Arina Pismenny critiques cultural myths about romantic love, such as the “soulmate” narrative, and encourages a more realistic, inclusive, and nuanced understanding of love’s complexities.
Read more "Arina Pismenny, “How to think differently about love.” Psyche."
Arina Pismenny argues that romantic jealousy is rational or fitting when it responds to a real threat to the lover’s privileged status with the beloved. In polyamorous relationships, differing norms raise the thresholds for what counts as a “threat” or “rival” compared to monogamous contexts.
Read more "Arina Pismenny, “When is Jealousy Appropriate?” Dialectica."
John Biro and Harvey Siegel critique the pragma-dialectical account of argumentation, arguing that its reliance on speech act theory fails to address the core tension between reasonableness and convincingness in argumentative discourse. By showing that these qualities vary independently, the authors suggest that the framework cannot resolve its central theoretical challenge.
Jack Madock critiques prominent theories of the impermissibility of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) by demonstrating contradictions when applied to ideal warfare scenarios, where AWS achieve the best possible outcomes. He also examines the future role of AI in warfare and its ethical challenges.
Congratulations to Marcus Davis, who was recently awarded both two Dissertation Fellowships and a Teaching Award, and also earned runner-up honors in UF’s Three-Minute Thesis competition!
Rusong Huang defends an inferentialist account of proper names within Robert Brandom’s framework, addressing objections from Russellian and Millian perspectives: that inferentialism collapses into a description theory and that proper names lack conceptual content as meaningless tags.
Read more "Rusong Huang, “An Inferentialist Account of Proper Names.” Studia Semiotyczne."
James Simpson addresses the challenge concessive knowledge attributions (CKAs) pose to fallibilism, given their apparent infelicity. By examining and refining two prominent responses—Patrick Rysiew’s pragmatic strategy and Jason Stanley’s semantic strategy—he argues that fallibilists can resolve the issue: either the pragmatic strategy succeeds, or, if it fails, the semantic strategy succeeds, showing that CKAs are not a grave problem for fallibilism.
According to the dogmatism puzzle, if a person knows something, then they are entitled to disregard any evidence against it. Various forms of the puzzle have been raised, but here James Simpson argues that all of them rest on a false assumption, namely that if a person knows something, they also know that any evidence against it is misleading.
Read more "James Simpson, “The Dogmatism Puzzle Undone.” Analytic Philosophy."
Hunter Gentry and Cameron Buckner argue that we should replace the distinction between episodic and semantic memory with a more dynamic conception of the life cycle of memories that allows one to gradually shade into the other.
The Florida Undergraduate Law Review is a student-run publication at UF, dedicated to fostering a dynamic and inclusive forum for undergraduate students passionate about law. They published their first issue in Spring 2024.
Read more "Philosophy Students Help Establish Florida Undergraduate Law Review"
Arina Pismenny and her co-authors develop a taxonomy of emotional injustice: what occurs when the treatment of emotions is unjust, or emotions are used to treat people unjustly. They describe seven classes of emotional injustice, and explain why it is useful to distinguish them and also to subsume them under a single concept.
Read more "Arina Pismenny, Gen Eickers, and Jesse Prinz, “Emotional Injustice.” Ergo."
Shadi Heidarifar argues that there is a bidirectional relationship between gender-based social norms and gender-segregated education policies that excludes girls from knowledge production within the Iranian school system.
Chris Dorst argues that Pragmatic Humeanism undercuts the motivation for treating a low-entropy initial boundary condition of the universe (the “Past Hypothesis”) as a law of nature.
Read more "Chris Dorst, “Does the Best System Need the Past Hypothesis?” Philosophy of Science."
The Undergraduate Philosophy Society (PhilSoc) meets weekly to discuss all sorts of topics in philosophy. The club officers invite you to learn more about it here!
Read more "PhilSoc: The UF Undergraduate Philosophy Society"
Arina Pismenny uses the example of pansexuality to argue that our sexual orientation categories ought to be revised for both epistemic and normative reasons.
Read more "Arina Pismenny, “Pansexuality: A Closer Look at Sexual Orientation.” Philosophies."
Dr. Duncan Purves (UF) articulates a pressing concern about bias in predictive policing in a recent blog post for the Stockholm Centre’s Public Ethics Blog.
James Simpson argues that dreaming worlds are not nearby possible worlds, suggesting that such possibilities cannot be used as legitimate grounds for skepticism.
Chris Dorst and Kevin Dorst argue that the fine-tuning of fundamental constants provides subtle reasons to support the hypothesis that the universe was designed, at least for agents like us who are not ideally rational.
John Biro argues that we should include composite objects in our ontology on the basis of their necessity in certain causal explanations. He goes on to argue that composition is not identity.
Read more "John Biro, “Two notes on Composition.” Metaphysica."
Amber Ross argues that the epistemic relation between layperson and expert can serve as a blueprint for evaluating under what conditions it would be ethical to accept opacity in AI decision making.
Arina Pismenny and Berit Brogaard’s edited volume explores the moral dimensions of love through the lenses of political philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.
Duncan Purves argues that there are two overlooked normative factors that are essential to a full assessment of the moral permissibility of predictive policing: fairness in the social distribution of the benefits and burdens of policing as well as the distinctive role of consent in determining fair distribution.
Jeremy Davis, Duncan Purves, Juan Gilbert, and Schuyler Sturm’s recent paper synthesizes scholarship from several academic disciplines to identify and analyze five major ethical challenges facing data-driven policing.
Stewart Duncan’s new book explores how a series of seventeenth-century philosophers tried to address the question of whether or not humans are purely material beings.
Read more "Stewart Duncan, Materialism from Hobbes to Locke. Oxford University Press."
Dr. John Biro argues against Davidson’s paratactic account of indirect speech, as in the example, “Galileo said that the Earth moves.”
Chris Dorst argues that the quantum measurement problem dissolves on a Humean conception of laws of nature.
Read more "Chris Dorst, “There is no measurement problem for Humeans.” Noûs."
Stewart Duncan investigates Locke’s views about materialism by comparing Locke’s arguments with those of Descartes and Cudworth. These comparisons shed light on Locke’s views about the causation of perfection and the nature of superaddition.
Graduate student James Simpson surveys a variety of closure principles of epistemic justification before proposing a novel multi-premise closure principle that cannot be used in Cartesian skeptical arguments.
Read more "James Simpson, “Getting a little closure for closure.” Synthese."
Kelly Trogdon and Gene Witmer argue for a definition of full grounding in terms of partial grounding, contrary to the current consensus in the literature.
Dr. Arina Pismenny uses the model of emotional rationality to argue that romantic love is not essentially moral in nature.
Dr. Rodrigo Borges introduces a special issue of Synthese on “post-Gettier” approaches to knowledge and justification.
In an editor’s introduction to a special issue, Dr. Ross and her collaborator Dr. Matthen explore several puzzle cases for the view of perception embraced by European philosophers of the modern period.
In a recent paper, Dr. Borges argues that inferential knowledge requires knowing all the propositions that knowledge depends on.
John Palmer’s latest publication is a book in the Cambridge Elements in Ancient Philosophy series
With comprehensive course offerings and faculty with expertise in a wide variety of areas, UF is an exciting place to pursue graduate studies in philosophy.
Assistant Professor of Philosophy Duncan Purves has received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the ethics of using artificial intelligence to assist police officers in anticipating crime before it happens.
Read more "Dr. Purves Awarded NSF Grant to Study Ethics of Predictive Policing"