Student and Faculty News

Congratulations to our graduating seniors!

2009 Philosophy Majors' Post-Graduation Plans:

Alex Rosenberg: Alex will be entering the Philosophy PhD program at Bowling Green

Melissa McKay: Melissa is moving to Denver to open a dance and music studio.

Jessica Einstein: Jessica will be the Advocacy Coordinator at DMAA: The Care Continuum Alliance, Washington, D.C.

Nathan Dailey: Nathan will be entering the Philosophy PhD program at UC Riverside.

Megan Henricks: Megan will be entering the Philosophy PhD program at UC Riverside.

John Grauer: John will be entering law school, most likely at The Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.

John Schaffranek: John will be entering law school at the University of Pittsburgh. 

Trevor Shaw: Trevor plans to move to Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where he would like to start a non-profit organization that would help raise money for school supplies for local public school children.  In the future, he may attend business school or law school. 


    Faculty News

    Steve Vogel, professor
    Dr. Vogel was awarded the inaugural Nancy Eshelman Brickman Endowed Professorship in Memory of Dr. Ellenor Shannon at the Denison Academic Awards Convocation on April 24, 2009. Dr. Vogel presented his paper entitled, "Alienation and the Commons," at the conference on "Human Flourishing and Restoration in the Age of Global Warming," at Clemson University on September 6, 2008. He also presented this paper to a workshop on "New Thinking on Alienation," at KWI Essen in Germany on January 14, 2009.  Dr. Vogel also participated in a panel, "The Turn to Green: A Left Turn?" at the Program on the Global Environment at the University of Chicago on May 9, 2009.


    Barbara Fultner, associate professor
    Dr. Fultner is currently on a Faculty Research Fellowship at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, Storrs, CT. She was also granted Denison’s R.C. Good Fellowship. Dr. Fultner’s conference presentations and invited lectures: “Re-Imagining Normativity: Meaning, Rules, and the Imagination,” American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division), Vancouver, Canada, April 2009; “Why Philosophers of Language Need a Social Theory,” University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, March 2009 (an earlier version presented to the Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, January 2009); “Heidegger’s Existential-Pragmatic Conception of Language: Utterance and Assertion,” Department of Philosophy, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, February 2009 (also presented to Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut, February 2009); “Meaning, Norms, and Imagination,” Critical Theory Roundtable, New York, NY, September 2008; “Normativity: From Language to Social Practice and Back Again,” Language, Culture, and Mind III, Odense, Denmark, July 2008; “Lifeworld, Meaning, and Intersubjectivity,” LCM III, Odense, Denmark, July 2008. “A Non-Essentialist Approach to Discourse and Gender,” Canadian Philosophical Association Meeting, Vancouver, Canada, June 2008; “Intersubjectivity: The Lifeworld and Child Development,” CPA, Vancouver, Canada, June 2008; “Meaning, Norms, and Creativity,” Colloquium on Philosophy and Social Theory, Prague, Czech Republic, May 2008.

    Jonathan Maskit, assistant professor
    Dr. Maskit published "Subjectivity, Desire, and the Problem of Consumption" in Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology and "Something Wild? Deleuze and Guattari, Wilderness, and Purity" in The Wilderness Debate Rages On: Continuing the Great New Wilderness Debate. He presented "Romanticism and the Picturesque: Environmental Aesthetics and the History of Landscape Painting" at the meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics (Northhampton MA, November, 2008) as well as at the meeting of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics (Vancouver, May-June 2008). He also presented "Über den Wiederaufbau nachindustrieller Gelände: eine ästhetische Analyse" [On the Reconstruction of Postindustrial Sites: An Aesthetic Analysis] at the
    Deutsche Kongress für Philosophie (Essen, Germany, September, 2008). In March 2009, he presented “Aesthetics of the Skyscape: Science, Industrialism, and the Skies” at Celestial Aesthetics: The Aesthetics of Sky, Space, and Heaven, the 7th international Conference on Environmental Aesthetics in Heinavesi, Finland. Dr. Maskit’s paper “French Environmental Philosophy: An Introduction” was accepted for presentation at the Thinking Through Nature Conference in Eugene, Oregon in June of 2009. Dr. Maskit gave a colloquium entitled "The Aesthetics of Elsewhere: Presence, Absence, and Environmental Aesthetics" at Ryerson University in Toronto on 3 February 2009 and a re-worked version at the University of Connecticut on 11 February 2009 as "The Aesthetics of Elsewhere: An Everyday Environmental Aesthetic."

