Dear Friends of the Department:

Greetings from Angell Hall! This fall we welcome three new faculty members to the Deparment--Rachana Kamtekar, Michelle Kosch, and Jason Stanley.

Professor Kamtekar teaches and writes on a broad range of topics in ancient Greek philosophy. A Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, she has taught superbly and creatively for several years at Williams College. In addition to courses on ancient Greek philosophy, she also gave an inter-sessional course that took Williams students to her native India to study ethical and political questions of development and social reform. Professor Kamtekar's research focuses on topics on Plato's moral and political thought, from the nature of virtue and the role of the emotions in moral development, to difficult interpretive questions about justice. In addition, she has done significant work on Hellenistic philosophy, especially on Roman Stoics such as Epictetus and Cicero.

Michelle Kosch is a recent Columbia Ph.D. who works in nineteenth-century Continental philosophy, specializing in the thought of the Danish thinker, Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard has remained a somewhat curious figure, apparently standing outside the major traditions of philosophical thought and seeming almost inaccessible to contemporary philosophy. By placing Kierkegaard within the context of post-Kantian debates about the nature of freedom and acutely and insightfully analyzing his ideas, Kosch brings out what is philosophically interesting in his thought. Professor Kosch will also support the Department's offerings in twentieth-century Continental philosophy, as well as social and political philosophy and feminist theory.

Jason Stanley joins the Department as a tenured associate professor after spending several years teaching at Cornell. His appointment will go a long way to meeting critical departmental needs in philosophy of language. Widely held to be among the most promising researchers at his career stage in the world in this important philosophical area, Stanley is also an exciting teacher who brings extraordinary energy and enthusiasm to engaging students and colleagues in philosophy as a vital collaborative activity. He works on a wide range of issues in philosophy of language, and his ideas challenge contemporary orthodoxies concerning, for example, the semantic content of names and of language more generally. Stanley's philosophical approach is notable for its strong foundation in empirical linguistics. He and Richmond Thomason form a strong bridge between these two important areas at Michigan.

With these new arrivals, we must also mark two departures. Stephen Everson, who had taught ancient philosophy at Michigan since 1994, resigned just before last year to take a position at York University. We wish Stephen well as he returns to his native England. And David Hills, known to many years of Michigan students, graduate and undergraduate, as a mainstay of the Michigan department, left this past January to relocate for personal reasons. At a going-away party, we gave David a first edition of the only novel by one of his favorite writers, the German poet, Rainer-Maria Rilke.

Several of our faculty won awards and honors during this past year. For the second year in a row, a Michigan philosopher has been elected Vice-President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, to assume the position of President the year following. Last year's Vice-President, and this year's President, was Lawrence Sklar. This year's Vice-President is Allan Gibbard, and he will assume the presidency next year.

Larry Sklar also won an appointment to the Institute for the Humanities for 2000-2001, where he will be exploring how, over an extended time period, foundational theories in science can evolve in ways that affect our understanding of what a scientific explanation consists in and what constitutes a satisfactory scientific theory.

Last year, Kendall Walton was named the Charles L. Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy. Stevenson, a member of the Michigan Department from 1946 to 1977, was a leading figure in ethics and aethetics. This September 26 he will give a lecture to inaugurate the chair, "In Other Shoes." If you can be in Ann Arbor, come to the Rackham Amphitheatre at 4 pm for a fascinating discussion of empathy and its relevance to aesthetics. Collegiate Professor positions are awarded by the College of LS&A as a high honor to faculty. In addition to Walton, the Department also claims one in Larry Sklar, who is the William Frankena Collegiate Professor. And, as of September, we will gain another, when Stephen Darwall becomes the John Dewey Collegiate Professor. (Dewey spent almost ten years as a member of the Michigan Philosophy Department, from 1884-1888 and from 1889 until he left for the University of Chicago in 1894.

The University's highest honor is the Distinguished University Professorship, of which there are approximately twenty throughout the entire University. This year, Allan Gibbard, who has been the Richard Brandt Distinguished University Professor since 1994, was honored by the Provost at a luncheon given for all of Michigan's University Professors. All in all, this means that in a department that numbers only nineteen total faculty, there are four Collegiate and University Professors. In addition, the Department awards its own named chair: the James B. and Grace J. Nelson Professorship. Last year Edwin Curley and Peter Railton were both named Nelson Professors of Philosophy.

Last year marked the first year of the Marshall M. Weinberg Distinguished Visiting Professor in Philosophy. Made possible by a generous gift from Marshall Weinberg, the Professorships enable us to bring first-rate philosophers to campus for a semester. This is a great boon for both our students and our faculty, and since the Weinberg Professors give a presentation to a wide university audience, it also helps to raise the profile of philosophy on the campus. The lecture by last year's Weinberg Professor, Charles Travis of the University of Stirling, "Philosophy's Twentieth Century: A Revolutionary Path" was a fascinating retrospective on the eve of the millennium. We were especially pleased that Marshall was able to be there to enjoy the event with us. (We are including the text in this issue of Michigan Philosophy News so that you can enjoy it too.)

Next winter, we will have our second Weinberg Visiting Professor, Adam Morton of Bristol University in England. Professor Morton has written widely in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind and is also currently interested in issues in the theory of decision.

