Graduate Students

We are proud to acknowledge the accomplishments of our graduate students:

Alex Feldt participated in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Workshop in Social Change held June 13-19, 2009, at Brown University. The 2009 theme was Institutions, Behavior and Development. Seventy students from across disciplines and around the globe were invited to participate, and expenses during the workshop were fully funded.

Hammad Hussain presented his paper "'More Familiar to Us' vs. 'More Familiar Simpliciter'" at the 41st Meeting of the North Texas Philosophical Association at the University of North Texas in April, 2008, at the 3rd International Conference on Philosophy, in Athens, Greece, sponsored by ATINER, in June, 2008, and at the conference on "Aristotle, Ethics and Science" at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, PA in October, 2008. This paper has also been accepted for publication in An Anthology of Philosophical Studies, Vol. 2, edited by Patricia Hanna.

Rusty Jones gave several presentations: “Baehr on the Value Problem” at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, December 2008; “Truth and Contradiction in Aristotle’s De Interpretatione 9” at the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy meeting, Fordham University, October 2008; “Plato’s Rhetorical Proof for the Immortality of the Soul,” with Hugh Hunter, at the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy meeting, Fordham University, October 2008; “What Good’s a Good Example? The Limitations of Counterfactual Exemplar-Based Virtue Theories,” with Robert Johnson at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, University of Colorado, Boulder, August 2008; “The Argument of De Interpretatione 9” at the Alaska Philosophy Workshop in Ancient Philosophy, University of Alaska, Anchorage, May 2008; “Bivalence and Contradictory Pairs in Aristotle’s De Interpretatione 9” at the Central Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, April 2008; and “The Aporia of Euthydemus 288d-292e” at the 31st Annual Workshop in Ancient Philosophy, Texas A&M University, April 2008. He also commented on Blake Hestir’s “Aristotle on Truth and the Synthetic Structure of Language, Thought, and Reality” at the Alaska Philosophy Workshop in Ancient Philosophy, University of Alaska, Anchorage, May 2008; David Yount’s “Is the One of Parmenides’ First Hypothesis Best Interpreted as the Form of the Good?” at the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, March 2008; and Rachel Barney’s “Ring-Composition in the Republic and Beyond” at the Arizona Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, University of Arizona, February 2008.

Jason Oakes presented his paper "God in the Quad: The Priority of Divine Revelation in the Epistemology of George Berkeley" at the Evangelical Philosophical and Theological Society national conference in Providence, RI, and will present a second paper, "An Argument for Propositional Revelation," at the Regional Society of Christian Philosophers meeting in April. Finally, last but not least, Jason will begin a tenure-track job this fall at Biola University.

Josh Rollins presented his paper "Feldman on Epistemic Disagreement" at an international conference on Responsible Belief in the Face of Disagreement in Amsterdam in August, 2009.

Joshua Seachris's “Death, Futility, and the Proleptic Power of Narrative Ending,” is forthcoming in Religious Studies as of August 2009. He published "Yan Hui's Death as a Threat to Confucius' Expression of Virtue: A Further Look at the Master's Grief" in Asian Philosophy 18:2 (July 2008): 105-22 (abstract) and has a book review of Keith Mascord's Alvin Plantinga and Christian Apologetics forthcoming in the Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology. He gave two presentations in spring 2009: “In Search of the Universe’s Narrative: Scientific Naturalism, Christian Theism, and the Meaning of Life,” at the Southwest Regional Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Criswell College, March 2009, and “Narrative and the Meaning of Life: An Interpretive Proposal on Philosophy’s ‘Big’ Question,” at the Midwest Regional Meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers, Oklahoma Baptist University, April 2009.

Jason Southworth won OU’s Second Century Award for 2008-2009. His essay “Batman’s Identity Crisis: On Wittgenstein’s Family Resemblance” appeared in Batman and Philosophy (Wiley Publishing, 2008). Jason also gave two presentations: “Metaphorical Meaning” at the Northeastern Texas Philosophical Conference, April 2008 and “Can We Determine if Mozi is a Utilitarian or a Divine Command Theorist?” at the Uehiro Crosscurrents Philosophy Conference at the University of Hawaii, March 2008.

Ruth Tallman is the winner of the 2008-2009 Kenneth R. Merrill Graduate Teaching Award, for outstanding teaching throughout her career as a graduate student at OU. She presented her paper "Retaining Meaning in Art on a Physical Object Hypothesis Account of the Ontology of Artworks," at the University of Missouri-St. Louis 2008 Graduate Philosophy Conference: The Beautiful, the Good, and the Just, in April 2008. She also gave commentary on David Kaspar's paper "Moral Skepticism and the Other Agent" at the 2008 Mountain-Plains Philosophy Conference in Hays, KS in October 2008.

Angela Thurmond presented her essay "The Moral Significance of Manners: Confucian and Western Accounts" at the North Texas Philosophical Association conference in Denton, TX, in March 2009.