Spring 2025 Faculty News & Accomplishments

As part of his NSF-funded project, Professor Yuri Balashov organized a symposium on “Philosophy of Translation, Human and Machine” in the framework of the 29th Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association in New Orleans in November 2024. He also gave a talk “On the potential significance of ‘dust’ in ‘industrial’: Lessons from deep learning” at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy, at the University of Florida in Gainesville in November 2024. He published an invited blog post on Slator, a leading translation industry think tank. He is a guest co-editor of the special issue of Informatics on “Human and Machine Translation: Recent Trends and Foundations.”

Associate Professor Elizabeth Brient recently presented a paper, “All Likenesses must Shatter: Exploding Metaphors, Exploding Texts, in Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa” at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies at the University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo. She also contributed to a roundtable on Karsten Harries’ Commentary on Nicholas of Cusa’s On Learned Ignorance at the same conference. Brient’s "Blumenberg Reading Cusanus: The Epochal Threshold as a Liminal Space Between the ‘No Longer’ and the ‘Not Yet’," appeared in the fall of 2024, in Cusanus Today: Thinking with Nicholas of Cusa Between Philosophy and Theology, Catholic University of America Press.

Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor and Distinguished Researh Professor Edward Halper’s recently published “Dynamis and Agency in the Sophist” in Plato’s Power, an online resource edited by Carolina Araujo. The volume of papers from the 2022 Symposium of the International Plato Society held at UGA in 2022: Plato’s Sophist: Selected Papers from the Thirteenth Symposium Platonicum (Nomos Press), was published in November, 2024. Dr. Halper served as co-editor alongside Luc Brisson and Richard Parry. He also gave two papers this semester: “Singularity as the Problem of Knowledge,” in the “Being Singular” online lecture series in February; and “Reality as Coherence” at the Metaphysical Society of America, Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia in March. Additionally, Dr. Halper also served as main advisor to Amin Amouhadi, who successfully defended his dissertation on Time in Aristotle’s Physics in April.

Associate Professor Rene Jagnow published “Multisensory Experience of Paintings” in the spring 2025 issue of the journal Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics. He presented the paper “Polaroid Memories: Photographs and the Aesthetic Character of Episodic Memories” at the annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics in October 2024 as well as at an aesthetics workshop at UGA in April. He also commented on Shantel Blakely’s paper “Architectures’ Automatisms” at the Southern Aesthetics Workshop” at Auburn University in November.

Head of Department, Aaron Meskin, published a new co-authored paper entitled “Why Record Shops Matter Aesthetically: A Case Study in Aesthetic Institutions” in the The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. In Fall 2024, he delivered critical responses to papers at the American Society for Aesthetics Annual Meeting in Chicago and the Southern Aesthetics Workshop in Auburn, Alabama. Along with an undergraduate co-author, he presented a paper on the aesthetics of getting ready for a night out at the Georgia Philosophical Society 2025 Annual Meeting in Augusta in March. He also presented a version of that paper at the 2025 Midsouth Philosophy Conference in Memphis. In December 2024, Meskin formed the UGA Aesthetics Lab, which aims to support professionalization, research productivity and community-building among UGA philosophy graduate students interested in philosophical aesthetics. 

Associate Professor Thanassis Samaras has received a summer fellowship from the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC. In the capital, he intends to work on his manuscript on Plato's Republic and the Household. In February, Samaras presented the paper, “A Re-evaluation of Plato's Argument for Gender Equality in Republic Five” at the American Philosophical Association 2025 Central Division meeting. 

In February 2025 Professor Piers Stephens gave an invited presentation of a book project outline, Pragmatic Ecologism: William James and Environmental Philosophy, to the Center for Dewey Studies at the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale, a video of which is available online. Professor Stephens has also written an extended book review of Clifford S. Stagoll’s volume, Transforming One’s Self: The Therapeutic Ethical Pragmatism of William James which has been accepted for publication in the journal William James Studies. Most recently, in April 2025 Professor Stephens presented a new paper, “Might Environmental Pragmatism Imply a Theory of the Good?” at the Environmental Political Theory subdivision of the Western Political Science Association conference in Seattle, Washington.

Distinguished Research Professor Richard Winfield’s latest single-authored book, Philosophical Contestations of Humanity’s Self-Destruction: Reason at the Edge will be published by Palgrave-MacMillan in Fall 2025.