In the News
May 9, 2013: It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of Professor Hugh J. Silverman. A memorial service for Dr. Silverman will be held on Saturday, May 25th, from 3:00-5:00 pm in the Javitz Room of the Melville Library.
Professor Eduardo Mendieta received the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Professor Eva Kittay and Professor Anita Silvers (San Francisco State University) have been named winners of the Lebowitz Prize, given jointly by the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the American Philosophical Association.
Timothy Hyde received the Provost's Distinguished Lecturer Award for 2013.
Assistant Professor Serene Khader was accepted into the NEH Summer Institute on "Development Ethics: Questions, Challenges and Responsibilities" to be held this July and August at Michigan State University.
Undegraduate Philosophy Majors Peter John and Steven Licardi received the Provost's Award for Academic Excellence.
Doctoral candidate Nathifa Greene presented her paper, "Stop and Frisk: A Phenomenological Description of Policed Embodiment" at the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers at Penn State on April 12, 2013.
Professor Eduardo Mendieta published an essay titled "'Moral Optics': Biopolitics, Torture and the Imperial Gaze of War Photography" in Jose Manuel Barreto, ed., Human Rights from a Third World Perspective: Critique, History, and International Law.
Professor Robert Crease's play Trust Territory won First Prize in the Stony Brook University Science Playwriting Competition.
Stony Brook Alum and current Pennsylvania State University Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy Leonard Lawlor's 2011 book Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy (IUP) was reviewed in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Philosophy major Christie Sacco was awarded an Undergraduate Recognition Award for Outstanding Achievement.
Timothy Hyde reviewed James Risser's The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Undergraduate Philosophy Majors Steven T. Licardi and Briana Locicero received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Student Excellence.
Undergraduate Philosophy Major Jean Claude Velasquez received the Undergraduate Recognition Award for Academic Excellent for 2013.
Professor Mary Rawlinson was awarded a Visiting Fellowship in Ethics and Philosophy for Fall 2013 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Doctoral candidate Jeff Epstein has won this year's President's Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student.
Professor Eduardo Mendieta's co-translation of Enrique Dussel's Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion has been published by Duke University Press. This is a monumental work of ethics by one of Latin America's foremost philosophers.
Professor Eduardo Mendieta, alumnus Javier Aguirre and doctoral candidate Maria Prado Ballarin presented papers at the 2013 Telos Conference, the theme of which was "Religion and Politics in a Post-Secular World."
Doctoral candidates Jane Jones and Tim R. Johnston were awarded the 2013 Karen Burke Memorial Prize. Jane Jones will present "The Im/Possible Conditions of Unconditional Hospitality: Irigaray and Derrida on the Thresholds of Ethics" and Tim R. Johnston will present "Must the Interval be Heterosexual? Irigarayan Ontology and Non-Cisgendered Being" at this year's meeting of the Irigaray Circle at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Professor Rita Nolan presented a paper at the conference "From Grooming to Speaking: Recent Trends in Social Primatology and Human Ethology" hosted by the Centre for Philosophy of Science at the University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal, September 10-12, 2012. Her paper was titled "How Humans Became Behaviorally Modern."
Professors Ed Casey and Donn Welton, and Stony Brook Alum Anthony Steinbock published essays in the new Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology.
Professor Bob Crease won the 2012-13 Stony Brook University Science Playwriting Competition for his play Trust Territory.
Associate Professors Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeff Edwards published The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel.
About the Department
The Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University grants B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees to a broad range of students with diverse and varied interests. Committed to a pluralist treatment of philosophical issues, the department encourages interdisciplinary study as well as more traditional approaches to philosophy. Convinced that a knowledge of the history of philosophy is essential to the philosophical enterprise, the department offers intensive courses in ancient, medieval, and modern thought. Other courses address specific philosophical problems in ethics, political theory, epistemology, aesthetics, environmental philosophy, feminism, critical race theory, and philosophy of technology.
The department at Stony Brook is internationally renowned for its concentration in Continental philosophy, with particular emphasis on contemporary French and German thought. Courses in phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, postructuralism and postmodernism, and critical theory are held regularly, focusing on such figures as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Kristeva, Freud, Lacan, Irigaray, Levinas, and Habermas. Crucial nineteenth century philosophers such as Hegel and Nietzsche are also treated in depth. As well, the department offers many international research opportunities to graduate students who wish to pursue the study of Continental philosophy in Europe.
Stony Brook maintains a lively dialogue with Anglo-American philosophy, which is also strongly represented among faculty. A comparative seminar in a topic of common concern to continental and analytic philosophy is given each year. Other analytic courses cover computational theory, questions of meaning and metaphor, issues in philosophical psychology, and special problems in philosophical logic.
Stony Brook's Philosophy Department is a member of the New York Consortium of Graduate Schools, which allows graduate students to take courses for credit at schools in the New York City area, including Rutgers, Princeton, New York University, and Columbia.
Upcoming Events
Dissertation Defense: Roberto Toledo
Wednesday, May 1st, 4pm
Harriman, 214
Lecture: Virginia Held
Wednesday, May 8th, 1pm
Humanities 1008
