Faculty Update
Pascal Brixel - I have been writing a number of papers on freedom, coercion, alienation, and Marx, with a focus on structural unfreedom and collective action. I presented my work on these topics at the University of Chicago, Bryn Mawr College, Vanderbilt University, Leipzig University, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the University of Hong Kong. I was honored to receive the APA’s inaugural Stephen J. White Prize for my 2025 paper “Freedom First: On Coercion and Coercive Offers,” with a prize symposium on the paper held at the APA’s 2026 Central Division meeting. At Northwestern, I co-organized this year’s NUSTEP conference and taught a professional-skills seminar for our department’s job candidates, as well as introductory courses on feminist philosophy and political philosophy and a seminar on the ethics of markets, “Should Some Things Not Be for Sale?” (Answer: Should anything be for sale?) Next year, I will be a Fellow-in-Residence at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
Penelope Deutscher was on sabbatical leave and based in Berlin at the Freie Universitäat during this past academic year as the recipient of an award, the Humboldt-Forschungspreis. During this time, she completed a first draft of a book on contemporary reproductive politics called Revocability, and discussed this project in talks at universities in Germany and also in New Delhi. She also continued editorial work for a special issue on contemporary reproductive politics in the Americas she is coediting for the journal differences.
Kyla Ebels-Duggan - I had a wonderful year and very productive sabbatical year at the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame. With the additional time for reading, conversation, and writing, I completed a draft manuscript of Think on What is Good: Iris Murdoch’s Ethics of Love. In the book, I argue that Murdoch believes that we are naturally solipsists, and that the views that dominated philosophy of mind and ethics in her day only encourage this tendency. She thinks that we need a richer set of ethical concepts than these views afford us if we are to see clearly, think well, and realize our freedom. Such concepts come embedded in the stories that we tell and accept about what is most fundamentally going on in the world, or what Murdoch calls our metaphysics. Her own metaphysical story is that of a world filled with real, individual people, each with a value beyond price, living our lives with and among each other. We learn their value through love, which also provides our only means of escape from solipsism.
In the fall, I had the opportunity to discuss versions of five the book’s chapters with an excellent group of philosophers at the St Olaf/Carleton annual philosophy retreat in Minnesota. Over the course of the year, I presented parts of the manuscript at Notre Dame, Occidental College, The University of Chicago, The University of Virginia, The University of Texas-Austin, Hamden-Sydney College, and the Berlin Workshop in Germany. I am grateful to the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good for sponsoring a two-day workshop of the complete manuscript at the beginning of May and to the University of Edinburgh for hosting a second workshop later that month. If all goes well, the volume should be published early next year.
At the American Philosophical Conference in Chicago in February, we celebrated the publication of Responsibility and the Demands of Morality: The Collected Works of Stephen J. White. It was an honor to co-edit, with Berislav Marúsiç, this excellent volume of our beloved late colleague’s work.
Sean Ebels Duggan taught logic and, for the first time, an introductory class on metaphysics, both in the spring of 2026. Sean also taught a College seminar on logical positivism and fascism in the fall of 2025, hoping students would exit the seminar aligned to neither viewpoint.
During the 2025-26 academic year, Sandy Goldberg taught several of his standard courses (Introduction to Philosophy; Theory of Knowledge; Philosophy of Mind), a course he hadn’t taught before (Ancient Philosophy, taught as part of the Northwestern Prison Education Program), and a graduate seminar on conversational common ground. In addition, he finished work on a book on conversational responsibility, tentatively entitled The Expected Common Ground, which he hopes will come out in 2027. In short, he continues in the struggle to determine what it all means.
Chad Horne taught his usual slate of courses in ethics and political philosophy this year. He taught a new college seminar thinking about the state of nature both in political philosophy and in contemporary anthropology. He was very proud of Northwestern’s ethics bowl team for their great achievements this year, including their second-place finish at the Upper Midwest Regional Competition in Fall and their strong showing at Nationals in St. Louis in March. He was also very proud of his two honors advisees, Nora Schilling and Jackson Stein, for their two excellent honors theses.
