Philosophy News - St. George

October 2020 Departmental e-News

The past six months have passed in a whirlwind, but they’ve been incredibly productive and successful for the department! Take a look at a recap of our biggest news since March in issue 12 of the Department of Philosophy e-News. Accidentally missing from the announcements in the e-bulletin is another … Read More

Brendan de Kenessey Writes on Bad People’s Suffering in Washington Post

Published: October 13, 2020

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A long-standing philosophical controversy deals with whether it is ever good in itself for bad people to suffer. In a recent Washington Post opinion piece, Professor Brendan de Kenessey took President Donald Trump’s recent diagnosis with COVID-19 as an entryway into the discussion, ultimately differentiating between wishing suffering on someone … Read More

From Aristotle Contest to Dialexicon: An Interview with Elizabeth Zhu

Published: August 10, 2020

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Elizabeth Zhu is a name to remember. Last year, as a 16-year-old Grade 11 student, Elizabeth genuinely impressed the judges with her submission to the 2019 Aristotle Contest, an annual essay-writing competition co-hosted between U of T’s Department of Philosophy and OPTA, the Ontario Philosophy Teachers’ Association. The adjudicating committee … Read More

Our Two Latest PhDs: Julia Smith and Manish Oza

Published: July 31, 2020

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Heartfelt congratulations to two more of our exceptional grad students who recently defended their doctoral dissertations: Julia Smith successfully passed her defense on Wednesday, July 22. Her thesis, titled “Unacknowledged Permissivism,” had been supervised by Jennifer Nagel. Today, on July 31, Manish Oza joined the ranks of freshly minted PhDs, … Read More

Mark Kingwell’s Book on Boredom Wins MEA Award

Published: June 22, 2020

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Congratulations to Mark Kingwell, whose Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019) won the Media Ecology Association’s (MEA) 2020 Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Social Interaction. The prize recognizes outstanding work published in book form that focuses on social situations, symbolic … Read More

Our Latest PhDs: Mason Westfall & Evan Taylor

Published: June 19, 2020

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This week, two more graduate students in the department successfully defended their doctoral dissertations: Mason Westfall‘s (pictured) “Understanding Minds: Essays on Social Cognition” passed the committee without changes on Monday, June 15. Evan Taylor followed suit on Friday, June 19, defending his thesis entitled “Knowledge and Anxious Thought,” also as … Read More