It was a busy year for major awards, milestones, and transitions as well.

Professor Hannah Tierney was awarded a highly prestigious Hellman Fellowship for 2022-2023. Professor Tierney plans to use the fellowship to establish an experimental philosophy (X-Phi) lab on campus and host a workshop in that area. Congratulations, Professor Tierney!

In June 2021, I-Sen Chen successfully defended his dissertation, Converse Intentionalism and Experiential Content, supervised by Professor Bernard Molyneux. Dr. Chen has accepted a position equivalent to tenure-track Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sichuan University in China. Congratulations, Dr. Chen! In August, Mandana Kamangar successfully defended her dissertation, Thinking Fregean Thoughts, supervised by Distinguished Professor Emeritus Robert May. Congratulations, Dr. Kamangar!

In September, Da Fan successfully defended his dissertation, What a Clause Does: Raising Its Question and Answering It Too, supervised by Professor Adam Sennet. Dr. Fan has accepted a position equivalent to tenure-track Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wuhan University in China. Congratulations, Dr. Fan! In March, Max Parks successfully defended their dissertation, Why Shouldn’t We Think that Cognition Has Proprietary Phenomenal Character?, supervised by Professor Zoe Drayson. Congratulations, Dr. Parks!

In May, Arieh Schwartz successfully defended his dissertation, Memory: Naturalized and Epistemic Approaches, also supervised by Professor Drayson.

In Fall 2022, Dr. Schwartz will begin a two-year postdoctoral researcher position at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, funded by the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Congratulations, Dr. Schwartz! We will miss you, I-Sen, Mandy, Da, Max, and Ari!

In a further piece of good news, Ph.D. candidate Khang Tôn received the Sawyier Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Award in Philosophy at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Congratulations, Khang!

After an international search that drew over 200 applications, we hired Dr. Elvira Basevich as Assistant Professor. Professor Basevich received her undergraduate degree from Hunter College, CUNY and her Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, CUNY, and was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She specializes in social and political philosophy, late modern German philosophy (especially, Kant, Hegel, and Marx), Africana philosophy, and W. E. B. DuBois. Her monograph W.E.B. Du Bois: The Lost and the Found was published with Polity Press in 2020.

Professor Basevich is also a poet, whose poetry book How to Love the World was published with Pank Press in 2020 and was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award. Professor Basevich will start teaching for us in 2023-2024, after a year of research leave during which she will be a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values.

Welcome, Professor Basevich! Thanks are due to the search committee (Professors Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval, Adam Sennet, and Hannah Tierney), and especially to its chair, Professor Tina Rulli, for the countless hours of work this search involved.

In June, the department threw a party in honor of Distinguished Professor Jim Griesemer, who retired and became Distinguished Professor Emeritus in July, after 39 years with Philosophy at UC Davis. An internationally renowned philosopher of biology, Professor Griesemer joined UC Davis Philosophy in 1983 and helped to make it one of the top handful of departments in the world in his specialty.

The ethics working and reading group DaGERS continues to thrive. This year, graduate students’ work took center stage. Each week, students would either present their own research or lead a discussion on a paper that is relevant to their work. This generated a diverse and engaging series of conversations, spanning topics in ethics, social ontology, and political philosophy.

DaGERS was also lucky enough to host the first meeting of the FEMMES (Feminisms in Ethics, Metaphysics, Mind, Epistemology, and Science) reading group, and we look forward to collaborating with them in the future. A special thanks goes out to Khang Tôn, who served as this year’s DaGERS coordinator and fearless cat herder.

—Prof. Tina Rulli

This has been a transitional year for our local chapter of MAP (“Minorities and Philosophy”). Our main order of business has been to restructure the chapter to better service our undergraduate community. We're now proud to announce that, besides a graduate representative (Lel Jones) whose main task will be to organize events at the graduate level, we've created the position of an undergraduate representative (Puja Kirpal) and a graduate organizer for undergraduate events (Natalie McCosker). Our efforts to bring majors into MAP's fold have included registering our chapter as an undergraduate club, as well as holding Q&A events where majors could ask questions about MAP and volunteer to join the organizational staff.

The main goal for the next academic year is to hold regular events and workshops at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. This will include a graduate conference with an open call for papers, as well as workshops on topics related to minorities in philosophy. At the undergraduate level, we plan to hold regular meetings for our "Philosophical Salon," the main goal of which will be the professional development of majors with sessions on applying to graduate school vel sim., as well as philosophical discussion on relevant topics.

—Prof. Alexandro Naranjo Sandoval

Prof. Tina Rulli published “Can ‘My Body, My Choice’ Anti-Vaxxers Be Pro-Life?” in Bioethics (Spring 2022). She gave talks at the Milwaukee School of Engineering for World Bioethics Day on “Human Applications of Genetic Technologies”, at the National Institutes of Health Bioethics Department on “Reproductive Ethics,” and comments on papers at a virtual event hosted by The Philosophy, Politics and Economics Society and the Pacific APA in Vancouver. She also wrote a popular media piece for The Conversation on “Why celebrities have a moral responsibility to help promote lifesaving vaccines” and was interviewed on Australia's ABC podcast The Philosopher's Zone for her work on the ethics of adoption.

