News
The 2024 Ambedkar Law Lectures will take place on Tuesday 24 September (JGH 104) and Wednesday 25 September (JGH 106) from 5.00-6.30 PM.
The lectures, titled Reading Fanon, will be delivered by Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) and will focus on the writings of Frantz Fanon, one of the twentieth century’s most important theorists of colonialism, revolution, and freedom. On each day, the lectures will have two commentators: Jeremy Kessler (Columbia Law School) and Aslı Ü. Bâli (Yale Law School) on 24th September, and Kaiama L. Glover (African American Studies, Yale University) and Michele Moody-Adams (Philosophy, Columbia University) on 25th September.
For Registration: https://tinyurl.com/5n8ww64j
Funded by the Office of the Executive Vice-President of the Arts & Sciences, the Heyman Center Fellowships provide four junior and four senior Columbia faculty with course relief during the academic year. During his time as a Heyman Centre Fellow, Prof. Peacocke plans to complete an interdisciplinary book presenting a theory of the nature of the perception of Western music. The theory aims to explain what it is for such musical experience to have the rich emotional and other content it is capable of possessing. He is the recipient of the Jean Nicod Prize for 2024, and the material on music perception is based on the lectures associated with the Prize.
Christopher A.B. Peacocke has been awarded the Prix Jean Nicod 2024 and will give a series of lectures at the École normale supérieure, Paris in May and June 2024. More information can be found here.
The Department of Philosophy congratulates its BA, MA, and PhD graduates for all their hard work and achievements.
Departmental Honors:
Peter Guo (GS)
Soham Mehta (CC)
Rebekah Seow (GS)
Kyla Tang (CC)
April Wang (CC)
Adam Leroy Jones Prize:
Zimu Zhang (CC)
James Gutmann Prize:
Cassady Marion (CC)
This award is funded by the Mellon Foundation for the support of an exceptional graduate student during their last dissertation year, in the subspecialty of science within the fields of history, philosophy, or sociology.
The award honors alumni of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for exceptional work in scholarship, public service, teaching, or academic administration.
Four alumni of the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) were recently awarded Wilbur Lucius Cross Medals in recognition of their outstanding work and service.
Awarded annually by the GSAS Alumni Association, the Wilbur Cross Medal honors exceptional work in scholarship, public service, teaching, or academic administration. It is the highest honor that GSAS bestows on alumni.
This year’s recipients are:
- Elizabeth Bradley ’96 Ph.D. (Public Health) for her leading scholarship in public health, and her unwavering commitment to the health and well-being of local and global communities;
- Robert Gooding-Williams ’75 ’82 Ph.D. (Philosophy) for his significant contributions to the fields of philosophy, political theory, and race theory;
- James M. Jones ’70 Ph.D. (Psychology) for his transformative scholarship in the study of race, racism, and diversity in the last 50 years; and
- Che-Chia Wei ’85 Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering) for technological innovation, including the miniaturization of integrated circuits, and leadership in the semiconductor industry.
For additional information, please visit YaleNews.
Professor Achille Varzi is the recipient of the Mark Van Doren Teaching Award for the academic year 2022-2023. Columbia College awards the Mark Van Doren Teaching Award. The award is to recognize a faculty member's humanity and inspiring leadership. For information about the Mark Van Van Doren Teaching Award, please visit Columbia College.
The Jean Nicod Prize is annually awarded between philosophers and philosophically-oriented scientists. For more information about the Jean Nicod Prize, please click here.
Columbia News interviewed John Dewey Emeritus Professor of Philosophy Philip Kitcher about his new book on John Stuart Mill as part of the Columbia "Core Knowledge" series. Here is the link to the article.
Project Title: Standard Research Grant: Representation and Inference in the Brain
The goal of this three-year project is to develop useful and precise definitions of ‘representation’ and ‘inference’ for attribution to the brain. Representation and inference are central notions in neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy, but they have not yet been rigorously defined in terms of neural activity. All three fields would benefit from such definitions. For example, neuroscientists often describe neural activity as representing and inferring. It is their way of describing the overall function of that activity, an abstraction away from detailed neural recordings. But, because there are no rigorously definitions, there are no objective grounds for these descriptions. As a result, they are treated as casual glosses rather than as rigorous analyses. Just as proper definitions accelerated progress in other fields, proper definitions of ‘representation’ and ‘inference’ have the potential to accelerate progress in neuroscience.
Francey Russell is one of four junior faculty to receive a Society of Fellows and Heyman Center Fellowship for 2023-2024. Professor Russell's project is entitled "Opaque Animals," and articulates a conception of human self-opacity grounded in Kant and Freud, and in contemporary debates in philosophical moral psychology, psychoanalysis, and works of art.