and summer with conferences, workshops, and publications on Irigaray, Cavarero, and Agamben for Oxford and SUNY presses, among others. In summer 2025 she will be a seminar leader at Collegium Phaenomenologicum and
focus on the theme "From Bios to Biography: Narrating Singular Lives with Cavarero and Hartman."
Assistant Professor Andrew Peterson has been furthering his research on the ethics of dementia care and clinical decision making, as well as on the implications of the use of psychedelics for mental health treatment. We are happy to say that he is also now serving as our Director of Graduate Studies! Assistant Professor Daniel Nicholson spent much of the last year working on his manuscript, What Is Life? Revisited, for Cambridge University Press. In the Fall of 2023, he had the honor of being a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.
As the department awaits the return of Professor Andrew Light (on leave working at the DOE), its longtime devoted Acting Director, Jesse Kirkpatrick is transitioning to a new position with the College of Engineering and Computing. Dr. Kirkpatrick will now serve as Co-Director and Research Associate Professor at the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center (MARC), leading interdisciplinary research on autonomy and robotics, while continuing his longstanding engagement with the ethical and policy issues. We are delighted that he will continue to maintain a strong presence in the department, teaching and working across colleges on curricular and research opportunities.
As for the Chair, I am about to submit a book manuscript to Oxford University Press entitled, Forced Migration and Health Justice. We are a busy crew!
As we celebrate these achievements, we also remember our late colleagues, Professors Wayne Froman and Mark Sagoff. Last spring the department hosted a luncheon in honor of Professor Wayne Froman, our esteemed Professor of Continental Philosophy who passed away in 2023. The Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy and friends are now also mourning the loss of the Prof. Mark Sagoff, a leading figure in environmental philosophy and ethics and one of the first members of the Institute. Prof. Sagoff was remembered for his innovation and leadership at an event held in September. Professors Wayne Froman and Mark Sagoff have left lasting legacies with the department and their losses are keenly felt by faculty and students.
Our students continue to make us proud. Lee Thielemier, for example, one of our MA students who has twice served as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the department, already has three conference presentations to their credit. Lee has presented at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities annual meeting (2023), the Philosophy and Minorities Conference (2024), and the LGBTQ Showcase (2024). Here are other MA students who are serving as our current Graduate Teaching and Research Assistants https://philosophy.gmu.edu/people/graduate_assistants, if you’d like to get a glimpse!
We continue our commitment to be a pluralistic department, covering a range of philosophical domains, generating internationally recognized scholarship and first-rate education in philosophy for undergraduates and students pursuing advanced study in our MA program. I hope you will think about ways you might be able to help us grow. We are especially grateful for gifts that help us support our students. If you can help us by donating to our Ethics Scholarship or funding to support opportunities for graduate students (for example, assistantships and travel to conferences), we would be especially grateful.
Please feel welcome to reach out with questions and ideas on how you can support our work! You can reach me at leckenwi@gmu.edu.
Wishing you all the best,
Lisa Eckenwiler, PhD
Professor and Chair
November 26, 2024