    Alexandra Bradner, assistant professor
    Dr. Bradner and Seth Chin-Parker, assistant professor of psychology, presented a poster entitled "Empirical Support for the Pragmatic Approach to Explanation" at the 34th annual conference of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology, in Philadelphia (June 2008).  In July, they presented "The Pragmatics of Explanation" at the 30th annual Cognitive Science Society conference in Washington, D.C., and the accompanying paper was published in the conference proceedings. Dr. Bradner will present "On the Very Idea of a Style of Reasoning," at The Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice, Minneapolis, MN, June 2009. She also published a paper, Teaching Modernity in Appalachia." Teaching Philosophy 31, no. 3 (2008): 229-247.

    Dr. Bradner has been awarded a grant and will attend the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Experimental Philosophy, University of Utah, June-July 2009.


    Tony Lisska, professor
    Maria Theresa Barney professor of philosophy, Dr. Lisska published "The Metaphysical Presuppositions of Natural Law in Thomas Aquinas: A New Look at Some Old Questions" in Virtue's End: God in the Moral Philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas. Book reviews on Aquinas appeared in Philosophy in Review and in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. He also presented "Aquinas on Natural Law Jurisprudence" at The Justice Institute on October 16, 2008, sponsored by The College of Law of the University of Cincinnati. He commented on Jason Eberl's paper entitled "Cultivating the Virtue of Acknowledged Responsibility," at the meetings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in Omaha. Dr. Lisska presented "What Aquinas Would Say to Nussbaum: The Capabilities Approach and the Human Person" at the session on "The Legacy of Aquinas" at the Northeastern Political Science Association Meetings in Boston. He also gave an invited paper, “God, Aquinas, and Revisionist Natural Law Theory: The Questions of Natural Kinds” at the University of Kentucky on March 6, 2009. His paper, "Frank Packard's Granville," appeared in The Historical Times, Vol. XXII, Issue 3 (Summer 2008), pp. 1-12. His article, "In the Shadow of Archbishop John Ireland: Langdon Thomas Grace O.P., Second Bishop of St. Paul," appeared in the Bulletin of the Catholic Record Society, Vol. XXXIII, No. 7 and No. 9 (July and September 2008), pp. 245-251; 261-266. Dr. Lisska also presented "Frank Packard's Influence on the Architectural Footprint of Granville" at the Granville Historical Society on October 22, 2008 and “Preservation Pitfalls: The Passing of the Frank Packard Paradigm” at the Bryn Du Life-Local Series on Historical Preservation on March 23, 2009.

    Ron Santoni, Professor Emeritus
    Dr. Santoni’s essay, “Camus on Sartre’s ‘Freedom’: Another Misunderstanding,” was published in the Review of Metaphysics, June 2008 issue. His essay, “Is Bad Faith Necessarily Social?” was accepted for the Sartre Studies International issue due out in 2009. Dr. Santoni also has an essay, “Späte Reue,” in Lebendiger Sartre, edited by Vincent Von Wroblewsky (Berlin: Basisdruck, 2009). Dr. Santoni presented a paper, “Is Bad Faith Necessarily Social?” at the Sartre Circle at the American Philosophical Association meetings in Chicago in February 2009. Dr. Santoni was also a panelist for Sartre Explained: From Bad Faith to Authenticity at the American Philosophical Association Meeting in Philadelphia in December 2008. Dr. Santoni will be attending the meeting of the International Sartre scholars at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris between June 18-20, and a book containing one of his contributions will be launched at an Art Studio/Librairie in the Latin quarter of Paris.

    Mark Moller, Associate Professor
    Dr. Moller received tenure and was promoted to associate professor in January 2009.
    He also published a paper, “Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research, Justice and the Problem of Unequal Biological Access,” in
    Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine (2008), 3:22 doi:10.1186/1747-5341-3-22. Dr. Moller’s paper, “The “Many and the One” and the Problem of Two Minds Knowing the Same Thing,” was published in the William James Studies (2008), 3. Dr. Moller published another paper, “Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and the Discarded Embryo Argument,” in the journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. (2009) 30, 2, pp. 131-145.