Fall 2022 Faculty News & Accomplishments

Professor Yuri Balashov continues his work on his project on human and machine translation. His new paper, “The boundaries of meaning: a case study in neural machine translation” was published in Inquiry and he gave several talks on the symbiosis of human and machine translation and attended an annual conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. His work was supported by a Michael Award from the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences.

Assistant Professor Jeremy Davis published a piece entitled “Severed Minds” about ethical issues arising from the TV show "Severance" in the August 2022 issue of The Philosophers' Magazine. In early September, he gave a talk at the University of Missouri Philosophy Department entitled "Can Algorithms Justify Killing?"

In July, Distinguished Research Professor and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor Edward Halper hosted “Symposium XIII: Plato’s Sophist,” the thirteenth triennial meeting of the International Plato Society at UGA. This was the first time that the IPS met in the US, and it was a great success with robust in-person participation in the weeklong conference. More than 90 scholars from across the globe came to Athens for the event, in addition to a large online international participation. At the conference’s business meeting, Halper was surprised to be presented with a Festschrift volume, Knowing and Being in Ancient Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan), edited by Daniel Bloom and Miriam Byrd. Although he still needs to edit papers for the volume of proceedings, Halper is very happy now to be a *past* President of the IPS and to look forward to the 2025 meeting in Madrid.

 Additionally, Halper presented three papers at conferences in Israel May 2022: one on Xenophon, another on Plato's Timaeus, and the third on the philosophy of biology. In August, he was in Paris to present a paper at SIEPM (Société Internationale de la Philosophie Médiévale). Halper also wrote an introduction to the collected papers of Irving Block that is being published by the University of Toronto Press.

Instructor Marianna Koshkaryan recently presented two conference papers: "Classical Greek Tragedy and French Tragedy of Classicism" (online, at the international conference "Antiquité et Culture Françaisе," Tbilisi, Georgia) and "Plato's Sophist: Whom Did the Visitor from Elea Catch?" (at Symposium Platonicum XIII) and published one paper arising from the first talk.

Department Head and Professor Aaron Meskin published “Why Do Philosophers Neglect the Short Story?" in the April 2022 issue of Philosophy and Literature. During the summer of 2022, he presented a paper entitled "The Aesthetics of (Popular) Music Radio" at the Rocky Mountain Division Meeting of the American Society of Aesthetics. In June 2022, he visited Auburn University as part of the SEC Faculty Travel Program and presented the presidential address at June's Georgia Philosophical Society Annual Meeting, held at UGA. In September, Meskin hosted and presented at an international conference on Food, Philosophy and Art in the US and Mexico.

Assistant Professor Rohan Sikri was awarded a research fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University for 2022–23. Sikri also gave several invited talks in 2022. He delivered the Pleshette DeArmitt Memorial Alumni Lecture at DePaul University, and was invited to speak at the Gettysburg Workshop on Chinese and Comparative Philosophy as well as the Diversifying Philosophy series of talks hosted at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Finally, Sikri’s article “The Art of Nourishing Life: Therapeutic Dialectics in the Platonic Dialogues and the Zhuangzi Neipian” was published in the Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi (Springer 2022).

Associate Professor Piers Stephens was invited to give a keynote presentation at the ‘What Really Matters?’ seminar on Philosophy, Politics and Society, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands in July 2022. Following his European travels, in August Stephens also gave a conference presentation paper, ‘Temporality, Nature and the Flux of Experience: Democratic Attention Against the Attention Economy’ to the Summer Institute in American Philosophy, at the University of Oregon. In addition, an interview with Dr. Stephens, conducted by Polish environmental philosopher and former UGA Fulbright visitor Magdalena Holy-Luczaj, is soon to be published under the title “’We Need to Act as a Sort of Translator’: Environmental Philosophy, Politics of Redistributionm and the Ecological Crisis” in the Polish philosophy journal Hybris this fall in both English and Polish language versions. 

Stephens has also published book reviews of Christine Harold’s Things Worth Keeping: The Value of Attachment in a Disposable World and of Keith Peterson’s A World Not Made For Us: Topics in Critical Environmental Philosophy, both in the journal Environmental Values.

Professor Sarah Wright will be presenting the paper "How a Group Can Own Its Epistemic Limitations" at the Epistemic Wrongs and Epistemic Reparations Conference on Nov 3–4 in Johannesburg.