Department of Philosophy

Faculty Achievements

Harry Brighouse

  • The UW-Madison chapter of Phi Beta Kappa presented him with their Excellence in Teaching Award in 2023.
  • Harry Brighouse was recently awarded a WARF named chair, as the Mildred Fish Harnack Professor of Philosophy of Education.
  • His book, edited with Michael McPherson, The Aims of Higher Education: Problems of Morality and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) won the 2017 Frederick Ness Book Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for the book that contributed most the the understanding and practice of liberal education
  • His newest book  is Educational Goods: Values and Evidence in Educational Decisionmaking (University of Chicago Press, 2018), written with Helen Ladd, Susanna Loeb, and Adam Swift. 
  • His previous book (with Adam Swift), Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships, (Princeton University Press, 2014) is the subject of special issues of the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, and Law, Ethics and Philosophy
  • He’s currently directing the Center for Ethics and Education (link to our webpage: http://ethicsandeducation.wceruw.org/)

Emily Fletcher

  • “Plato on Incorrect and Deceptive Pleasures,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 100.4 (2018), 379-410.
  • “Two Platonic Criticisms of Pleasure,” in Pleasure: A History, ed. Lisa Shapiro, (2018, OUP), 15-41.
  • “The Divine Method and the Disunity of Pleasure in the Philebus,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 55.2 (2017), 179-208.
  • “Aisthēsis, Reason and Appetite in the Timaeus,” Phronesis 61 (2016), 397-434.
  • Loeb Classical Library Foundation Research Fellowship, Spring 2015
  • “Plato on Pure Pleasure and the Best Life,” Phronesis 59 (2014), 113-142.

Paula Gottlieb

  • Aristotle’s Ethics: Nicomachean and Eudemian Themes, Elements in Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, June 2022.
  • Aristotle on Thought and Feeling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
  • Awarded a major fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities to complete my book Aristotle on Thought and Feeling with Cambridge University Press.
  • Entry on Aristotle on Non-Contradiction for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the web, last revised 2019, next revision, 2023. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-noncontradiction)
  • “Aristotle on Self-Knowledge” in Self-Knowledge in Ancient Philosophy: The Eighth Keeling Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy ed. Fiona Leigh, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, chapter 6.
  • With Elliott Sober, “Nature does Nothing in Vain”, the Journal of the History of the Philosophy of Science (HOPOS), VII 2, 2017, 246-271.
  • “Aristotle on Inequality of Wealth” in Democracy, Justice and Equality in Ancient Greece: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives ed. Georgios Anagnastopoulos and Gerasimos Santas, Springer, 2018, 257-68.
  • “Aristotelian Feelings in the Rhetoric” in Virtue, Happiness and Knowledge: Themes from the work of Gail Fine and Terence Irwin, ed., D. Brink, S. Meyer, and C. Shields, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2018, 169-83.
  • “Virtue of Character in Aristotle’s Nicomachean versus Eudemian Ethics” for Selected Essays from the 2021 Symposium on the Heritage of Western Greece, Parnassos Press: Fonte Aretusa, 2022.
  • Elected Central Divisional Representative for the American Philosophical Association, 2012-15.

Paul Kelleher

  • Elected as Fellow of the Hastings Center in 2018.

John Mackay

  • Modal Interpretation of Tense in Subjunctive Conditionals forthcoming, Semantics and Pragmatics (final version will be uploaded shortly)
  • Subjunctive Conditionals’ Local Contexts forthcoming, Linguistics and Philosophy (final version will be uploaded shortly)
  • Past Tense and Past Times in Subjunctive Conditionals Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 98.S1 (2017), 520-535.
  • Explaining the Actuality Operator Away Philosophical Quarterly 67.269 (2017), 709-729.
  • Actuality and Fake Tense in Conditionals Semantics and Pragmatics 8.12 (2015), 1-12.
  • Quantifying over Possibilities Philosophical Review 122.4 (2013), 577-617.

Farid Masrour

  • “Consciousness and Unity: Groundwork for a Comprehensive Account.” Forthcoming In Oxford Studies In Consciousness, ed., Uriah Kriegel, Oxford: OUP.
  • “Space Perception, Visual Dissonance and the Fate of Standard Representationalism.” Nous (2016): (Early View, 1–29 doi: 10.1111/nous.12139
  • “Revisiting the Empirical Case Against Perceptual Modularity.” Frontiers in Psychology 6(2015): 1676. (with Nirshberg, G., Schon, M., Leardi, J., & Barrett, E)
  • “The Geometry of Visual Space and the Nature of Visual Experience.” Philosophical Studies 172 (7) (2015): 1813-1832
  • Harvard University Mind-Brain-Behavior Fellowship Award, 2013

James Messina

  • Vilas Associates Award (2019)
  • “Kant’s Stance on the Relationalist-Substantivalist Debate and its Justification.” Journal of the History of Philosophy (2018)
  • “Looking for Laws in all the Wrong Spaces: Kant on Laws, the Understanding, and Space.” European Journal of Philosophy 26 (2017): 589–613
  • “Kant’s Necessitation Account of Laws and the Nature of Natures,” in Kant and the Laws of Nature, edited by Michela Massimi and Angela Breitenbach (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
  • Chosen for the 2016 The Philosopher’s Annual (I was selected for my 2015 paper, “Conceptual Analysis and the Essence of Space: Kant’s Metaphysical Exposition Revisited”)
  • “Kant on the Unity of Space and the Synthetic Unity of Apperception.” Kant-Studien 105:1 (2014): 5-40

Steven Nadler

  • The Good Cartesian: Louis de La Forge and the Rise of a Philosophical Paradigm (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2024)
  • Why Read Maimonides Today? (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2024)

Anat Schechtman

  • Vilas Associate Award, 2021-2023
  • Humboldt Foundation Fellowship, 2021-2022
  • The Philosopher’s Annual selected “Three Infinities in Early Modern Philosophy” as “one of the ten best articles published in philosophy” in 2019
  • Visiting Faculty at Harvard University, 2016-2017
  • The Philosopher’s Annual selected “Substance and Independence in Descartes” as “one of the ten best articles published in philosophy” in 2016
  • The Philosopher’s Annual selected “Descartes’ Argument for the Existence of the Idea of an Infinite Being” as “one of the ten best articles published in philosophy” in 2014
  • ACLS Fellowship, 2014-15

Larry Shapiro

  • Received a WARF named professorship: Berent Enç Professor of Philosophy (2021).
  • When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves, with Steven Nadler (Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
  • Visiting Scholar, La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia), January 2017.
  • The Miracle Myth: Why Belief in the Resurrection and the Supernatural Is Unjustified (Columbia University Press, 2016).
  • The Multiple Realization Book, with Thomas Polger (Oxford University Press, 2016).
  • The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition (ed., Routledge Press: London, 2014).
  • President, Phi Beta Kappa, UW Alpha Chapter 2011-2014
  • The American Philosophical Association’s Joseph P. Gittler Award for an outstanding contribution in the field of the philosophy of the social sciences for Embodied Cognition, 2013
  • Honored Instructor Award, Spring 2013, Fall 2014, Spring 2014
  • Kellett Mid-Career Award, Spring 2012

Russ Shafer-Landau

  • Organizer, MadMeta
  • Director, Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics
  • President, American Philosophical Association (Central), 2021
  • Living Ethics 2ed (Oxford 2021)
  • The Fundamentals of Ethics 6ed (Oxford 2023)
  • The Ethical Life 6ed (Oxford 2023)
  • Philosophical Methodology: From Data to Theory (Oxford 2022), with John Bengson and Terence Cuneo

Alan Sidelle

  • “Coincidence: The Grounding Problem, Object-Specifying Principles, and Some Consequences,” Philosophical Papers (2016) 497-528.
  • “Frameworks and Deflation in ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’ and Recent Metametaphysics,” in Ontology After Carnap (ed. By Stephan Biatti and Sandra Lapointe, 2016) 59-80
  • “Does Hylomorphism Provide a Distinctive Solution to the Grounding Problem?” Analysis (2014) 397-404

Elliott Sober

  • Elected Fellow of the British Academy, 2020.
  • The Design Argument, published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press.
  • Awarded the Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement by the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the American Philosophical Association in 2017.
  • Ockham’s Razors — A User’s Manual was published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press.
  • Awarded the Carl G. Hempel Award in 2014 by the Philosophy of Science Association for lifetime scholarly achievement in Philosophy of Science.

Mike Titelbaum

  • Keynote speaker, 2018 Formal Epistemology Workshop.
  • “Reason without Reasons For” selected for the 2017 Wisconsin Metaethics Workshop and publication in Oxford Studies in Metaethics.
  • “Rationality’s Fixed Point (Or: In Defense of Right Reason)” awarded the Sanders Prize in Epistemology. Published in Oxford Studies in Epistemology Volume 5. Recognized by The Philosopher’s Annual as one of “the ten best articles published in philosophy” in 2015.
  • Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, Spring 2016.
  • Quitting Certainties: A Bayesian Framework Modeling Degrees of Belief published by Oxford University press in 2013. Winner of the Council of Graduate Schools’ 2014 Gustave O. Arlt Award for best book in the humanities. Honorable Mention for the 2015 American Philosophical Association Book Prize.

Peter Vranas

  • Kellett mid-career award, 2018-2023.
  • “‘Ought’ implies ‘can’ but does not imply ‘must’: An asymmetry between becoming infeasible and becoming overridden.” The Philosophical Review, 127 (2018), 487-514.
  • “I ought, therefore I can obey.” Philosophers’ Imprint, 18, no. 1 (2018), 1-36.
  • “Informative aboutness”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 95 (2017), 354-364.
  • “New foundations for imperative logic III: A general definition of argument validity”, Synthese, 193 (2016), 1703-1753.
  • National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend (2016).

Bruno Whittle

  • “Exceptional Logic.” To appear in the Review of Symbolic Logic.
  • “
Ontological Pluralism and Notational Variance.” To appear in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics.
  • “
Truth and Generalized Quantification.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2019): 340–53.
  • “
Size and Function.” Erkenntnis 83 (2018): 853–73.
  • “
Truth, Hierarchy and Incoherence.” In B. Armour-Garb (ed.), Reflections on the Liar (Oxford University Press, 2017).
  • “Proving Unprovability.” Review of Symbolic Logic 10 (2017): 92–115.