Chair in Philosophy and Relgion at Leeds!

Leeds is advertising for a chair in philosophy and religion - see the advert pasted below.

Chair in Philosophy and Religion

Faculty of Arts
School of Humanities
Reference: 0995/5
Closing Date: Friday 23rd March 2012

This Chair is a part of a major strategic investment by the University to achieve an ambitious improvement in academic performance and enhanced student experience.

From August of this year, the present School of Humanities will become the new unitary School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, bringing together the subject areas of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies and the History of Science. Building on established research excellence, and committed to providing a world-class standard of student education, the School is investing in a significant number of new posts aligned to its strategic commitment to ensuring its place amongst the top-ranked Schools internationally. The creation of this Chair reflects that ambition, alongside recognition of the potential to enhance existing research and teaching strengths through cross-disciplinary collaborative leadership and activity.

Philosophy at Leeds is one of the highest ranked research units in the UK, with an internationally-recognised world-leading status in key areas, while Theology and Religious Studies is an international leader in the study of religion and public life, and the History of Science is one of the foremost units of its kind in the UK, with an impressive international profile. In this context, this post offers an exciting opportunity for an individual to exercise a leading role in enhancing collaborative activity and achievement, while developing their own expertise and career in a School committed to world-leading research and student education. The School is open to applications from candidates with expertise in philosophy of religion, religion and science, and other areas that can build on existing and developing cross-disciplinary strengths in the School, such as religion and ethics, religion and aesthetics and religion and metaphysics. The person appointed will report to the Head of School and deliver research-led education that contributes to an exceptional student experience, top quality research outputs that contribute to impact and innovation, and expect to take on a significant leadership role in the organisation in education and/or research.

Preliminary enquiries about the post should be directed to our retained consultancy firm, Perrett Laver on +44 (0)207 340 6200.

To download further particulars about the role please visit www.perrettlaver.com, quoting reference number 0995/5.

Salary

The salary, which is negotiable, will be within the Professorial range - minimum £59,302 p.a.

For further details and for information on how to apply, please read the complete job description for this role

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholar Prize

I've been asked to post the following notice about the

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholar Prize

THE

Sponsored by the Ammonius Foundation (http://www.ammonius.org/) and administered by the editorial board of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, the 2012 Younger Scholar Prize annual essay competition is open to scholars who are within ten years of receiving a Ph.D. or students who are currently enrolled in a graduate program. (Independent scholars should enquire of the editor to determine eligibility.) The award is $8,000. Winning essays will appear in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, so submissions must not be under review elsewhere.

Essays should generally be no longer than 10,000 words; longer essays may be considered, but authors must seek prior approval. To be eligible for the 2012 prize, submissions must be electronically submitted by 30 January 2012 (paper submissions are no longer accepted). Refereeing will be blind; authors should omit remarks and references that might disclose their identities. Receipt of submissions will be acknowledged by e-mail. The winner is determined by a committee of members of the editorial board of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, and will be announced in early March. At the author’s request, the board will simultaneously consider entries in the prize competition as submissions for Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, independently of the prize.

Previous winners of the Younger Scholar Prize are:

Thomas Hofweber, “Inexpressible Properties and Propositions”, Vol. 2;

Matthew McGrath, “Four-Dimensionalism and the Puzzles of Coincidence”, Vol. 3;

Cody Gilmore, “Time Travel, Coinciding Objects, and Persistence”, Vol. 3;

Stephan Leuenberger, “Ceteris Absentibus Physicalism”, Vol. 4;

Jeffrey Sanford Russell, “The Structure of Gunk: Adventures in the Ontology of Space”, Vol. 4;

Bradford Skow, “Extrinsic Temporal Metrics”, Vol. 5;

Jason Turner, “Ontological Nihilism”, Vol. 6;

Rachael Briggs and Graeme A. Forbes, “The Real Truth About the Unreal Future”, Vol. 7;

Shamik Dasgupta, “Absolutism vs Comparativism about Quantities”, forthcoming, Vol. 8.

