I have most welcome news to report about recruitment and promotion of faculty, and endowment development. Marshall M. Weinberg (B.A. '50) is establishing an endowed Distinguished Visiting Professorship in Philosophy. The endowment will be a unique resource, insuring that Michigan students gain first-hand exposure to new ideas affecting our discipline. The funding for the Weinberg Distinguished Visiting Professorship represents the largest commitment of endowment to the department in fifty years. There is more about the new endowment below.

This past year, we have been highly successful in building on current faculty strength. Philip J. Ivanhoe and Jamie Tappenden have accepted offers to join the Department, and Eric Lormand has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. We will benefit from their contributions in coming years. P. J., Jamie, and Eric work in areas -- Chinese philosophy, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of cognitive science, respectively -- in which we would not otherwise have specialists.

Eric Lormand's research in the philosophy of mind falls squarely within interdisciplinary work in cognitive science. He is especially interested in those mental phenomena that inspire philosophical challenges to the capacity of frameworks within cognitive science to do justice to such phenomena as emotions, holism, mental representation, and consciousness. He has developed a theory of consciousness that explains and illuminates a wide range of psychological, phenomenological, and conceptual data. Eric has also contributed to debates on the frame problem and connectionism within cognitive science. He runs University-wide interdisciplinary discussion groups on consciousness and cognitive processes, and serves on the Advisory Board, Program in Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience.

Jamie Tappenden joins the Department this fall as Assistant Professor. A specialist in philosophy of language, philosophy and history of mathematics, and philosophical logic, Jamie has published on the liar and sorites paradoxes, negation, vagueness, analytic truth, and Frege's philosophy of mathematics. In current research, he is examining the sense in which proofs in mathematics should yield "understanding" of a theory, with special reference to competing nineteenth century accounts of projective geometry. Jamie also has an interest in Kierkegaard. He has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, and has held visiting positions at Berkeley and Harvard. It is a pleasure to welcome Jamie to the Department.

P. J. Ivanhoe has accepted a joint appointment as Associate Professor in Philosophy and Asian Languages and Cultures, beginning 1998-99. P. J.'s research is in East Asian philosophy, with a special interest in Chinese religious and ethical thought. He focuses on the ancient and medieval Confucian and ancient Daoist traditions, and, within them, on such topics as Chinese views on character, virtue, moral agency, mystical experience, and skepticism. His current projects include a co-authored book comparing the "anti-rationalist" religious thought of Zhuangzi and Kierkegaard. We look forward to his joining the Michigan faculty a year from now. One of the traditional strengths of our department has been its coverage of diverse fields, including several that are not represented in every excellent graduate program: aesthetics, philosophy of religion, Continental philosophy, and Chinese philosophy. We are pleased to be able to renew our strength in this latter area, following Don Munro's retirement. (See MPN, Fall, 1996).

In other Department transitions, Jack Meiland has retired from active faculty service effective this past summer, after thirty-five years at Michigan. Jack's philosophical interests are wide-ranging, and include metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of logic, philosophy of the social sciences and of history, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and contemporary Continental philosophy. He has published some thirty articles and three stimulating books -- Scepticism and Historical Knowledge, The Nature of Intention, and Talking About Particulars -- in these areas. He has written on relativism, and co-edited an anthology on relativism in the cognitive and ethical spheres. Most recently, Jack's research interests have been in the area of pragmatism, especially Peirce. In the last few years, he reintroduced American Philosophy into the Department's curriculum, and also developed two new courses -- Great Books in Philosophy, and Science, Culture, and Values.

In recognition of his outstanding undergraduate teaching, Jack was appointed Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in 1988. For many years, Jack taught Methods of Thinking, a University course intended for first-year students. His College Thinking brought his ideas about undergraduate education to a wider audience. It is one of the few "college guides" that discusses how to benefit intellectually from college, rather than on how to select a college. Jack's commitment to undergraduate education has been reflected in his institutional service. He served as Director of the LS&A Honors Program from 1979 to 1983, as the College's Associate Dean for Long-Range Planning and Curriculum from 1983 to 1990, and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education from 1990 to 1992. In addition to holding a variety of administrative positions within the Department, Jack played a central role in the establishment of the Tanner Philosophical Library in 1970. In Jack's honor, we will be expanding the Library's resources in the areas of American philosophy, Continental Philosophy, and relativism.

