Spring 2024 Faculty News & Accomplishments

Associate Professor Elizabeth Brient presented the keynote lecture, “The Infinite Sphere as Think Tank: Suspension (of the finite in the infinite/ of the infinite in the finite) as Meditative Praxis” at the interdisciplinary international conference, Thinking the Float Tank: AUM Fiftieth Anniversary Conference; Cybernetics, Float Tanks, and Phenomenology in conjunction with the group exhibition Gödel, Escher, Bach at the contemporary art museum West Den Haag, in The Hague, The Netherlands, in August 2023. She also presented the paper, “All Likenesses Must Shatter: Exploding Metaphors, Exploding Texts, in Nicholas of Cusa” at the international workshop, Exploring the Cosmos: Unraveling Cusanus’ Metaphors at Ruhr Universität Bochum, Germany in June 2023.  

Assistant Professor Jeremy Davis is the primary organizer of the Southern Workshop on the Ethics of Emerging Technologies, held at UGA in April 2024. He published the co-authored piece, "Requests and Refusals: In Defense of Consistency" in the March 2024 issue of Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics.He also recently authored posts on Aesthetics for Birds about setlists and on Inside Higher-Ed on issues related to ChatGPT and assessment. Davis has presented papers at the Fall 2023 Georgia Philosophical Society, the American Philosophical Association Central Division meeting in New Orleans in February 2024, the APA Pacific Division Meeting in Portland in March 2024, and at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. He has recently participated in two book symposia—one on David Boonin's forthcoming book , Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and the States; the other on Saba Bazargan-Forward's recently published book Authority, Cooperation, and Accountability (Oxford University Press 2022). 

Distinguished Research Professor & Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor Edward Halper recently completed the editing of a volume of selected papers from the 2022 Symposium XIII of the International Plato Society meeting held at UGA with assistance from research assistant Quentin Murphy. In early April 2024, he delivered a comment in the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy. An interview with Halper titled “Aristotelian Metaphysics,” appears online at the 3:16 website.

Associate Professor René Jagnow published two papers on aesthetic experiences of paintings: “Experiencing Atmospheres in Paintings” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and “Multisensory Experience of Paintings” in the February 2023 issue of Proceeding of the European Society for Aesthetics. In October 2023, he also commented on Chris Bartel’s paper “An Aesthetics of Simulators” at the Southern Aesthetics Workshop. 

Assistant Professor Youjin Kong’s article “Social Identity at the Margins: A Decolonial Approach” appears in the Spring 2023 issue of The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory. She has recently presented “Beyond Distributive Equality: A Two-Dimensional Normative Framework for Fair Machine Learning” at the Southern Workshop on the Ethics of Emerging Technologies held at UGA in April 2024 and “Navigating, Curdling, and Weaving: A Decolonial Feminist Account of Marginalized Social Identities” at the PhiloSophia Conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in March 2024. Kong organized and participated in the post-lecture discussion panel on “The Authority of Hunger” with Kate Manne in March 2024 at UGA. Kong spoke on “AI: Keeping Pace with Advances” at the AI and Data Science Across Disciplines Symposium at UGA in November 2023. She also led and co-led several grant projects, including “Developing Applied Institutional Ethics for the Age of AI: Interdisciplinary Approaches,” awarded $150,000 through the UGA Presidential Interdisciplinary Seed Grant Program, for which she is the team leader and Primary Investigator. Kong is the Philosophy area chair for ACM FAccT 2024: Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency,flagship conference in the field of responsible AI. 

Professor & Department Head Aaron Meskin published an essay entitled “Four Publishing Strategies for When Writing is Difficult" in the Winter issue of The American Society for Aesthetics Newsletter. He delivered a paper on the illustration of thought experiments at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting in Portland March 2024 and a paper commentary at the American Society for Aesthetics Eastern Division Meeting in April 2024. Also in April, he gave an invited colloquium talk at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and served on the external review panel for the University of South Carolina Department of Philosophy.

Associate Professor & Undergraduate Advisor Thanassis Samaras published a chapter, “Perspectives on Leisure in Antiquity from the Archaic to the Christian Periods” in A Cultural History of Leisure, Vol. 1: Antiquity, edited by Jerry Toner (Bloomsbury 2024). He presented the papers “The Communitarian Plato” in the 55th Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Political Science Association in Boston in November 2023, and “Nature and Embodiment in Plato's Republic: Some Implications for Gender and Social Issues” in the 45th Midsouth Philosophy Conference in Memphis, TN in April 2024.

Professor Piers Stephens is currently working on a commissioned book chapter “Ecological Politics, Authoritarianism and Liberalism” for the forthcoming Edward Elgar Handbook of Environmentalism. In addition, he recently presented a paper, “The Continuing Case For A Green Liberalism”, at the Environmental Political Theory section of the Western Political Science Association conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Within the same section at the same event, he chaired the session on “Technology and Environmental Philosophy,” which also featured a paper presented by Stephens’ former graduate student Michael Lindquist, who is now an Assistant Professor at Northland College (WI).

Professor Sarah Wright, graduate coordinator and undergraduate coordinator for cognitive science, traveled in January to South Africa to visit the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science at University of Johannesburg, of which she is a Senior Research Associate. She presented the paper, "Epistemic Reparations as Restoring the Epistemic Relationship with Self" at the Epistemic Oppression workshop, and then traveled to Stellenboschto present that same paper at the annual conference of the Philosophical Society of South Africa. Sh then returned to Johannesburg to spend a week researching there, culminating in the presentation of "Natural and Artificial Epistemic Virtues" at an Epistemic Virtue Workshop on January 26th.