Enquiries should be addressed to Dean Zimmerman:

dwzimmer@rci.rutgers.edu

Parthood, CAI and grounding

I've posted a new paper: 'Parts generate the whole, but they are not identical to it'. The paper argues that the view that wholes are grounded (at least in part) by their parts is better than the view that wholes are their parts (composition as identity), because it does as well or better at solving certain puzzles concerning parthood, and has the advantage of not having counter-intuitive essentialist consequences. Any comments welcome!

Three jobs at Leeds

We are advertising three continuing lecturer jobs at Leeds, in philosophy of language, epistemology, and value.

(These jobs are roughly equivalent to tenured assistants professorships, in US terms. And feel free to apply for more than one: if you do language and epistemology, e.g., then put in two separate applications, one for each job.)

Further details:

1. Lecturer in Value Philosophy Job reference: ARTHM0010

The School seeks to hire a Lecturer in of Philosophy of Value, broadly construed to include (e.g.) normative ethics, metaethics, and political philosophy.

The position will incorporate undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, some thesis supervision, and some non-teaching administrative duties. With a research record and teaching experience commensurate with career stage, the successful candidate should have completed or submitted a PhD by the beginning of the appointment.

The successful candidate will have the ability to make an outstanding contribution to the research activities of the Centre for Ethics and Metaethics, to the research life of the department in general, and to Philosophy’s REF 2014 submission.

Post must commence no later than 1 September 2012 (or sooner if required to do so in discussion with the School).

Candidates are encouraged to apply for more than one Philosophy position where appropriate.

We particularly welcome applications from candidates belonging to groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in philosophy, including but not limited to women and ethnic minorities.

For more information on Philosophy at the University of Leeds see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/20048/philosophy

University Grade 7 (£32,751 – £35,788) or University Grade 8 (£36,862 - £44,016)

Informal enquiries may be made to Professor Graeme Gooday Tel +44 (0)113 343 3274, messages Tel +44 (0)113 343 3260,

Email: g.j.n.gooday@leeds.ac.uk

Closing date 18 November 2011

Interviews are expected to be held in February 2012

2. Lecturer in Epistemology Job Reference: ARTHM0009

The School seeks to hire a Lecturer in Epistemology, broadly construed to include (e.g.) specialists in the history of the subject and candidates whose research engages with issues in philosophy of science.

The position will incorporate undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, some thesis supervision, and some non-teaching administrative duties. With a research record and teaching experience commensurate with career stage, the successful candidate should have completed or submitted a PhD by the beginning of the appointment.

The successful candidate will have the ability to make an outstanding contribution to the research life of the department, and to Philosophy’s REF 2014 submission.

Post must commence no later than 1 September 2012 (or sooner if required to do so in discussion with the School).

Candidates are encouraged to apply for more than one Philosophy position where appropriate.

We particularly welcome applications from candidates belonging to groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in philosophy, including but not limited to women and ethnic minorities.

For more information on Philosophy at the University of Leeds see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/20048/philosophy

University Grade 7 (£32,751 – £35,788) or University Grade 8 (£36,862 - £44,016)

Informal enquiries may be made to Professor Graeme Gooday Tel +44 (0)113 343 3274, messages Tel +44 (0)113 343 3260,

Email: g.j.n.gooday@leeds.ac.uk

Closing date 18 November 2011

Interviews are expected to be held in February 2012

3. Lecturer in Philosophy of Language Job Reference: ARTHM0011

The School seeks to hire a Lecturer in the Philosophy of Language, broadly construed to include (e.g.) specialists in the history of the subject.

The position will incorporate undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, some thesis supervision, and some non-teaching administrative duties. With a research record and teaching experience commensurate with career stage, the successful candidate should have completed or submitted a PhD by the beginning of the appointment.