Last year's reception for graduating philosophy concentrators was a grand affair, as usual. Michael Seaton was awarded the William Frankena prize for excellence in the philosophy concentration. Michael, who punctuated his philosophical study with travels in Alaska, also wrote an honors thesis, "Interpretation and Reference," a critical discussion of a number of issues in the philosophy of language, with special attention to Davidson's views and the causal theory of reference. Honors theses were also written by Garth Heutel, Daniel Wachter, and Jonathan Yeasting. And this year's Haller prizes, awarded to the best papers submitted in undergraduate philosophy classes, went to Seth Yalcin and Grace Lim.

Also on the undergraduate front, we significantly enhanced our concentration requirements and instituted a new Philosophy minor. Beginning this fall, Philosophy concentrators will be required to take an upper-level seminar restricted to undergraduates in addition to an advanced-level course that also includes graduate students. We have also improved the structure of prerequisites to add greater overall coherence to the concentration. The new Philosophy minor is part of a new LS&A initiative to allow students to do serious and structured work in a second area. Since philosophy is so fruitfully pursued in relation to other disciplines, many of our students have already been doing that as double concentrators. In creating the new minor, we are hoping to attract even more students to the serious study of philosophy. In addition to a scaled-back version of the concentration (General Philosophy), there will be four other Philosophy minors, each with a special focus: History of Philosophy, Mind and Meaning, Moral and Political Philosophy, and Asian and Comparative Philosophy. We are really excited by these new developments in our undergraduate programs. Many thanks to former students and friends who answered our call for advice in last year's MPN. It was very helpful in our deliberations.

Last year was also a great year in the graduate program. Completed dissertations were successfully defended by Karen Bennett, Jeanine Diller, Craig Duncan, and Richard Schoonhoven. On the job market, Karen Bennett accepted both a tenure-track position at Princeton along with a post-doctoral fellowship at the prestigious Philosophy Program in the Research School of Social Science at the Australian National University, where she will be in alternate years. Laura Schroeter also accepted a post-doctoral fellowship at ANU. It is a remarkable achievement for the Michigan Philosophy Department to have had two of its students win these prestigious fellowships (not to mention, the added plum of a position at Princeton). This year, for the second year in a row, a Michigan Ph.D. will be starting a new position at Stanford, as Nadeem Hussain returns to Palo Alto where he was an undergraduate. Also, Richard Schoonhoven is taking up a position on the Philosophy faculty at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. In addition, Jeanine Diller assumes a visiting position at Hope College. Finally, we are very pleased that Marc Kelley and Craig Duncan will be joining our teaching staff at Michigan for the year.

Prominent among graduate students winning honors this past year were Andrea Westlund and Katie McShane, who won Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowships. These are awarded by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation to support dissertation work in areas concerning ethics and values. About six or so are given out nationally to graduate students in philosophy. Katie is working on foundational issues in environmental ethics, and Andrea is addressing issues of autonomy, accountability, and independence in ethics and moral psychology, with special attention to aspects relating to gender. In intra-university competitions, Charles Goodman won appointment to the Institute for the Humanities for 2000-2001 as a graduate student fellow, where he will be pursuing a fascinating project on metaphysics and Buddhism. And Kevin Toh won a Rackham Pre-doctoral Fellowship to support his dissertation work in the philosophy of law. Finally, Charles Goodman won the Department's Charles Stevenson Prize for the outstanding candidacy dossier of 1999-2000, and Karen Bennett received the John Dewey Prize for outstanding teaching by a Philosophy graduate student.

Sam Ruhmkorff, Evan Kirchhoff, and Robert Gressis organized the 2000 Spring Colloquium on analytical feminism, which featured presentations by Louise Antony of the University of North Carolina, Adele Mercier of Queen's University (Canada), and Ann Cudd of the University of Kansas. The graduate student commentators were Sam Ruhmkorff, Andrea Westlund, and  Peter Vranas.

In addition to the Spring Colloquium, we also had our usual rich array of philosophical events: two weeklong Nelson-Philosopher-in-Residence visits (Harry Frankfurt of Princeton and James Higginbotham of Oxford and USC), the Tanner Lecture and Symposium, and frequent talks, including: John Hare, Kit Fine, Jennifer Saul, John Gibbons, Michele Moody-Adams, Robert Brandom, J.B. Schneewind (who also visited the Institute for the Humanities for two weeks), Peter Godfrey-Smith, and David Brink. The Tanner Lecture was delivered by Helen Vendler, the eminent poetry critic from Harvard University. Her lecture, "Poetry and the Mediation of Value: Whitman on Lincoln," was a thoughtful reflection on the interplay between ethical, aesthetic, and political values in Whitman's poems on Lincoln. The Symposium included comments by Mark Neely, the leading biographer of Lincoln, Kenneth Fuchs, a composer and musicologist who has written music that was inspired by Whitman, and Vivan Pollack, a literary theorist and critic who has written about Whitman.

I hope you will enjoy "Philosophy's Twentieth Century: A Revolutionary Path?," by our first Weinberg Visiting Professor, Charles Travis, which follows. When one looks back over the century of philosophy of Michigan, the view is quite amazing. We are all very lucky to have been a part of it. I look forward to your continued interest in the Department as we begin a new century, and am very grateful for all your help and support.

Sincerely,

Stephen Darwall
Chair

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