Welcome to the 2024-25 Academic Year at Berkeley! 2024-08-21

Philosophy at Berkeley is thriving. It is with great excitement that we welcome Professor Daniel Viehoff as our newest faculty member. We have an impressive cohort of new graduate students joining us too: Sarah Cohen, Emily Fox-Penner, Burçe Gümüşlü, Fanyi Jiang, Reid Kurashige, Cindy Xin, as well as Adam Lesnikowski, Lucy Horowitz and Esme Weil, who are students in the Program in Logic and Methodology of Science

A warm welcome also to the visiting scholars and also visiting student researchers who join us at the invitation of our faculty and who bring energy and invention to our community. This year we are joined by the visiting student researchers Eve-Aline Dubois, Desa Valeska Martin, Lukas Naegli, Marta Perez-Verdugo, Filippa Ronquist, Gabriel Siegel, Simon Stromer, and Alice Wright, as well as by the visiting scholars David Builes, Alexander Dinges, Dominic Hughes, Yun Tang, Isaac Wilhelm, and Julia Zakkou. Carolyn Dicey Jennings, who is professor of philosophy at our sister campus UC Merced, will be visiting as well this year. — Welcome to you all!

We also bid farewell to members who are moving on. Four of our PhD student graduated last spring: Mathias Boehm, Tyler Haddow, Guillaume Massas, and Sven Neth. Professor Tim Clarke, our dear colleague, has left Berkeley to take up a position in the Philosophy Department at Yale. It is also with a heavy heart that we mourn the recent death of Alvin Goldman, who has been with us as a Distinguished Research Associate since 2019.

There have also been transitions in the department office. Our new manager Bill Dellinger has taken up the reigns after the departure, after 15 years of dedicated service, of Maura Vrydaghs. And JD Hoyt is our new graduate student affairs officer, effective last spring.

We have a busy year of colloquia and special lectures, reading groups, and conferences, to look forward to this academic year. Information about some of these can be found on the department web site here: https://philosophy.berkeley.edu/events. I look forward to see you at these important events.

– Alva Noë, Chair

News: Faculty Book Notes 2024-08-21

John Campbell and co-authors Saul Perlmutter and Robert MacCoun have a new book Third Millennium Thinking: Making Sense in a World of Nonsense (Little, Brown and Spark, 2024).)

Niko Kolodny’s book Pecking Order: Social Hierarchy as a Philosophical Problem is now out with Harvard (2023).

Paolo Mancosu and his coauthor Massimo Mugnai have recently published their new Syllogistic Logic and Mathematical Proof (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Alva Noë’s most recent book The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (Princeton, 2023) has been named the winner of the Outstanding Monograph Prize of the American Society for Aesthetics. A paperback version of the book is due out in February 2025.

Alvin Goldman (1938-2024) 2024-08-15

It is with great sadness that we share the news that Alvin Goldman, who has been a Distinguished Research Associate in the Berkeley Philosophy Department since 2019, has died. A philosopher of international importance, he was a lively and admired presence in our philosophical community. He will be sorely missed. (Here is a link to a memorial notice at Rutgers University, where Professor Goldman worked until his retirement in 2018.)