Prof. Hannah Tierney gave several virtual and in-person talks, including “The Four-Case Argument and the Existential/Universal Effect” (APA Eastern; Agency and Intentions in Language Workshop), “The Limits of Blame” (Northwest Philosophy Conference), and “Don’t Burst My Blame Bubble” (Keynote at the Berkeley, Stanford, Davis Graduate Conference). She was also honored to serve as a commentator on Susan Wolf’s Kadish Lecture at UC Berkeley. She published chapters in two collections, including “Guilty Confessions” in Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, vol. 7 and “Don’t Suffer in Silence: A Self-Help Guide to Self-Blame” in Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility. Together with Andrew James Latham, she published two papers: “Defusing Existential and Universal Threats to Compatibilism: A Strawsonian Dilemma for Manipulation Arguments” in The Journal of Philosophy and “The Four-Case Argument and the Existential/Universal Effect” as an online advance article at Erkenntnis. Together with A. J. Latham, K. Miller, and C. Tarsney, she published “Belief in Robust Temporal Passage (Probably) Does Not Explain Future-Bias,” available online at Philosophical Studies, and “Robust Passage Phenomenology Probably Does Not Explain Future-Bias,” available online at Synthese. Finally, she made her podcast debut together with Andrew James Latham on The Free Will Show, where they discussed Strawsonianism and manipulation arguments.

Prof. Alyssa Ney published an article “Panpsychism and the Limits of Physical Science” in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and a review of Jessica Wilson's Metaphysical Emergence for the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. She also served on the program committee for the 2022 Pacific APA meeting in Vancouver and wrote two popular pieces for IAITV:

Prof. Hanti Lin has two research articles that are forthcoming: “Modes of Convergence to the Truth: Steps Toward a Better Epistemology of Induction” in the Review of Symbolic Logic, and “Bayesian Epistemology” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (to appear in the Fall 2022 Edition). He presented “Seven Reasons Against the Akaike Framework of Model Selection” at the 27th Biennial Meeting of Philosophy of Science Association, Philadelphia, November 2021.

Prof. Zoe Drayson’s key publications in 2021-22 were: “What we talk about when we talk about mental states” (in Mental Fictionalism, ed. by T. Demeter, A. Toon, T. Parent, Routledge 2022) and “Naturalism and the metaphysics of perception” (in Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception, ed. by H. Logue and L. Richardson. Oxford University Press, 2021); Together with UC Davis graduate student Danielle Williams, she authored a paper which is forthcoming later in 2022: “Realism and instrumentalism in Bayesian cognitive science” (in Expected Experiences: The Predictive Mind in an Uncertain World, ed. by T. Cheng, R. Sato, J. Hohwy. Routledge). She also served on the program committee for the 2022 Pacific APA meeting in Vancouver.

Prof. Jan Szaif published “The Place of Flawed Pleasures in a Good Life. A Discussion of Plato’s Philebus” in the Plato Journal 22 (2021), and “The Role of Imagination in False Anticipatory Pleasure (Philebus 38a-40e)” in The Journal of Greco-Roman Studies 60.3 (2021). He has an article in press on “Aporetic Discourse and Protreptic in Plato’s Lysis,” which is about to appear in a special issue of the journal Archai that he is editing together with David Jennings (Studies on Plato’s Lysis). He also wrote review articles on two recent books: “S. Delcomminette and R. Van Daele (eds.), La méthode de division de Platon à Érigène (Vrin)” for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2022.03.15; and “Jessica Moss, Plato’s Epistemology: Being and Seeming. Oxford University Press” for the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2022.05.02.

Ph.D.: I-Sen Chen (Summer 2021)

Title of the Dissertation: “Converse Intentionalism and Experiential Content”

Ph.D.: Mandana Kamangar (Summer 2021)

Title of the Dissertation: “Thinking Fregean Thoughts”

Ph.D.: Da Fan (Fall 2021)

Title of the Dissertation: “What a Clause Does: Raising Its Question and Answering It Too”

Ph.D.: Max Parks (Spring 2022)

Title of the Dissertation: “Why Shouldn't We Think That Cognition Has Proprietary Phenomenal Character?”

Ph.D.: Arieh Schwartz (Spring 2022)

Title of the Dissertation: “Memory: Naturalized and Epistemic Approaches”

M.A.: Kory Matteoli (Spring 2022)

The Barall Family Philosophy Scholarship: Colin Burt

Arin Robert Aberasturi, Bryan Emmanuel Lopez, Colin Charles Burt, Elizabeth Hannah Cho, Frances A Haydock, Jacob Raviv Derin, Jaden Aimee Deibo, Jeremiah Hyojae Song, Joie Luh Yi Liew, Olivia Roberts, Kiana Keisha Victory, Nathan Edward Durwood

Oslo Phillips Stanat, Samuel Robert Carl Niederholzer, Tanvir Kaur, Wayne Chan

Winner: Ibrahim Dagher, “There’s Not Enough Time in the World: A Reply to Malpass”

Runner up: Sandra Kim, “Feminine Beautification as a Feminist’s Dilemma”

Elizabeth Cho (Highest Honors), Jacob Derin (Highest Honors), Tanvir Kaur (Highest Honors)