News

Allison will be joining the Columbia faculty on July 1, 2021 after completing a Bersoff Faculty Fellow position at NYU. Her areas of specialization are Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and Early Modern philosophy. 

Veronica Gomez  will be joining the Barnard faculty. Her areas of interest are metaphysics of science and philosophy of cognitive science. Currently, she is a Bersoff Faculty Fellow at NYU. Veronica received her PhD in 2021 from Rutgers University and her dissertation title is  “Metaphysical Foundations for Intentional Cognitive Science.”  

On April 29, 2021, Professor Robert Gooding-Williams was the inaugural recipient for Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Social Philosophy.

For more information about the 2021 American Academy of Arts and Sciences winners.

We are happy to announce that John Morrison (Associate Professor, Barnard Philosophy) and Christos Papadimitriou (Donovan Family Professor, Columbia Computer Science) were awarded a $100,000 grant from the Columbia Data Science Institute  to create and teach a course at the intersection of philosophy, computer science, and neuroscience.   The grant comes from  Columbia's Collaboratory Fellows Fund and will allow John and Christos to create a course exploring the following issues: 

"Artificial neural networks can do amazing things. They can play chess, recognize faces, predict human behavior, learn language, create art. Natural neural networks -- that is to say, brains -- can do many of the same things, often a little more clumsily. But, unlike artificial networks, they can switch seamlessly between two tasks, learn to perform them
without supervision, and do not need to be told to -- actually, they can choose to refuse.

Brains provided the initial inspiration for the artificial networks, which is why we call them 'artificial neural networks.' But how deep are the similarities between the two? Do they share more than a few abilities, a similar structure, and a common nomenclature?"

The course will explore these issues from both philosophical and computational perspectives.  A companion lab course will teach students how to program their own artificial neural networks.

Congratulations to John and Christos for this exciting grant. 

See the Columbia News article on Professor Clarke-Doane's new work, Morality and Mathematics, available here: 

https://news.columbia.edu/news/justin-clarke-doane-new-book-on-morality-and-mathematics

We are happy to announce that Professor Robert Gooding-Williams,  M. Moran Weston/Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies and Professor of Philosophy and of African American and African Diaspora Studies, has been awarded a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.

"Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen through a rigorous peer-review process from almost 3,000 applicants in the Foundation’s ninety-sixth competition."

Professor Gooding-Williams' project is entitled: Du Bois’s Political Aesthetics: The Moral Psychology of White Supremacy and the Ends of Beauty