Faculty Update
Last year, Mark Alznauer put the final touches on a new manuscript on Hegel’s mature philosophical system which is tentatively entitled “Hegel’s Sole Idea.” A version of one of the chapters was awarded best essay of the year by the Journal of the History of Philosophy. He also enjoyed teaching a joint course on forms of knowing in the humanities with Viv Soni (English) for the Kaplan Scholars Program. He is excited to be turning his attention from Hegel to some new work on American pragmatism this summer.
Pascal Brixel: In 2023–24, I published “The Unity of Marx’s Concept of Alienated Labor” in The Philosophical Review and “The Difficulty of Making Good Work Available to All” in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. I presented my work at the University of Illinois Chicago, the University of Massachusetts Boston, Princeton University, the University of Bayreuth in Germany, and the Pacific APA, and I took part in a panel discussion on equality and political economy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. In addition, I was excited to teach my first graduate seminar, on Marx, as well as introductory courses on moral and feminist philosophy, and to serve on the organizing committee of this year’s annual conference of the Northwestern University Society for Theory of Ethics and Politics (NUSTEP).
Penelope Deutscher has been completing a book manuscript on post-Foucauldian philosophy and the Dobbs decision entitled Revocability , supported by a 23-24 residential fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. This past year she added to the project’s published essays in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie and diacritics, with further essays in the European Journal of Philosophy , and forthcoming work in Polity, Critical Times, and a German anthology on reproductive rights (all three forthcoming). At the conclusion of the year her research was awarded the “Humboldt-Forschungspreis” by the Humboldt Foundation.
Kyla Ebels-Duggan: I’ve spent much of the year deep in Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, writing a series of essay that will become part of a book manuscript. Murdoch is a value realist—in fact, a Platonist about value. At the same time, she thinks that the ethical concepts that we bring to the world will affect how we see it and in this sense we, as she often says, “partly” make the world. Our ethical concepts will shape what it will make sense to us to do. I have received funding from the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities to work on this project over the next year.
I published “Buck-passing and the Value of a Person” in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics. There I argue against views, such as T.M. Scanlon’s that hold that value can be reduced to reasons: to say that something is valuable is just to say that there are reasons to respond to it in certain ways. I argue that the value of a person, in particular, cannot be understood in this reductive way.
The highlight of my teaching this past year was a course on the history of modern moral philosophy, tracing the development of the rationalist and empiricist traditions in Europe from Hugo Grotius in the early 1600s to Kant at the end of the eighteenth. This was the first time that I taught the course, and the first time since graduate school that I had revisited much of the material. I had a phenomenal group of students who engaged admirably with the sometimes foreign texts and kept up extremely lively discussions. It was a blast and we all learned a lot.
This also marked my first year as Director for the Brady Program in Ethics and Civic Life. I have been teaching in this extraordinary program for thirteen years and sitting on the Faculty Advisory Board for ten. It has been an honor to step into the directorship and the wonderful students and graduate fellows have made for an extraordinarily rewarding first year.
In August of 2023, Sean Ebels-Duggan presented a paper at a conference at UConn commemorating the 40th anniversary of the “neo-Fregean” program in the philosophy of mathematics. In addition to teaching the department’s second course in logic, he led first-year undergraduates in a writing seminar on the philosophy of time, and lectured on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations for advanced philosophy majors. His joint paper with Francesca Boccuni, 'Explicit Abstract Objects in predicative settings’, will appear in the Journal of Philosophical Logic.
Sandy Goldberg spent the year, as he has in the past several years, trying to figure out why we value humor, and how our attempts at humor intersect with our moral and political norms. He rejoiced at having had a Freshman seminar class that was willing to think about these issues with him. He also continues to think (better: worry) about many of the dysfunctions of our current informational environments (both online and offline), and what might be done to enhance our joint deliberations. And he has just begun to explore what we take for granted about our common ground, when discussing matters of politics and life.
