Faculty Update
Mark Alznauer finally let go of his manuscript on Hegel’s system—tentatively entitled Hegel’s Sole Idea. He hopes it will find a publisher this year. His essay, “Untrue Concepts in Hegel” was included in Philosopher's Annual, volume 43, as one of the ten best articles in philosophy published in 2023. In the Fall, he was voted the President of the Hegel Society of America. In the Winter, he enjoyed the novelty of teaching a graduate course with not a single German philosopher on the syllabus (it was on American pragmatism). Now he is excited to be working on a variety of new projects.
Pascal Brixel - This year, I published “Freedom First: On Coercion and Coercive Offers” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. The article explains the distinctive wrong of coercion and casts aspersions on the use of incentives in general (coercive or otherwise). I also published a review of Vanessa Wills’s book Marx’s Ethical Vision in the European Journal of Philosophy and presented my work at Davidson College and the University of Chicago.
Penelope Deutscher co-edited, with Paul Earlie, a special issue of the journal Paragraph on the work of philosopher and recently elected member of the Academie Française, Barbara Cassin, which appeared in 2025. This past year she has also been working, with Amy Krauss, on a co-edited collection of essays entitled “Borders of Reproduction” (forthcoming as a special issue of the journal differences) and on a book, Revocability: Reproduction After Foucault and Roe. As Associate Director of Northwestern’s cross-disciplinary Critical Theory cluster and program, she organized a series of cross-program graduate workshops whose invited speakers included Judith Butler, Fumi Okiji, Alia Al-Saji, and Martin Saar. She developed a new first-year writing seminar on power, gender, and reproductive politics, which she taught for the first time in spring 2025.
Kyla Ebels-Duggan - This year, I continued my work and thinking about Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, writing essays on her concept of imagination and her view about the importance of theory in ethics. These will be two of seven planned chapters of my book, Think on What is Good: Iris Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy. I plan to finish the manuscript over the next year, as a Visiting Faculty Fellow at Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good.
Murdoch holds that imagination is an activity of mind that takes place, as she says, “between perception and action.” In exercising imagination we see a situation in a particular, richly detailed way that both shapes and limits how it will make sense to respond. Murdoch argues that her contemporaries do not allow any conceptual space for this ethically important faculty and her objections to their ways of thinking apply to many current approaches to moral psychology as well. She is often interpreted as a detractor of ethical theories, due to her emphasis on attending to the particulars of people and situations. But, in fact, she defends what she calls a need for theory. She thinks of our theories as comprising our stories about what is most fundamentally going on in this world, our accounts of what the world is really like. She also calls these fundamental descriptions of reality “metaphysics.” Throughout her work, she argues that how we see and described the world is ethically important. The theory we accept will, she thinks, determine the range of ethical concepts that we can bring to bear in our ethical and practical thinking. In opposition to those who try to do without theory she cautions that “it is dangerous to starve the imaginations of the youth.”
This Murdochian idea that good moral philosophy expands our repertoire of ethical concepts, and so allows us to ask better questions and think better thoughts, has long been central to my teaching. This year support from the Kaplan Center limited my teaching to my Brady Program course, The Moral Life. In this course, we think about the range of concepts that consequentialists views exclude and whether we can do better. We consider concepts of integrity, ideals, normative powers, and directed obligations, among others.
I have just completed my second year as Director for the Brady Program in Ethics and Civic Life. In addition to the rewarding experience of teaching the course, I got to lead informal discussions at Brady Teas throughout the year, mentor graduate fellows, and watch the cohort’s civic engagement projects develop. Over the spring term I had the gratifying task of overseeing the selection of new undergraduate scholars, graduate fellows, and a postdoctoral fellow to join the program next year. The interest in the program and the outstanding group that we were able to assemble was inspiring.
Sean Ebels Duggan led a fall college seminar for first year students on the self. The best(?) part, besides enjoying tea and treats with them, was making the students read W.H. Auden out loud and then explaining to them what they just said. Additionally, atop the fall’s introduction to logic course was an independent study with two students on the philosophy of mathematics. In the winter there was a very dedicated class of students learning set theory. In all other things, the struggle continued.
In addition to continuing to think about the notion of common ground in conversations, Sandy Goldberg continued to teach and lecture on topics near and dear to his heart: humor, the social dimensions of knowledge, and the nature of language and thought. He hopes to emerge from this with something to show for it; and it would be lovely if this took the form of a book, perhaps on the responsibilities we have when we talk to one another.
At the start of this academic year, Chad Horne was promoted to Associate Professor of Instruction. In the winter quarter, he presented a paper on climate change and the paradox of collective harm at a workshop at Rice University in Houston. In Spring, he taught a new undergraduate course on the political philosophy of John Rawls, in addition to his usual courses in applied ethics and political philosophy. He was happy to see the Northwestern Ethics Bowl team re-constitute itself this year, for which team he serves as faculty advisor.
