Rotman members were busy during the month of October with new publications, conferences, book reviews, and more. News and updates are listed below in alphabetical order.
- Samantha Brennan presented the keynote address at the Atlantic Region Philosophers Association (ARPA) Annual Conference in Wolfville, Nova Scotia on October 21-22. The theme of this year’s conference was philosophy of childhood, and her talk was titled “Ethics and our early years: Making decisions for children as if childhood really mattered”.
- Samantha Brennan wrote a blog post titled “Wine O’ Clock:” Alcohol and Gender Norms on Impact Ethics.
- The latest issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, Volume 2, Issue 2 (2016), is out. Samantha Brennan served as an editor of the issue, titled “The Challenge of Epistemic Responsibility: Essays in Honour of Lorraine Code”.
- Justin Bzovy presented a talk titled “Some Essentialism Stories” at the Atlantic Region Philosophers Association (ARPA) Annual Conference in Wolfville, Nova Scotia on October 22.
- At the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Western Canadian Philosophical Association, held in conjunction with the inaugural meeting of the Canadian Society for Environmental Philosophy, on October 28-30 at the University of Alberta, Justin Bzovy took part in a panel titled “Sex, Art, and Essentialism: New Perspectives on HPC Kinds”.
- Louis Charland participated in several workshops titled Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID): What You Need to Know. The workshops were sponsored by the Ontario Association for Non-Profit Nursing Homes for Services for Seniors (OANHASS). Louis’ role was to present on Capacity and Consent in Medical Aid in Dying, and to sit on 2 out of 4 panel discussions with Q&A. These events ran the whole day and included physicians and lawyers familiar with MAID from Mt. Sinai Health Systems in Toronto.
- Louis Charland recently published an article on MAID, published by the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health. The article is titled Decision-Making Capacity to Consent to Medical Assistance in Dying for Persons with Mental Disorders, and was co-written with Law Professor Trudo Lemmens from the University of Toronto, and Rotman Post-Doctoral Fellow Kyoko Wada MD MA PhD. The Journal of Ethics in Mental Health will soon be publishing a collection of eight international commentaries on this article, from experts in Europe and the United States.
- A paper by Justin Donhauser, “Theoretical Ecology as Etiological from the Start” was published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences this month.
- Lucas Dunlap was featured in the inaugural post of the Course Spotlight series on the blog of the American Philosophical Association. A course he developed and teaches, called Philosophy and Time Travel, was highlighted in the post. For more on his course, see this post from the Rotman Blog.
- A paper by Lucas Dunlap titled The metaphysics of D-CTCs: On the underlying assumptions of Deutsch׳s quantum solution to the paradoxes of time travel was published in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics.
- Craig Fox attended the 32nd Boulder Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science, titled Gravity: Its History and Philosophy, and gave a talk titled “The Newtonian Equivalence Principle: How the relativity of acceleration led Newton to the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass“.
- A paper co-authored by Mackenzie Graham, Charles Weijer, Adrian Owen, and Lorina Naci from the BMI was recently accepted for publication in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology. The title of the paper is ‘Covert narrative capacity: Preserved mental life in patients thought to lack consciousness.’ The paper reviews a study by Naci and colleagues which showed that some behaviourally non-responsive patients demonstrated a highly similar pattern of neural activation as healthy subjects when watching a suspenseful film, suggesting they had a similar conscious experience. The paper then considers some of the preserved mental capacities that that these patients may retain, based on the result of this study, and how this might be relevant to considerations of their well-being.
- Bill Harper gave a talk titled “Newton’s Scientific Method” at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy on October 24th.
- Benjamin Hill and Henrik Lagerlund were co-editors of a new book, Routledge Companion to Sixteenth Century Philosophy. The Companion includes 27 chapters, written by an international team of scholars, and accessible for both students and researchers.
- Last month, Rotman alumna Molly Kao was profiled on the Université de Montréal website, where she has just begun her new position as an Assistant Professor.
- Adam Koberinski and Doreen Fraser co-authored a paper that appeared in the most recent issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. The paper is titled “The Higgs mechanism and superconductivity: A case study of formal analogies”.
- Jaclyn Lanthier presented a paper titled “Neurobiology and Performativity: Navigating the Politics of Sexual Citizenship” at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Western Canadian Philosophical Association, held in conjunction with the inaugural meeting of the Canadian Society for Environmental Philosophy, on October 28-30 at the University of Alberta.
- Jamie Shaw wrote a review of Ontology after Carnap, by Stephan Blatti and Sandra Lapointe (Eds.), titled Metaontology After Ontology After Carnap.
- Anthony Skelton’s review of The Cosmos of Duty: Henry Sedgwick’s Methods of Ethics by Roger Crisp was published on the NDPR.
- Jessey Wright was one of the recipients of the 2016 American Association of Philosophy Teachers Grant for Innovations in Teaching. The grant was awarded for his project, “A Game-Based Tool for Introducing Philosophy of Science Suitable for All Ages.” For more on his project, see this post from the Rotman Blog.
Pictured above: Molly Kao, from the article about her new position at the Université de Montréal.