The research of our faculty continues to receive wide recognition. Larry Sklar will deliver the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University this coming spring. He will address issues in methodological philosophy of science, focusing on the interaction between philosophical questions considered globally and in an a prioristic way with related questions that appear in the context of particular fundamental theories in physics. David Velleman spent last year as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, working on love, respect, and well-being in Freud and Kant. Ian Rumfitt has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, completing a book on Frege's logical theory. Ken Walton has received a University Humanities Award, which provides released time. The award will support Ken's research on the philosophy of music, work that seeks to explain the sense in which music is "expressive," the special intimacy listeners sometimes have with music, and the nature of the importance or value of music to us. Stephen Darwall has received an LS&A Research Excellence Award, in recognition of his recent work on the history of British moral philosophy.

Last Winter, Sally Haslanger was named an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Sally's combination of energy, clarity, approachability, and sheer hard work inspires undergraduates at all levels, and with quite different disciplinary backgrounds. Her teaching excels across the entire spectrum of course levels and formats, whether an introductory lecture for two hundred fifty students, or an advanced class of ten.

Regular faculty constitute the core of our research and teaching strength. At the same time, visiting professors can provide critical intellectual stimulation and engagement. The Marshall M. Weinberg Distinguished Visiting Professorship in Philosophy will regularly provide faculty and students sustained contact with scholars elsewhere. Weinberg Visiting Professors will be researchers who work in areas central to the rational understanding of the nature of knowledge, mind, language and value: epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and ethics. In light of the interactions between these fields and other disciplines -- for example, cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, political theory, and law -- appointees pursuing interdisciplinary work will be welcome. Indeed, Weinberg Visiting Professors may be affiliated with departments other than philosophy at their home institutions. They may also be younger scholars whose work is of unusual interest.

Marshall established the Endowment for the William K. Frankena and Charles L. Stevenson Prizes in 1991, and the Marshall M. Weinberg Endowment for Philosophy in 1995. This latter has been used for graduate student support. Competition for the best graduate students is intense, and the quality of graduate students has an important impact on both faculty retention and the quality of undergraduate instruction. Yet few donors understand the importance of graduate student support. Indeed, the application of Marshall's 1995 endowment to graduate student support helped to signal the importance of graduate student support to the Department and served as a catalyst for enhanced institutional funding in this area. Rackham subsequently selected Philosophy to receive Mellon Foundation funds for graduate fellowships, as well as Rackham Summer Fellowship funds. The new Visiting Professorship Endowment represents another unique contribution on Marshall's part. We look forward to the appointment of the first Weinberg Visiting Professor as early as fall, 1999. Student and faculty colleagues and I are enormously grateful to Marshall for his loyal and generous support.

This past year we established the Elsa L. Haller Prize Scholarship, awarded for undergraduate papers in intermediate and advanced philosophy courses; recipients need not be concentrators, and there can be more than one recipient over the course of a year. The Haller Prizes are funded by an endowment established in 1974. Faculty members are asked to nominate papers; the Department's Undergraduate Studies committee decides on the awards. Kyla Ebels received the first Haller Prize, in recognition of her paper, "Immorality Is Irrational: Kant's Defense of the Categorical Imperative," written for Ethics (Philosophy 361), taught by Steve Darwall.

Elena Goldstein received the sixth Frankena Prize for Excellence in the Concentration this May. Elena wrote an Honors thesis, "Particularly Objective: Longino on Politics, Justice, and Objectivity," which applied conceptions of objectivity in the philosophy of science to social and political concerns. Daniel Levin, another Philosophy Honors student, was one of two University of Michigan undergraduates who received an Outstanding Student award this April from the Michigan Association of Governing Boards of State Universities. Dan's thesis was on weakness of the will.

The number of Philosophy Honors theses remained at the high level (eight) of last year. In addition to Elena and Dan, the other Honors concentrators writing theses were Wendy Fitzsimons, "Morality: Subjectively, Objectively, and Rationally Speaking"; David Lau, "An Analysis of Confucian Ethics"; Yoohang Eunice Lee "Memory, Narrative, and the Self"; Adam Sherman, "Promoting Cooperation: A Justification of Law"; Joshua Smith "The Super-Ego and the Superman"; and Hilary Weis, "The Influence of Extra-Experimental Criteria on Theory Evaluation in Science." We congratulate these Honors graduates, and thank their faculty supervisors -- Elizabeth Anderson, David Hills, Allan Gibbard, Eric Lormand, Peter Railton, and Brook Ziporyn (Asian Languages and Cultures).

Our concentrators were active this year in other ways. Gary Brouhard presented a paper, "Teaching Aesthetics: an undergraduate perspective," at the Eastern Division meetings of the American Society for Aesthetics. He has been asked to submit the paper to the ASA newsletter. The Undergraduate Philosophy Club was also active. Under the leadership of Naomi Hirano in the Fall Term, and Karina Ruiz in the Winter, the Club met frequently, often together with a faculty member to discuss particular topics. For the fourth consecutive year, a number of undergraduates -- Carrie Heitman, Karina Ruiz, Manprect Singh, Joel Wesley, and Michael Zeedis -- attended the New England Undergraduate Philosophy Conference at Tufts University in March.

