Department Chair
Director of Graduate Studies:
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Office Administrator
Address
Philosophy Department
111 Furman Hall
Vanderbilt University
Nashville TN 37240
Phone
(615) 322-2637
Fax
(615)343-7259
Welcome
The Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt University offers BA and PhD degrees. Faculty research spans the major areas of philosophical inquiry and reflects a variety of methodological and metaphilosophical commitments; this breadth is represented in the Department’s course offerings. The Department hosts a regular Philosophy Colloquium and a Social and Political Thought Workshop, both of which bring distinguished philosophers from around the world to Vanderbilt. Informal reading groups and workshops are organized by graduate students and often involve participation from students and faculty alike. Every student admitted to our PhD Program receives full funding, and our program is designed to be completed in five years. Recent placement data can be found here.
Department News and Announcements
David Miguel Gray has won the 2012 William James Prize for his paper on “Racial Norms: A Reinterpretation of Du Bois' 'The Conservation of Races’.” The paper will be the subject of a symposium session at the Eastern APA, December 2012
Robert Talisse will participate as a critic in an author meets critics session devoted to Paul Weithman’s recent book, Why Political Liberalism?, at the Eastern APA, December 2012
Kelly Oliver's book Animal Lessons was selected for an
Author Meets Critics session at SPEP, November 2012.
Robert Talisse will deliver a paper to the Philosophy
Colloquium of the University of Southern Mississippi, November 2012
John Lachs will deliver the keynote address at the International Santayana Conference in Rome, October 2012
Michael Hodges will deliver a paper on Santayana’s “Realm of Truth” at the International Santayana Conference in Rome, October 2012
Kelly Oliver's latest book, Knock me up, Knock me down: Images of
Pregnancy in Hollywood Film will be published by Columbia University Press
in October 2012
Marilyn Friedman will host the
2012 meeting of The Society for
Analytical Feminism, at Vanderbilt, October 2012
Robert Talisse will be the keynote speaker at the Pluralism, Democracy, and the American Spirit conference at Elon University, October 2012
Kelly Oliver will speak at a keynote panel she organized on Kristeva's Severed Heads at the Kristeva Circle, Sienna College, October 2012
Michael Hodges will deliver a lecture to the Philosophy Department of Western Carolina University, October 2012
Marilyn Friedman will present a paper at the conference Relational Autonomy: Ten Years On, at McGill University, September 2012
Larry May will deliver a paper at the Oxford Institute on Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, September 2012
Kelly Oliver will give a lecture
entitled "Twilight Family Values" at the University of Alberta,
September 2012
Robert Talisse’s book, Democracy
and Moral Conflict, will be the subject of a day-long colloquium at the Felician Center for Ethics, September 2012
Idit Dobbs-Weinstein will present a paper on Gersonides at the XIII International Congress of Medieval Philosophy, Munich-Freising, August 2012
Kelly Oliver will give a lecture entitled Women as Weapons of War? at The University of Cape Town, South Africa, June 2012
Larry May has just published After War Ends with Cambridge University Press. It was the subject of a roundtable discussion Peace Palace in The Hague, May 2012
Robert Talisse delivered a keynote lecture at the Democracy, Legality, and Policy conference at Tilburg University in May 2012
Idit Dobbs-Weinstein was a plenary speaker at the 5th International Critical Theory Conference in Rome, May 2012
Lenn Goodman presented a paper “The Song of Songs: God and Israel as Lovers” to the University of Chicago Divinity Seminar, April 2012
David Gray delivered a paper entitled “HOT: Keeping up Appearances?” on the main program of the Pacific APA conference, April 2012
Larry May presented a paper to the Law and Philosophy Workshop at University of California at Berkeley, April 2012
John Lachs was listed in The Princeton Review’s Best 300 Professors, April 2012
Lenn Goodman delivered the Atwood Lecture at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI on “Evolution and Faith,” April 2012
Lisa Guenther was a keynote speaker at Goucher College’s 9th Annual Undergraduate Philosophy Conference, April 2012
Larry May was a PPL Visiting Scholar at SUNY Binghamton, April 2012
Kelly Oliver won the 2012 Mentoring Award presented by the Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center, March 2012
David Wood discussed his work on time with a seminar held by the New Temporalities Mellon Research Group at Brown University, March 2012
Marilyn Friedman presented “Authenticity and Jewish Self-Hatred” at a workshop on Self-Government and Social Transformation at the University of California Davis, March 2012
Robert Talisse was an invited speaker at the 15th Annual Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference in March 2012