Megan Hyska - This year saw two articles, long in preparation, finally reach publication: one of these was in social metaphysics (Social Movements and the Synecdoche Problem, in Noûs) and one in social epistemology and the philosophy of technology (Deepfakes, Public Announcements, and Political Mobilization, in Oxford Studies in Epistemology). I also completed the first article in a planned series on the topic of address, and developed the material for two others. As an international scholar, immigration and immigration enforcement have also been much on my mind over the past year. Last summer I served as a witness for the American Association of University Professors in AAUP v. Rubio, a suit in which they argued that the federal administration's policy of pursuing detention and deportation of non-citizen students and scholars on the basis of their political speech was unconstitutionally chilling the speech of non-citizen academics across the country. While appeals are ongoing, in the fall the court decided in favor of the AAUP, finding that the federal administration's pattern of immigration enforcement had violated the First Amendment. With immigration enforcement still on my mind, I also spent the year giving a number of talks to multidisciplinary audiences around the country on contemporary ICE-watch videography as a timely and urgent case study in the epistemic practices of civilian countersurveillance. Finally, this year I developed courses on address, and on language and technology; I've had a delightful last quarter teaching these new courses. It is with great affection and appreciation for the colleagues and students I've had the pleasure of knowing in my time at Northwestern that I head out to start a new chapter at the University of Leeds in the fall.
Claire Kirwin - This year, I published two articles on moral and evaluative disagreement, in Oxford Studies in Metaethics and Philosophical Studies, and one on Nietzsche’s ethics of friendship, in Inquiry. I also published a piece on normativity and the first-person perspective as part of an edited collection on value realism with OUP, and a short symposium piece on the perspective of the artist in Estetika. My manuscript for Nietzsche’s Critique of Pity, part of the ‘Cambridge Elements’ series on Nietzsche, was accepted for publication with Cambridge University Press. I gave several talks, including at Cornell and Oxford University. I was grateful to be supported in my research this year by a teaching release fellowship from the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and I look forward to being based next year at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, where I will be beginning work on a new book.
Cristina Lafont published a book, Democracia y participación ciudadana (Eudeba, 2025) and several journal articles, on “Uncivil Activism and Democratic Legitimacy,” “Deliberation and Voting,” and “Why Citizens’ Assemblies Should Not Have Decision-Making Power”. She was invited as keynote speaker at the 11th Swiss Summer School in Democracy Studies & 8th Deliberative Democracy Summer School on “Inequality and Deliberation,” at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and to discuss her recently published book, co-authored with Nadia Urbinati, The Lottocratic Mentality (OUP, 2024) at book symposia organized in universities in Reykjavik, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Mexico, Barcelona, Bologna, and Vancouver. Her experience co-authoring a book with a political theorist has been so rewarding that she has decided to write another book with Nadia Urbinati, on the timely topic of defending democratic elections.
In 2025-26 José Medina served as Chair of Philosophy and Associate Director of Critical Theory. He published two articles and finished three forthcoming publications. He also completed the collection of essays Resistance, co-edited with Dina Lupin (University of Southampton, School of Law) and Leo Townsend (University of Southampton, Philosophy). Resistance is in production with Oxford University Press and scheduled to appear in 2027. In 2025-26 Professor Medina gave ten keynote addresses at national and international conferences (in Canada, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, and the U.S.). He has received the Spinoza Professorship at University of Amsterdam and will deliver the Spinoza lectures in Amsterdam in Spring of 2027.
Axel Mueller served as Director of Undergraduate Studies and Honors Convener and as the NU Senator representing the Division III (Humanities) WCAS Teaching Track Faculty during this Academic Year. As the latter, he became more involved in university politics as much towards the federal attack on Higher Ed as, for example, co-leading a push for a change in Northwestern’s salary raise policies regarding non-tenured instructors (to ensure that raises meet cost-of-living minima). Within the department, working with a constantly growing majors-population (we’re now at 112, up from 65 just 5 years ago!) and Honors bunch (13 for the beginning AY!) provided the needed positive energies of mutual learning and shared enthusiasm for what we’re doing (philosophy!) within the generally exhausting circumstances. Personally, Mueller almost finished his next populism-article, worked on contributions to books on the philosophy of Hilary Putnam, and further researched an article on how the philosophy of laboratory science helps understanding why many of the most exciting claims from cognitive neuroscience (“they showed free will doesn’t exist”) systematically fall short.
This year Morgan Thompson taught her first graduate seminar on feminist philosophy of science, which ended up involving great cross-disciplinary conversations among graduate students in Philosophy, Performance Studies, Psychology, and Biology. She gave talks at Duke University, Marquette University, and the University of Washington, Seattle. She wrapped up two papers on social issues in the measurement of pain. Her Spring term is focused on a paper defending the achievement thesis in standpoint theory as helpful for social scientific researchers, despite recent arguments for rejecting it. She was honored to learn that her paper with Daniel James and Tereza Hendl on white ignorance and the German statistical category ‘Migrationshintergrund’ also won the Charles Mills prize from the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
Peter van Elswyk - In the last year or so, my new research project investigating the cognitive capacities that underwrite our use of language has culminated in a number of papers. The first “Assertoric mindreading” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research) defends that assertion activates mindreading, the second “Veridicality and the acquisition of think” (Linguistics and Philosophy) proposes a new explanation for why young children initially mislearn attitude verbs, and the third “Moore perspective-taking” (Cognition), which was co-authored with Paula Rubio-Fernández, reports the findings of new experiments on the acceptability of Moorean conjunctions. My related book How We Do Things With Declaratives is also now finally finished, and forthcoming from Oxford University Press. More importantly, my son Emerson was born on October 14th. He's healthy, happy, and huge.