There have been a number of healthy developments in the undergraduate curriculum. This past year, Larry Sklar introduced The Worldview of Modern Science (Philosophy 320), and Eric Lormand revived Mind, Matter, & Machines (340), which had not been offered in twenty years. Both courses experienced strong enrollments, and will be offered again this year. We have another revival slated for 1997-98 -- Philosophy of Film (368), to be offered by David Hills. None of these courses carry prerequisites; the 300-level numbers reflect their somewhat specialized character, and the sophistication of the material. These offerings represent an effort to develop more outreach vehicles, apart from courses in "applied" ethics (Contemporary Moral Problems and Law and Philosophy). Introduction to Symbolic Logic has been converted from a course taught by graduate students (203) to a faculty-taught offering (303). Jim Joyce was the first regular faculty member to teach the course, which will count toward a new LS&A distribution category, Mathematical & Symbolic Analysis, as well as satisfy the logic requirement for the concentration. This fall, Ian Rumfitt is reviving Types of Philosophy (234). Unlike Problems and Principles (232), 234 is an historically-based introduction. In years past, the course was a mainstay in the curriculum -- taught by Don Munro, Jack Meiland, and -- as Philosophy 34 -- by the late Bill Frankena.

Within the graduate program, we have made a number of significant changes in our system of graduate student funding. We have eliminated the "teaching apprentice" positions for first-year students, in favor of full non-teaching fellowships for all our doctoral students in their first year of study. We now guarantee students who achieve candidacy in three years non-teaching fellowships during two terms in the fourth and fifth years. We are also guaranteeing six years of full support to students who achieve candidacy in three years, and whose work and teaching are satisfactory.

Finally, as I reported last year, we are making every effort to offer up to two terms of half-time teaching, as Visiting Assistant Professors, to our own Ph.D.'s who have reason to delay their search for an academic position, or who are not initially successful in it. Two of our recent Ph.D.'s students received two-term visiting appointments during 1996-97, the first year of this program. We are very proud of this effort, which provides an additional year of support, and some time to pursue research and publication, in a difficult job market.

Six recent Ph.D.'s and finishing doctoral students were seeking placement last year, four for the first time. Three received offers of tenure-track positions. Manyul Im, who works in Chinese ethics, is joining the philosophy faculty at California State University at Los Angeles this fall. In an unusual turn of events, two other Michigan students declined tenure-track offers. The May, 1997 issue of the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association contains some interesting data in regard to placement. The APA Committee on Career Opportunities sent questionnaires in spring, 1996, to 853 job candidates. Of the 469 candidates who responded, 390 indicated that they had been looking for their first tenure-track position. Restraint is called for in graduate admissions; at Michigan, we have lowered our target for new doctoral students to six or seven per year.

Last spring, the faculty awarded the John Dewey Prize for Graduate Student Excellence in Undergraduate Education to Manyul Im. Manyul is a patient teacher, highly respectful in his interactions with students, and determined to give them a sense of inclusion in philosophical discussion. He has been active in discussing pedagogy, both with faculty and graduate students, and members of the Undergraduate Philosophy Club. A remarkable proportion of Manyul's students report that they plan to take related courses. He also received a Rackham Outstanding GSI Award. The Department has now awarded four Dewey Prizes. Dewey was a member of the Michigan faculty from 1884-88, and head of the department of philosophy (as well as psychology and pedagogy) from 1889-1894. Linda Robinson Walker's fascinating two-part account of Dewey's year's at Michigan is in the University's Summer and Fall, 1997, Michigan Today.

In other graduate student recognitions, Karen Bennett received the Charles L. Stevenson Prize for Excellence in the Graduate Program. The Prize is awarded for an outstanding candidacy dossier, a portfolio of work leading to a dissertation, and presented as part of the requirements for achieving candidacy. Karen and Mika Lavaque-Manty have been awarded Rackham Predoctoral Fellowships this year. Karen works on the metaphysics of contingent identity and mental causation. Mika's work constructs an account of political action, drawing on liberal notions of publicity and public reason. Jeffrey Brand-Ballard and Craig Duncan will hold a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship and an International Institute Graduate Fellowship, respectively. Jeff works on collective agency and the rules of justice. Craig's research is on competing understandings of the value of religious toleration.