Megan Hyska spent the year as a Kaplan Fellow in association with her work on generative artificial intelligence and political communication. She was also a visitor at the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab at the Australian National University for part of the winter quarter.
Claire Kirwin joined the department in the fall of 2023. This year, she has been working on papers on the role that the concept of goodness plays in agency and deliberation, and on interpersonal love. She has also begun work on a short monograph on Nietzsche’s ethical critique of pity. Her paper ‘Value Realism and Idiosyncrasy’, making the case for the objective value of (among other things) peanut-butter-cup ice cream, was published in Oxford Studies in Metaethics. She enjoyed teaching her first classes at Northwestern, especially a 'Topics in Moral Philosophy' class on love and sex, and serving on the organizing committee for the Northwestern University Society for the Theory of Ethics and Politics (NUSTEP) annual conference.
Cristina Lafont was on research leave this year. She finished the manuscript of her book The Lottocratic Mentality: Defending Democracy against Lottocracy that she is co-authoring with Nadia Urbinati (to be published by Oxford University Press). She was the keynote speaker at the 2024 Adams Symposium at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and gave talks at conferences at Harvard, Yale, Rice, UCLA, Columbia, and Buffalo. She was invited to international conferences in Canada, South Korea, Germany, Mexico, and Spain. She published several journal articles and contributions to collective volumes on topics related to democracy, the digital public sphere, and the critique of ideologies. The next academic year, she hopes to begin working on a book on human rights.
Axel Mueller continued in his function as Director of Undergraduate Studies and Honors Convener during this Academic Year. This Year, the WCAS Teaching Track Faculty at large added to this the honor of electing him as their Senator. He will represent! To add a more upbeat take on the administrative and curricular work, Mueller was overjoyed to see the surge in intensity of the work of and with student groups like Minorities In Philosophy (MAP)-UG, the former Women Into Philosophy Initiative WiPhi’s reconstitution as a non-male gender inclusive “Bussey Society”, the Northwestern Undergrad Philosophy Society NUPS’s huge success at organizing their conference with Christine Korsgaard as keynote speaker, and Decolonizing Philosophy, all of whose new student leaders inject energy into the department’s life with their capability, curiosity and driven power to do and change stuff. Philosophically, Mueller was pleased to accept writing two high profile contributions to handbooks on the philosophy of Hilary Putnam, which caused pushing back the ongoing projects of publishing the almost finished next populism-article and the long-standing growing project of an article on the interactions between the limitations of experimental science and expectations of explanatory and reductive power of theories in neuroscience and psychology. Enough work to look forward to next year, then!
This was a year of firsts for Peter van Elswyk. He taught his first freshmen seminar, his first graduate seminar, and begin work on his first book. The book is under contract with Oxford University Press, and is tentatively titled How we do things with declaratives. It aims to explain linguistic action as the byproduct of various psychological processes (e.g. event cognition, mind reading, norm cognition). This research marks a new turn in his research towards questions at the intersection between philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. He also took a greater role in the Cognitive Science department by joining their program committee.
Claudia Yau had a lovely first year at Northwestern. She continued to work on her monograph on wisdom in Plato’s Republic, one part of which will appear in an article in the Journal of the History of Philosophy. She also gave talks on Plato at Penn State University, Rice University, and University of Chicago, and on Aristotle at Princeton University. She especially enjoyed teaching a graduate seminar on Plato’s theory of political expertise and a new version of her course on the history of ancient philosophy.
Rachel Zuckert enjoyed teaching two courses in Fall 2023 on eighteenth-century philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history; it was delightful to have the chance to discuss these materials, which dovetail with her research projects, with two such intelligent and lively groups of students. She gave talks at Cambridge University (UK), Marquette University, University of New South Wales (Australia), University of Pavia (Italy), University of Vienna/French Kant Society, and at the Pacific meetings of the American Philosophical Association and North American Kant Society. She published two essays in edited collections: one on Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s view that humor can defuse religious fanaticism, and another considering Kant’s philosophy of history as an attempt to respond to existential despair.