Megan Hyska - I spent the fall of this academic year thinking a lot about artificial intelligence, and the spring thinking a lot about collective action. In the fall I taught a new course on philosophical issues related to generative AI and I gave a talk at Yale Law School on the question of how to characterize what (if anything) makes large language models different in kind from foregoing communications technologies like the printing press, the photocopier, and the internet. I started to think I might eventually want to write something about how early modern ideas about language influenced the history of computing, and I wrote a grant proposal about this. At some point in there, a very long paper on social organizing that I had been working on for close to five years finally came out, which was cool. Since January, I've spent my sabbatical finishing revisions on a paper on social movements, and advancing a few other projects: about political cooptation; about whether it's possible to address a body rather than a person and what this would mean for the addressee's obligation to respond; and about what social media platforms call “coordinated inauthentic behavior” policies. I also gave a few other talks around the country about social movements and about how deepfakes might make a difference to the practical and ethical dimensions of how people politically mobilize.
Claire Kirwin - This year, I completed the manuscript for a short book, Nietzsche’s Critique of Pity, which will be published as part of Cambridge University Press’s ‘Elements’ series on Nietzsche. I gave talks at New York University and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and presented papers at several conferences. I published a paper on value realism in the European Journal of Philosophy, a paper on love in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, a paper on agency and the guise of the good in an edited collection in honor of the late Joseph Raz, and a symposium piece on Paul Katsafanas’s book on the philosophy of devotion in the Journal of Moral Philosophy. I especially enjoyed teaching two new classes this year: one on contemporary virtue ethics, and a graduate seminar on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality.
Cristina Lafont published a book, co-authored with Nadia Urbinati, The Lottocratic Mentality: Defending Democracy against Lottocracy (Oxford University Press, 2024). She was invited to deliver the Juan Rodríguez Larreta Annual Lectures in Buenos Aires and gave talks at several conferences in the USA (Yale, UCLA, Rice University, CUNY, the APSA Meeting in Philadelphia, and the APA Pacific Division Meeting in Portland). She also participated in international conferences in South Korea, Germany, Canada, and Spain. Over the past year, she published several journal articles and contributed to edited volumes on democracy, human rights, and political activism. She will be on academic leave next year and plans to continue working on a book focused on human rights.
In 2024-25 José Medina published three journal articles and two book chapters. He also finished four other essays and is finalizing the book Resistance, co-edited with Dina Lupin and Leo Townsend, for Oxford University Press. Professor Medina gave the prestigious 66th Hurst Lecture at American University and also keynote addresses at national conferences in the US and at international conferences in Canada, Germany, Hungary, and Portugal.
Axel Mueller continued in his function as Director of Undergraduate Studies and Honors Convener during this Academic Year. In this eventful year, his function as the NU Senator representing the Division III (Humanities) WCAS Teaching Track Faculty resulted in unexpectedly more than the mere honor of standing up for those who elected him: to become quickly part of a representative body of voices who stand up for, well, science, the university and an independent academia as such at the intra-university, but also the national level. Wishes are that such excitement soon diminish, but wishes are cheap. Within the department, the joy of coordinating with extraordinarily energetic students in the creation and maintenance of venues for vibrant Undergraduate life in (the department of) philosophy, in student groups like Minorities In Philosophy (MAP)-UG, the non-male gender inclusive “Bussey Society”, the Northwestern Undergrad Philosophy Society (NUPS), constantly renewed his awareness of who all the "defending independent academic practices and knowledge" is for, and stems from: new generations driven to learn, know more, and on this basis do more and change stuff. Philosophically, Mueller is finishing contributions to handbooks on the philosophy of Hilary Putnam, and (still) almost finished with his (now again more relevant) next populism-article. As much in representing his academic peers as in teaching and mentoring students to become such and not lose their (energetic, young) temper and in muddling through to the next piece of writing, the year ahead will not allow him to get bored.
This year Morgan Thompson has published a co-authored article arguing that the official German statistical category (‘Migrationshintergrund’), which serves as a proxy for race, contributes to white ignorance in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. She also published a paper on the problem of constructing and validating new measures by (primarily) comparing them to old measures in Philosophy of Science. She gave talks at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting and the Society for the Study of Measurement. This summer she looks forward to introducing undergraduate students to philosophy of science at the Summer Immersion Program in Philosophy at Brown University. She enjoyed teaching courses on philosophical issues concerning social scientific methods and her first Writing Seminar on oppression and discrimination.
Claudia Yau has been completing a monograph on wisdom and political expertise in Plato, a preview of which can be found in an article titled, “Wisdom for the Living: Sophia in Plato’s Republic” at the Journal of the History of Philosophy. She gave talks at the University of Notre Dame, Marquette University, the Institute for Classical Studies at SAS London, and Nagoya University. She was excited to co-organize ancient philosophy events with the Chicago-Area Consortium in Ancient Philosophy, to collaborate on a digital humanities project called the Open Plato Project, and to teach her first college seminar (on self-care in Plato’s Alcibiades).
Rachel Zuckert had a busy year celebrating the 300th birthday of Immanuel Kant: together with Peter Fenves (German), she organized and hosted a three-day conference in spring 2024 on the works of the “Young Kant,” featuring a number of current and past graduate students in the Northwestern philosophy department. She also gave talks at conferences in Kant’s honor held in Bonn (Germany), Seoul (S. Korea), Cambridge (UK), Pavia (Italy), and at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Her continued fascination with Kant’s view of the sublime ensued in two more articles on it – along with another one, perhaps the last, in the works.