Graduate students again organized our annual spring colloquium, and served as commentators for the talks by Alvin Goldman (Arizona), Jaegwon Kim (Brown), and Hilary Kornblith (Vermont) on the topic "Justification and Naturalism." Karen Bennett, Marc Kelly, and Nishi Shah were commentators. Richard Schoonhoven did a masterful job organizing the colloquium activities. Nelson Philosophers-in-Residence, who pay one week visits to the Department, were Michael Smith (Australian National University) in the fall, and Martin Davies (Oxford), in the winter. Speakers during the year included: Julia Annas (Arizona), David Christensen (Vermont), Paul Guyer (Pennsylvania), Tito Magri (Bari ), Diana Raffman (Ohio State), Sam Scheffler (Berkeley), Ted Sider (Rochester), and Robert Wilson (Illinois). The Department hosted the Midwest Conference in the History of Modern Philosophy last December. Stephen Davies (Aukland) and Richard Wolheim (Berkeley), as well as Matthew Biro (Art History, Michigan) and John Doris (Michigan) gave presentations to the Aesthetics Discussion Group (organized by Ken Walton). Other informal discussion groups during the past year were organized by John Doris, Nadeem Hussain, Sally Haslanger, Manyul Im, Eric Lormand, Nishi Shah, Kevin Toh, and James Woodbridge. Some groups focused on individual contemporary philosophers; others were devoted to race and gender, language and mind, and virtue ethics.

Thomas Scanlon, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, Harvard University, delivered Michigan's 1996-97 Tanner Lecture last October. His title was "The Status of Well-Being." In addition to Professor Scanlon, participants in the interdisciplinary symposium on the Tanner Lecture were Peter Hammond (Professor of Economics, Stanford), Shelly Kagan (Henry R. Luce Professor of Social Thought and Ethics, Yale), and Cass Sunstein (Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence, Law School and Department of Political Science, Chicago).

I am sorry to report that Susan Lipschutz passed away in April. Susan touched the lives of many Philosophy graduate students, faculty, and undergraduates. A magna cum laude graduate of Smith College, Susan earned her doctorate in Philosophy from Michigan in 1969. She taught political philosophy at the University of Denver and at Albion College, and returned to Michigan in 1981 as assistant to Harold Shapiro, president of the University at the time. She served as Associate Dean at the Rackham School of Graduate Studies from 1986 to 1989, and as Senior Associate Dean until 1993, when she left Rackham to become Associate Provost. She served in that role under two Provosts, Gilbert Whitaker and Bernard Machen. She initiated and implemented programs to support the careers of women graduate students and women faculty, as well as the University's Dual Career Program, among other projects. Susan pursued her responsibilities with humane purpose. She never called attention to herself, and was devoted and selfless in her University service.

Susan also served as Adjunct Associate Professor of Philosophy since 1984. She was a remarkably effective teacher in Honors Introduction to Philosophy. She cared deeply about the academic progress and personal welfare of her students. Her introductory courses accounted for a disproportionate number of our concentrators. In recent years, University administrative responsibilities kept her out of the classroom; this was a real loss for our students. Over the years, Susan was highly supportive of Department programs, faculty, and students. For those of us who had the privilege to work with her, she was a model of caring and effective service to the University community. Susan, who wrote her dissertation on "Participatory Democracy," promoted civility and mutual understanding in her professional life. Memorial contributions can be made to the Susan Lipschutz Memorial for Women Graduate Students, care of the Dean of the Rackham Graduate School.

This issue of MPN includes an article by Ed Curley, "Exploring Religious Toleration." Ed and Steve Darwall will serve as Faculty Chairs of a year-long seminar, "Theories and Practices of Religious Toleration/Intolerance," during 1997-98. Under the auspices of the Advanced Study Center of the International Institute, the seminar will undertake a broadly interdisciplinary, intercultural, and critical exploration of theories and practices of religious tolerance, as this idea developed in the west in the modern period, in various nonwestern cultures at other times and places, and as it relates to political, ethical, and legal issues that confront us today. Ed's article reflects some of his work in conjunction with the Seminar. A biographical sketch follows his article.

We have completed an initial year in our renovated quarters in Angell Hall. The new Meeting Room (2271 Angell) is proving an especially versatile addition to our facilities. The room overlooks State Street, and accommodates many advanced undergraduate/lower-level graduate (400-level) courses, as well as some faculty sections of core intermediate (300-level) courses, and Honors Introduction to Philosophy. The modular tables are typically set out in a seminar format, but can be rearranged to accommodate smaller discussion groups. The room has also served well for some public lectures and other special events. Much else is new -- a seminar room/Library annex, a graduate student computer room, and a room for GSI's to meet with undergraduates. Please visit when you are able to get to Ann Arbor.

Sincerely,

Louis E. Loeb,
Chair

Back to Top