ECOM member and ECOM Summer ’19 Graduate Research Fellow Ryo Tanaka will be giving talks in Kanazawa University, Tokyo University, Forum for Young Philosophers, and University of Salzburg in the upcoming weeks. We wish him good luck! The titles and dates are,

ECOM member and coordinator Aliyar Ozercan received IBACS-BIRC Research Assistantship in Neuroimaging for 2019-2020 academic year. As an IBRAiN fellow, he will provide a teaching resource to help BIRC users design and implement experimental procedures for fMRI, EEG, TMS and other methodologies, provide resources for data analysis, and oversee use of equipment by others. Congratulations, Aliyar!

On May 15, our member Drew Johnson gave a talk in the Epistemology: Current Themes seminar at Arche, titled “Deep Disagreement, Conviction, and Humility.” On May 22, he also gave another talk titled “Lies and Hypocrisy: Illocutionary Acts in Ethical Thought and Discourse” at the University of Aberdeen. 

ECOM hosted its 6th annual workshop on May 3-4 at MCHU/Laurel 305, titled “Communication, Context, Conversation”. The workshop brought researchers working on the pragmatics, linguistic analysis, and comparative and developmental psychology of communication and conversation together.  The workshop schedule can be found under our Events.

We’re pleased to announce that ECOM has awarded summer stipends to support four exciting ECOM-related projects:

• Ken Ito: “The Origins of Denial” ($2,500)
• Ryo Tanaka: “Knowledge of Meaning: Reconciling the Epistemic Intuition about Meaning and Empirical Theories of Linguistic Understanding” ($2,500)
• Eno Agolli: “Pragmatic Unsettledness: A Pragmatic Solution to the Syntactic Problems of the-Predicativism” ($1,250)
• Aliyar Ozercan: “Curiosity: What May Connect Homo Sapiens to the Rest” ($1,250)

Early in the Fall, we’re hoping to host an ECOM event in which these projects will be presented informally.

Congratulations, Ken, Ryo, Eno, and Aliyar!

ECOM member Drew Johnson was one of the recipients of this year’s Ruth Garrett Millikan Graduate Research Fellowship. This fellowship was created in 2017 with the aid of generous admirers, friends, and colleagues of Professor Ruth Garrett Millikan, one of the world’s most distinguished living philosophers, and a cherished member of UConn’s philosophical community. The recipients are outstanding ABD students in the Philosophy Department who use the fellowship to further their graduate research study in the summer of the award year. Congratulations, Drew!

ECOM member Phillip Barron has been admitted to this summer’s Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. Sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, this summer research program on mind, cognition, and intelligence will be held at the University of St. Andrews from 6/30/19 – 7/20/19.  

Phillip applied to work with other philosophers, cognitive and neuroscientists, and artists on the relationship between intelligence and narrative. His dissertation gives an account of personal identity in which persons are biological, psychological, and narrative entities. Trans-disciplinary thinking is at the core of his work. Because his project spans philosophy, art, and cognitive science, it will benefit from the opportunity to engage with the DISI faculty and other participants from the cognitive and social sciences. Despite the reputation philosophers have for being solitary thinkers, Phillip believes philosophy is done best in a collaborative setting, listening and exchanging ideas with others. 

ECOM Director Dorit Bar-On will be participating as a faculty lecturer at this summer’s Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. Sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, this summer research program on mind, cognition, and intelligence will be held at the University of St. Andrews from 6/30/19 – 7/20/19. Dorit’s lectures will take place July 1-2.  See here for more information on the institute.

ECOM Research Specialist Teresa Allen will be presenting a paper titled “Against the Purely Epistemic Point of View” at the Edinburgh Graduate Epistemology Conference May 6-7, 2019.

ECOM Director Dorit Bar-On will be presenting a joint paper with St. Andrews Evolutionary Psychologist Kate Arnold entitled “How to Do Things With Nonwords: Communication, Expression, and Meaning” at the workshop “Linguistic Investigations Beyond Language: Gestures, Body Movement and Primate Linguistics” at ZAS in Berlin, March 11-12, 2019.