Professor Yuri Balashov traveled to the Machine Translation Summit XX in Geneva and the 11th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies in Leeds, UK in summer 2025 to present his research funded by an NSF grant. His paper, co-authored with Alex Balashov and Shiho Fukuda Koski, has been published in the prestigious ACL Anthology. He also presented a talk on the origins of the translation abilities of large language models at the virtual conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas in September 2025 and is now working on a longer paper on this topic. Professor Chris Cuomo attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP30 in Brazil with UGA PhD student and research assistant Max Barton in November, where she participated in multiple workshops. Cuomo joins hundreds of US representatives including scholars, scientists, as well as state and major city government representatives who are attending the conference in the absence of any US federal government representation in the climate change global negotiations. Assistant Professor Jeremy Davis recently participated in a panel on “The Role of AI in Suicide Prevention Risks, Benefits, and Practical Next Steps” at the second annual Center for Suicide Research and Prevention Conference presented by Mass General Brigham Integrated Healthcare System and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in September. Distinguished Research Professor & Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor Edward Halper delivered a paper “The Problem of Collective Predication and Aristotle’s Solution” at the inaugural meeting of the International Aristotle Society in Lisbon in July. He gave the same paper to the Israeli Philosophical Association in Ramat Gan. In the beginning of August, he gave three masterclasses in Lanckorona, Poland for a workshop called "Plato AI" that was dedicated to developing system that would allow individuals to have a Platonic dialogue with a computer: (1) “Plato’s Dialectic and Rhetoric: The Prospects for an AI Plato,” (2) “The Structure of the Early Dialogues: A Pattern for AI?” (3) “Can We Learn from an LLM? A Socratic Effort to Make the Student Be the Teacher (Platonic active involvement of the participant vs the Hegelian self-generating dialectic).” In October he delivered a paper “Forms in the Early Dialogues? The Case of the Protagoras” virtually to the XVth Symposium Platonicum Pragense: Plato's Theory of Forms, Prague, Czech Republic. His “Self-Understanding as Self-Relation: Hegel and Aristotle” has now appeared in Das Selbstverständnis der Philosophie und ihr Verhältnis zu den (anderen) Wissenschaften, ed. Dina Emundts, Dina, Karen Koch, and Kirk Quadflieg. Klostermann, 2025. Associate Professor Rene Jagnow published “Representationalism and the Spatial Representational Contents of Afterimage Experience” in Analytic Philosophy. He was invited to deliver a keynote address at the conference “The Aesthetics and the Atmospheres of the Five Senses” at the University of Genoa in July, where he presented his paper “Atmosphere’s Effect on Expression and Content in Paintings.” In September, he also served as a commentator on Romain Carpentier-Pomey’s paper “Marcel Proust on Impressions” at the Southern Aesthetics Workshop at the University of Georgia, Athens. Head of Department, Aaron Meskin, has published three new articles in the last few months. A review of Henry Pratt’s The Philosophy of Comics: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Matter came out in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, a co-authored article-length commentary on Neil Van Leeuwen’s Religion as Make-Believe was published as part of a symposium in Philosophia, and a co-authored guide to public philosophy of art and aesthetics appeared on the Public Philosophy Network website. Meskin also recently delivered invited talks in Edinburgh, Leeds, London, Nottingham, Tilburg, and Ljubljana, as well as a conference talk at the 83rd American Society for Aesthetics Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Assistant Professor Nicholas Schuster recently published an article in AI & Society: "Moral Disagreement and the Limits of AI Value Alignment: A Dual Challenge of Epistemic Justification and Political Legitimacy" (co-author: Daniel Kilov, ANU) Professor Sarah Wright organized (and presented at) the Bled Philosophy Conference, in Bled Slovenia in June. The conference brought together an international group of fifty-seven philosophers working in epistemology to focus on the topic of “Social, Political, and Legal Epistemology.” Three former UGA Graduate students presented: Benjamin McCraw (University of South Carolina Upstate), Justin Simpson (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), and Josué Piñeiro (Kennesaw State University), who presented jointly with Alina Ahmed (PhD student at the University of Connecticut). Wright will be editing a special issue of papers from the conference to appear in Acta Analytica. Later in June Dr. Wright also presented the paper “False Confessions and Repairing Self-Trust” at the Epistemic Reparations Workshop on Bearing Witness: Citizens and The Law in Post-Apartheid South Africa hosted by the African Centre for Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science (ACEPS) at the University of Johannesburg. Type of News/Audience: Faculty News
