News
December, 2007
DON HOWARD has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
This is a significant honor that recognizes outstanding contributions to physics. The APS is the main professional organization of the field, and Fellowship is limited to less than one percent of membership. The number of APS Fellows in a physics department is one of the metrics used to rate its excellence. In the notice of his election, Don was cited "for
his ground-breaking studies of the interplay between physics and philosophy of science in the twentieth century, especially in connection with the work of Einstein and Bohr." This adds to Don's already successful year, in which he currently holds an NSF grant.
SAM NEWLANDS has been awarded an NEH Fellowship for his project, "Reconceiving Spinoza". The grant will enable Sam to take a year of research leave to write a monograph that "provides a novel, integrated interpretation of how Spinoza's metaphysics and ethics shape one another in ways that remain germane for contemporary philosophical disputes." As we all know, NEH Fellowships in philosophy are not as frequent as in the other humanities. So far as records indicate, Sam's NEH is the first in our Department in a decade, the last being held by Karl Ameriks in 1997-1998.
PROGRAM IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
(Karl Ameriks, Gary Gutting, Anja Jauernig, Lynn Joy, Samuel Newlands, Fred Rush, Stephen Watson from our Department) has won significant internal funding from ISLA and the Nanovic Institute, in addition to generous funding previously provided by the College of Arts and Letters, to mount their Workshop series over the next two years. These funds will
enable the Workshop to host outside speakers to the enrichment not only of the Department but the wider College community.
Catholic Digest Names Shrader-Frechette U.S. "Hero"
October 25, 2007
Kristin Shrader-Frechette, F.J. and H.M. O’Neill Professor of Philosophy and concurrent professor of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame, has been selected by Catholic Digest magazine as one of 12 “heroes for America” — laypeople living or working in the United States who are performing exemplary work in the spirit of the Catholic faith. The magazine cited her work on behalf of environmental justice.
Shrader-Frechette and the other honorees are profiled in the October issue of the magazine. The only other university professor selected as a Catholic Hero is Paul Farmer, the Harvard University physician and medical anthropologist who is the cofounder of Partners in Health and who was the recipient of an honorary Notre Dame degree last May.
“The environment is not necessarily a social justice issue, but environmental effects of pollution are social justice issues,” Shrader-Frechette said in an interview accompanying the Catholic Digest feature. “Environmental injustice — and by that I mean disproportionate pollution forced on children, poor people, minorities and workers — is a social justice issue, because unfair pollution burdens take away not only poor people’s money, but something that’s even more important: their lives and their health.”
The magazine also cited Shrader-Frechette for involving students in the fight against environmental injustice.
“My students and I (in the Center for Environmental Justice and Children’s Health at Notre Dame) work mainly with poor, black, Latino, Native-American, and Appalachian communities,” she said. “We simply try to provide some scientific help so that the people are able to protect themselves, especially their children. We can do maybe 30 projects a year, pro-bono. That’s a lot, but only because the Notre Dame students are so generous, so brilliant, and so committed to social justice. They’re just wonderful.”
Although cancer annually kills 600,000 Americans, Shrader-Frechette says many of these premature deaths are preventable by avoiding scientific errors in impact assessment and by enforcing pollution laws. Government and U.N. groups agree, noting that up to 90 percent of cancers are “environmentally induced and theoretically preventable.”
Children are more sensitive to pollutants, Shrader-Frechette said, and their annual cancer incidence rates are increasing 40 percent faster than those of adults. She points out that minority cancer rates also are much higher, partly because most industrial polluters locate in poor or minority neighborhoods, and minorities must breathe air that is typically twice as polluted as in white neighborhoods.
Working with local community members, Shrader-Frechette and her students revealed both scientific errors and ethical problems in the impact assessment used when, without community consent, a multinational corporation attempted to site a substandard uranium-enrichment plant in the African-American community of Homer, La. The case is regarded as the first major victory against environmental racism in the United States.
In 2004, Shrader-Frechette became only the third American to win the World Technology Award in Ethics. The U.S. National Science Foundation has continuously funded her research since 1982.
Shrader-Frechette, who also is a fellow of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1998. She has held senior professorships at the University of California and the University of Florida. An award-winning teacher as well as a researcher, she has published more than 350 articles and 15 books that have been translated into 11 languages. Her 2007 book, “Taking Action, Saving Lives,” published by Oxford University Press, has just been nominated for a National Book Award.
Shrader-Frechette earned her mathematics degree from Xavier University and a doctorate in philosophy of science from Notre Dame. She has done post-doctoral work in biology, in economics, and in hydrogeology.
Philosopher, Michael Detlefsen, receives $1.1 million grant from French National Research Agency
July 23, 2007
Michael Detlefsen, professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has been awarded a prestigious $1.1 million senior Chaire d’Excellence from the French National Research Agency (ANR). The award, along with matching financial support provided by the institutions that nominated him − the University of Paris, University of Nancy, and Collège de France − will support a four-year research project on the history and philosophy of mathematics.
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Philosopher Ralph McInerny's autobiography published
April 24, 2006
"I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You: My Life and Pastimes," an autobiography by Ralph McInerny, professor of philosophy and Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame, has been published by the University of Notre Dame Press.
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Expert on poverty and welfare to deliver lecture March 30
March 23, 2006
Lawrence Mead, professor of politics at New York University, will deliver a talk titled "Welfare Reform: Implications for the War on Poverty" at 7 p.m. March 30 (Thursday) in DeBartolo Hall at the University of Notre Dame.
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Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas to be celebrated at Basilica Mass
January 24, 2006
By Michael O. Garvey
The feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, patron saint of students and universities, will be observed at the University of Notre Dame with a vigil Mass at 5:15 p.m. Friday (Jan. 27) in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.
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Lecture series to focus on 18th-century feminist Wollstonecraft
October 6, 2005
Examining the life and political theory of 18th-century Anglo-Irish feminist, writer and intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft is the focus of a lecture series sponsored by the Program in Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
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A half century of Ralph McInerny
July 26, 2005
Ralph McInerny, professor of philosophy, director of the Jacques Maritain Center and Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame, can be pointed in his disapproval of recent trends in his chosen academic discipline. "Philosophy itself has now become a form of Radical Chic," he says, deriding those comfortably employed philosophers who "fly about the world to talk to one another and deny that there is a world to fly around or that anything they or anyone else might say makes sense."
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Plantinga discusses evolution and Christianity
July 18, 2005
A renowned philosopher from the University of Notre Dame supports recent comments by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn that belief in evolution as accepted by some in science today may be incompatible with Christian beliefs.
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