Jeffrey Tlumak delivered a Berry Lecture in Public Philosophy, “Do We Have Free Will? Why Does It Matter?,” at Vanderbilt, March 2012
David Wood gave the keynote lecture (“Still Life?”) and made an art installation at the Fifth Annual Stony Brook in Manhattan Philosophy & Art Conference and Exhibition, March 2012
Marilyn Friedman delivered a Berry Lecture in Public Philosophy, “Can Bad People Live Well?,” at Vanderbilt, March 2012
Lenn Goodman participated in a Templeton meeting on Special Divine Action at Oxford University, March 2012
Larry May was an invited speaker at the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law, March 2012
There was a workshop devoted to Robert Talisse’s book Democracy and Moral Conflict (Cambridge, 2009) at Eastern Kentucky University, March 2012
Kelly Oliver spoke at the University of Arizona and at Utah Valley State University about her forthcoming book on images of pregnancy in Hollywood film, February 2012
David Wood launched the second series of Thinking Outside the Box philosophical conversations at the Nashville Public Library, February 2012
Lenn Goodman delivered the Snuggs Lecture at the University of Tulsa, February 2012
John Lachs delivered the inaugural Berry Lecture in Public Philosophy, “Why is Good Enough not Good Enough for Us?,” at Vanderbilt, February 2012
Marilyn Friedman presented “Unequal Consenters and Political Illegitimacy” on the main program of the Central APA conference, February 2012
David Wood presented an invited paper, “Kierkegaard Vivant,” at the Austin J. Fagothey, SJ Philosophy Conference at Santa Clara University, February 2012
Lisa Guenther presented her research on solitary confinement at a Café Scientifique organized the Canadian Institute for Health Research in Halifax, Nova Scotia, January 2012
Robert Talisse presented a paper on “Impunity and Domination” at Felician College in New Jersey, January 2012
Lisa Guenther’s essay, “Resisting Agamben: The biopolitics of shame and humiliation” was published in Philosophy and Social Criticism, January 2012
Kelly Oliver spoke on Derrida and the Death Penalty at the MLA conference in Seattle and at the University of Alberta, January 2012
John Lachs’s new book, Stoic Pragmatism, has just been published with Indiana University Press (2012)
Jose Medina holds the Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at the Carlos III University in Madrid for academic year 2011-2012
Robert Talisse's book, Pluralism and Liberal Politics, has just been published with Routledge (2012)
Lucius Outlaw delivered the 2011 Dewey Lecture at the Eastern APA, “Reconstructions in Academic Philosophy,” December 2011
Kelly Oliver's book, Women as Weapons of War was the subject of an Author Meets Critics session at the Eastern APA, December 2011
Larry May delivered the 2011 Presidential Address to the American Society for Value Inquiry at the Eastern APA, December 2011
The October 2011 issue of the journal Metaphilosophy contains a symposium on Robert Talisse's essay, “Towards a New Pragmatist Politics”
David Wood presented the Keynote Address on “Animal Architects” at London Metropolitan University's Animal Gaze Returned conference, October 2011
Larry May's book, Genocide: A Normative Account (Cambridge, 2011) has been reviewed in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse’s book Reasonable Atheism (Prometheus, 2011) has been reviewed in the Philosophers’ Magazine
Kelly Oliver delivered a plenary lecture entitled “The Plight of Ethics” at the 50th Anniversary meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy on October 2011
Marilyn Friedman delivered a lecture entitled “Jewish Self-Hatred in the Debates over Israeli Policies toward Palestinians” at the Public Philosophy Conference in Washington, DC, October 2011
Kelly Oliver delivered a plenary lecture entitled “Derrida and the Death Penalty” at the annual meeting of The Semiotic Society, October 2011
Kelly Oliver’s “Pet Lovers, Pathologized” appeared on The New York Times’s online column, “The Stone,” October 2011
David Wood presented a paper “Is it Time for Art?” at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Edinburgh), September 2011
Kelly Oliver delivered a plenary address at the Spindel Conference in Memphis, entitled “See Topsy ‘Ride the Lightning’: The Scopic Machinery of Death.” September 2011
Robert Talisse delivered the 2011 Constitution Day Lecture in September at Florida Atlantic University, September 2011
Lenn Goodman keynoted at the Shalem Center's conference in Jerusalem, the title of his address was “The Song of Songs: God's Love of Israel,” June 2011
Scott Aikin's book, Epistemology and the Regress Problem (Routledge, 2010) has been reviewed in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews and also in Logos & Episteme.
Last fall's Leiter Reports' poll ranking journals in the History of Philosophy that publish in more than one period rated Jeffrey Tlumak's History of Philosophy Quarterly 6th best, only behind (1-5) Journal of the History of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie.