Twenty-third Annual Conference of the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World McDaniel College, Westminster, MD

Schedule of Presentations

Saturday, July 23

  • 4:45-5:45pm “On Becoming Worthy of Victory: Asserting a Natural Place for Philosophy in Global Struggle” – Sanjay Lal, Clayton State University
  • 7:30-8:30pm “Insurrections and the Role of the Philosopher: A Documentary Project” – Daniel Tutt, Marymount University

Sunday, July 24

  • 9-10am “Politics, Solidarity, and the (Dis)Location of Love” – Geoff Pfeifer, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
  • 10-11am “Women’s Reproductive Bodily Integrity, Coercion, and Nie’s Defense of Forced Abortion” – Margaret Betz, West Chester University
  • 11am-12pm “Religion and the ‘Religious’: Cormac McCarthy and John Dewey” - Robert Metcalf, University of Colorado—Denver
  • 2:30-3:30pm “Colonialism and Ressentiment” – José Haro, Borough of Manhattan Community College
  • 3:45-4:45pm “Is Western Morality too WEIRD to Be Universal?” –  Paul Churchill, George Washington University
  • 4:45-5:45pm “The Moral Question Concerning Weapons of War” – David Chan, University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point
  • 8-9pm “The Ethics of Extreme Scarcity, National Socialism, and Heidegger” – George Teschner, Emeritus Professor, Christopher Newport University, and John Woods

Monday July 25

  • 9-10am “Basic Questions of Freedom and Liberty” – Stanley Konecky, Hartwick College
  • 10-11am “Guns and Freedom: Reflections Inspired by DeBrabander’s Do Guns Make us Free?” – Hans Pedersen, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
  • 11am-12pm “The Four Sources of Behavior in Human and Nonhuman Animals” – Caroline Wiseblood Meline, St. Joseph’s University

Tuesday July 26

  • 9-10am “Why Torture Fails: A Reasoned Response to the Ticking Time Bomb” – Jay Lewey, Independent Scholar
  • 10-11am “A Defense of the Presumption Against War” – Jordy Rocheleau, Austin Peay State University
  • 11am-12pm “The Struggle with Empathy” – Ray Kolcaba, Independent Scholar
  • 1:30-2:30pm “Numbering the Poetic: On the Minimal Distance between Heidegger and Badiou” – William Koch, New York City College of Technology, CUNY
  • 2:30-3:30pm GRADUATE STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP PRIZE “Struggling with Alterity: A Dialogue on Oppression and Liberation” – Dominick Cooper and Lindsay Whittaker, Virginia Tech
  • 3:45-4:45pm “Benjamin’s Key: Sudden Experience and the Politicized Work of Art” – Stacy Boedigheimer, Boston College
  • 4:45-5:45pm “The Aporia of Identity and Other Problems with ‘Object-Oriented Ontology’ (Or: Whose Correlationism? Whose Phenomenology?)” – Jeremy Wisnewski, Hartwick College

Wednesday July 27

  • 9-10am “Can We Learn About Real Social Worlds from Fictional Ones?” – Todd Jones, University of Nevada—Las Vegas
  • 10-11am “Philosophical Retrofuturism: Putting the Liberatory Imagination to Work in Times of Struggle” – Christian Matheis, Virginia Tech
  • 11am-12pm “The Activity of Attending to the World Arises from Being-in-the-World and not from Some Alleged ‘Internal’ Mental State” – S. West Gurley, Sam Houston State University