Although the Pacific APA in San Francisco has been cancelled, it doesn't stop us sending congratulations to all our philosophers who would have been presenting and taking part this April. Here's a socially distanced round of applause for all of you, wherever you're currently self-isolating in lockdown. We'll see you on the flipside! Stay safe.

Summer Reading Group Success

As we mentioned in our News Oct 2019 post, over the summer 2019 Grad Chair Holly Andersen set up a directed reading group with some of the MA program students. As a writing assignment, they prepared submissions to the Pacific APA. Shimin Zhao, Zili Dong, and Weixing Cai all had their papers (related in one way or another to causal modeling) accepted to the program. 

As noted by SFU Philosophy chair Evan Tiffany, this is quite an achievement.
"[As a result of Holly’s] multi-semester reading group aimed at helping students produce professional-quality papers, three students ended up submitting their papers to the annual Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association; all three were accepted into the main program. To put this in context, the APA has an overall acceptance rate of around 25% and all submission are blind reviewed, so the MA submissions are in direct competition with submissions from faculty and doctoral candidates."

Colloquium Clusters

• Epistemic Injustice: Arianna Falbo (MA 2017) “Mind the Gap; Navigating the Harm of Hermeneutical Injustice”
• Epistemology and the Public Sphere: Jim Hutchinson (Limited Term Lecturer) “Post-Truth and Valuing the Truth”
• Explanation: Weixin Cai (MA 2019) “Reductio Ad Absurdum Explanations” and Shimin Zhao (MA 2019) “The internalist approach and the externalist approach to non-causal explanation”
• Kant and Schelling: Nicholas Dunn (MA 2015) “Subsuming ‘Determining’ Under ‘Reflecting’: Kant’s Power of Judgment, Reconsidered”
• Philosophy of Physics and Scientific Explanation: Zili Dong (MA 2019) “Structural property of causation and its role in scientific explanation”
• Kant’s Moral Philosophy: Nikolas Hamm (MA 2016) “Manifesting Morality: Affective Experience and Character Cultivation in Kant’s Moral Philosophy”

Invited speakers

Endre Begby is speaking in an invited symposium entitled Algorithmic Bias in Decision and Policy Making. The title of his paper is "Automated Risk Assessment in the Criminal Justice Process: a Case of 'Algorithmic Bias'?"

Holly Andersen is invited to do a commentary on a paper, "Measuring the Past: Proxy Measurement in Paleoclimatology".

Chelsea Rosenthal is presenting a paper called "Knowledge and Neutrality" in the Political Epistemology Network's session.

Tom Donaldson will be providing commentary on a paper; “More Puzzles of Ground and a Way Out”.

Jennifer Wang is providing commentary on a paper; “Uniqueness and Collective Essence”