Our faculty have had another productive semester, with numerous publications, presentations, and awards:

Professor Yuri Balashov published a long paper on the origins of the translation abilities of large language models.

Professor Edward Halper had a paper “Plotinus on Knowledge,” accepted in the International Journal of the Platonic Tradition.  He will present this paper at the Aristotle Across Boundaries II Conference, Vercelli, Italy, May, 2026.

Head of Department, Aaron Meskin, published a co-authored essay entitled "Middlebrow Aesthetics: An Explanation and Defense" in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. He also recently delivered invited talks in at the American Society for Aesthetics Annual Meeting in Baltimore, the American Philosophical Association meeting also in Baltimore, at an aesthetics conference in Philadelphia, and at Texas Tech University. Professor Meskin won an Arts Collaborative Mini Grant for a project entitled Art, Philosophy, and Awkwardness. This project explores awkwardness, especially its aesthetic and artistic dimensions, through a collaborative and creative research process involving a dialogue between philosophy, social psychology, and dance.

Dr. Nicholas Schuster is one of 32 co-authors of "A Road Map for Responsible Robotics: Promoting Human Agency and Collaborative Efforts," which was recently featured in IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine. This article is the product of a conference he co-organized in 2023 at the Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics. He also presented a paper, "Algorithmic Fairness for Insurance Pricing: A Case for Decision Error Parity" (co-authored with Fei Huang, NSW) at GSU. This was part of the 3^rd Annual Southern Workshop on the Ethics of Emerging Technology (SWEET), co-organized by our own Dr. Jeremy Davis. Additionally, he was recently selected as a 2026–2028 Lilly Teaching Fellow.

Professor Piers Stephens has announced that he will be retiring from undergraduate teaching duties at the end of the 2025-6 academic year, but he continues to be active in research and intends this to continue throughout the future. He has completed a review of Toby Svoboda’s book A Philosophical Case for Ecological Pessimism which is forthcoming in Environmental Values, Vol. 21, 2026. In November 2025 he presented a paper, ‘Might Environmental Pragmatism Imply a Theory of the Good?’, to the PPE Society conference in New Orleans, whilst in April 2026 he presented a new paper, ‘Environmental Pragmatisms: An Overview and a New Direction’ to the Environmental Political Theory section of the Western Political Science Association conference in San Diego, CA. Professor Stephens also has two papers in the process of revision for publication and gave a farewell lecture, ‘What I think I Keep Saying but Nobody Hears: An Explanatory Farewell’, arranged as the final Kleiner Lecture series talk of Spring 2026.

Last July at the International Hegel Seminar in Santiago, Chile, Professor Richard Winfield delivered his paper, “The Psychology of Thinking Versus the Logic of the Concept,” which was recently published in Cogency: Journal of Reasoning and Argumentation (Vol. 17, Number 2, Spring 2025). In August, he delivered “The Solution to the Hidden Mystery of Self-Consciousness” at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. In November, at the IV International German-Latin American Hegel Conference in Puebla, Mexico, he delivered his paper, “Hegel’s Challenge to Political Fascism.” March saw the presentation of “Intelligence and the Psychology of Will” at the 76th Annual Meeting of the Metaphysical Society of America at Yale University. Professor Winfield is also looking forward to the release of his 25^th book, Philosophical Investigations Contesting the End of Humanity, from Palgrave Macmillan (cover to the left).

In January, Professor Sarah Wright presented her paper “Refining the Epistemic Power of Anger through Storytelling” at the Philosophical Society of Southern Africa Meeting hosted by the University of Cape Town. She then traveled to Johannesburg and presented her paper “Why LLMs are not Trustworthy” at a celebration event for ACEPS (African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science) at the University of Johannesburg, which has officially been elevated to an Institute. Finally, Professor Wright presented “Coerced False Confessions and their Harms to Self Trust” at the Epistemic Trust Workshop at ACEPS.