Franklin & Marshall College

The fall semester of 2011 is proving to be an exciting one for the philosophy department! We welcome three new members to the faculty and a new department coordinator. Professor Nick Kroll joins us from Yale University and will be focusing his teaching on modern and metaphysical philosophy. Travling from the University of British Columbia, Professor Nola Semczyszyn is our Postdoctoral Reasearch Fellow in Environmental Philosophy. Professor Keith Lehrer joins us this semester as a distinguished visitor from the University of Arizona and is teaching the popular course, Art as World Making. We have a strong number of majors and class enrollments, an active philosophy club, and a busy schedule of colloquia and conferences. 

In addition to our three new faculty members, the department welcomes Nicole Hoover ’09 as our new academic coordinator. Nicole graduated from Franklin & Marshall College with a degree in economics, but she spent many hours here with Beth Betrone as a student worker! A wife and a mother of two young boys, Nicole certainly keeps herself busy when not at work in the department. She is excited to return to F&M and is looking forward to serving the college in a whole new capacity. Welcome Nicole!

In October, 2010, Glenn Ross presented a paper, "Reconsidering the Lessons of the Lottery for Knowledge and Belief", at the University of Graz in Austria.  That paper is now forthcoming in Philosophical Studies. He is teaching three courses this fall term: introduction to philosophy, symbolic logic and a seminar in epistemology. His seminar is focused on topics that are closely related to his current research on the nature of belief, particularly, how logic places constraints on rational belief and whether the obligations of rationality require a robust control over belief formation.

Bennett Helm, having recently published his second book, Love, Friendship, and the Self, is now turning to his next project on the nature of respect and dignity. The first fruits of this research have been or soon will be presented at conferences in Jordan, Switzerland, Norway, Mexico, and Germany. In addition and with support of the Hackman Scholars program, he and Dan Kaplan ('12) co-authored a new paper on the place of interpersonal emotions in uncovering objective truth, and they will be traveling together to Israel to present it at a conference. On the teaching side, Helm has developed several new courses in the last couple of years: Love, Friendship, and the Self; Philosophy of Emotions; and Respect, Responsibility, and Ethics.

Stephan Käufer and David Merli returned from research leaves. They regret not having seen the class of 2007 graduate and hope to see some of you at Homecoming. Prof. Merli served as Visiting Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University during the 06/07 academic year. He had a great time in Columbus but is glad to be back in Lancaster. He continues to work on topics in meta-ethics, especially the semantic and epistemological significance of moral disagreement. Prof. Käufer presented a new series of papers on Heidegger at conferences in Berkeley and Pacific Grove.

Lee Franklin teaches Introduction to Philosophy, and courses in Medieval and Ancient Philosophy.  His research concerns Plato's philosophical method, Dialectic, and its connections with Plato's metaphysics and theory of learning.  Recent work has specifically concerned the Method of Hypothesis and its ramifications for Plato's commitment to the existence of mathematical objects, and the method of Collection and Division found in Plato's late dialogues.  Lee and his wife Marci Nelligan have two daughters, Sonya and Dahlia.