The successful candidate will have the ability to make an outstanding contribution to the research life of the department, and to Philosophy’s REF 2014 submission.

Post must commence no later than 1 September 2012 (or sooner if required to do so in discussion with the School).

Candidates are encouraged to apply for more than one Philosophy position where appropriate.

We particularly welcome applications from candidates belonging to groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in philosophy, including but not limited to women and ethnic minorities.

For more information on Philosophy at the University of Leeds see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/20048/philosophy

University Grade 7 (£32,751 – £35,788) or University Grade 8 (£36,862 - £44,016)

Informal enquiries may be made to Professor Graeme Gooday Tel +44 (0)113 343 3274, messages Tel +44 (0)113 343 3260

Email: g.j.n.gooday@leeds.ac.uk

Closing date 18 November 2011

Interviews are expected to be held in February 2012

Indeterminacy workshop

The 2nd workshop for the Leeds Metaphysical Indeterminacy Project will be held on September 8-9 2011 at the University of Leeds.

Speakers and titles include:

* Katherine Hawley (St Andrews) 'A Problem of the Many for Universals' (joint work with Alexander Bird)
* Benj Hellie (Toronto) 'Treating the future as open'
* Nick JJ Smith (Sydney) 'Many kinds of indeterminacy; one kind of credence'
* Jessica Wilson (Toronto) 'Indeterminacy in the World'

The workshop will start around midday on Thursday, and finish mid-afternoon Friday. Thanks to funding from the AHRC, there is no registration fee; but if you'd like to attend, please contact Robert Williams (j.r.g.williams@leeds.ac.uk) so we can ensure we have enough space.

The workshop is the second of six sponsored by the AHRC as part of the 3-year Metaphysical Indeterminacy project at Leeds. Further details can be found at the project homepage.

Open future (again)

Elizabeth and I have posted a draft of a new paper on the open future: available here. Comments welcome!

Fictional Realism, Nominalism, and Indeterminate Identity

I’ve posted a new paper: How to be a nominalist and a fictional realist. Here are the Cliff notes.

In my musical works paper, I argued that there are true claims proclaiming the existence of, and properties of, musical works, but that there weren’t really any musical works, because such claims were made true by an ontology that didn’t admit such things. In this paper, I attempt to tell a similar story for fictional characters. It’s literally true that the fictional character Bilbo Baggins exists, and it’s literally that he is a Hobbit according to the fiction The Lords of the Rings. But these claims can be made true without admitting fictional characters, or fictions, into our ontology. What makes them true, I suggest, are our acts of interpreting the fiction. Thus we can account for these truths with a nominalistically acceptable ontology (assuming, as I do, that there is in general a nominalistically acceptable account of the mental).

I also argue that the resulting view solves various puzzle cases concerning fictional characters. The most salient being Anthony Everett’s argument that fictional realism leads to untenable indeterminacy in identity. Everett argues that there are fictions in which it is indeterminate whether A is identical to B. The fictional realist believes in the fictional characters A and B. Whether the fictional characters are in reality identical is determined by whether they are identical according to the fiction to which they belong. So since it’s indeterminate whether they are identical in the fiction, it’s indeterminate in reality whether the fictional characters are identical. Reductio of fictional realist, given Evans’ argument against indeterminate identity.

I attempt to solve this puzzle by locating the source of the indeterminacy to indeterminacy in what fictional character is referred to, thus avoiding conflict with Evans’ conclusion (which is, as Lewis noted, directed only at indeterminate identity de re, not at indeterminacy in identity statements). Roughly, the idea is that when the fiction attempts to make an indeterminate identity, we are forced to interpret the fiction both ways. Given the above account, this results in there being two fictions, and two sets of fictional characters associated with each fiction, and it will as a result be indeterminate which fiction and which characters we refer to. In which case, the statement of identity will be indeterminate, but there will be no indeterminacy of identity de re.

Further details in the paper, of course; comments welcome.