Rachel Zuckert gained further evidence this year that we are in the “golden age” of Northwestern philosophy students (to quote Kyla Ebels-Duggan), with fantastic classes studying Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, philosophy of art, and eighteenth-century philosophy of history, as well as a delightful reading group on Susanne Langer’s classic, Feeling and Form. She edited a special issue of History of Philosophy Quarterly on the work of the Young Kant, and gave talks in Italy, the US, and Canada, including (most fun of all) to the Northwestern undergraduate philosophy society.
Postdocs:
Rowan Mellor - This year I have focused on three research projects. First, I am working on a paper about “self-depriving solidarity”. Often, people act in solidarity with a worse off group by voluntarily depriving themselves of something which that group lacks. For example, when leading his army through the desert, Alexander the Great is fabled to have refused water, preferring to undergo the soldiers’ suffering with them. Self-depriving solidarity is puzzling. On the one hand, it often seems morally admirable. Yet, on the other, acts of self-deprivation make things worse overall; by declining water, Alexander makes himself worse off, without making others any better off. I argue that people who self-deprive in solidarity with others deliberate from a collective perspective: their only aim is that “we” achieve something. In doing so, they engage in a form of selflessness which I believe Iris Murdoch identified in her monograph The Sovereignty of Good. I published a non-specialist overview of this project this winter with the Blog of the American Philosophical Association, available here.
Second, I am working on a project about joint reasoning. We often think of reasoning as something which a person does alone: think of a logic student reasoning from a set of premises to a conclusion. But reasoning can also be a social activity done together with others. For example, a couple might reason together about whether to relocate, or a team of detectives about the murderer’s identity. My project aims to shed light on what it takes for several people to reason together. My proposal is that in order for a group to reason jointly, they need to arrive at a shared conclusion on the basis of reasons which all of them take to support it. In other words, if you and I are reasoning together, it’s not enough that we agree simply on what to do or believe; we must also agree on why.
Finally, I am also writing a paper about the “no-difference problem”. The actions of many people can together cause serious harms, while each individual contribution seems too small to make any difference. Think, for instance, of individually insignificant consumer choices which, when enacted by millions, collectively sustain structural harms. The problem is that if these individual actions really make no difference to collective harms, then it is difficult to articulate a moral reason to refrain from them. But if no one has any moral reason to refrain, then how can we condemn the collective harms which they produce? I think we can make progress on this problem by looking to my own account of joint obligation (which I published over my last two years at Northwestern, here and here). I argue that joint and individual obligations can diverge, such that what we together ought to do comes apart from what each of us individually ought to do. So, even if no one has an individual obligation to avoid acts which make no difference to collective harms, we can nonetheless have a joint obligation to avoid them.
At the end of this academic year, I will be leaving Northwestern to join Trinity College Dublin's Department of Philosophy as an assistant professor.
Yvonne Tam - It's been a lively first year at Northwestern. I've had the pleasure of teaching the Moral Life class to a bright cohort of Brady sophomores working through some tough moral questions together, capped by a class project everyone can be proud of: a collection of their essays in our very own “Brady Scholars Journal of Philosophy” zine. Brady life has also meant bonfires, escape rooms, and (Kantian) dinner parties, which has made for a memorable year-long philosophy party with this Brady bunch. On the research front, I've been developing two papers: one offers a perhaps heretical Kantian account of moral self-love as a duty. In the spring, I presented a second paper on Kant's treatment of sympathy in the Doctrine of Virtue, which ventures a reconception of the relationship between moral feeling and practical reason in Kant's moral psychology, and argues that moral feeling is not a supplement to reason but its living form for finite sensible agents like us. I also had the unique experience of being the sole philosopher in Northwestern's inaugural Dissertation-to-Book Workshop at the Kaplan Humanities Institute, which subjected a diverse range of eyeballs to my manuscript and gave me feedback on turning my dissertation on moral self-love into a book. I closed the year on a high note with NUSTEP, another philosophy party I got to play a small part in organizing.