On Thursday, February 22, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael Smith announced this year's recipients of the Dean's Distinction award, honoring Faculty of Arts and Sciences staff members "whose contributions, citizenship, and skillful collaboration have delivered outstanding results for the FAS in 2017." Among the thirty-nine individuals recognized for their excellence was Department of Philosophy Coordinator Nyasha Borde.
Professor Tommie Shelby, Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy, and Brandon Terry, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies, have co-edited a new book on Martin Luther King, Jr. that challenges longstanding conventional narratives of King and of the Civil Rights Movement that have drained it of its radical political character.
On Wednesday, December 13th, Professor Susanna Siegel--Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard-- joined BPL Presents and Brooklyn Public Philosophers to share work from her recent book The Rationality of Perception. Siegel's book takes as its point of departure the truism that different people see the world differently and investigates whether, given this truth, perception itself be rational or irrational and, if so, how we can tell. As the...
As the Department of Philosophy and the larger Harvard community continues to mourn the loss of Alex Patel, we wish to pay tribute to Alex’s memory by collecting testimonials from those who knew him. These testimonials will appear on our website until May, after which we will we will collect them into a bound hard copy to give to Alex’s family.
If you wish to contribute your thoughts, stories, or memories of Alex, please send them to...
On Wednesday, November 8th at 7:30 pm there will be a memorial gathering in celebration of the life of Alexander Patel '18, a senior philosophy and mathematics concentrator. The gathering will take place in Memorial Church, with doors to the sanctuary opening at 6:30. Following the service, at 8:30 pm, the Adams House Faculty Deans will host a reception at their residence.
As many in our community have noted, Alex was more than just an exceptionally intelligent and highly accomplished student—he was a deeply caring and attentive friend who gave generously of himself to those...
Alexander Prescott-Couch (Harvard University, PhD 2015) has been appointed Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow, Lincoln College, Oxford University. Prior to his appointment, he had been a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT.
While at Harvard, Prescott-Couch worked with Ned Hall, Selim Berker, Philip Pettit, and Tommie Shelby. His dissertation, "Rational Reconstruction and the Construction of an Interlocutor," combined work in democratic theory and philosophy of science to explore how journalists and social scientists enable our understanding of others through the...
The UnMute Podcast--a project of Myisha Cherry, a Fellow in Philosophy in the department and W.E.B. Du Bois Research Fellow at Harvard--speaks with PhD candidate Wendy Salkin about the powers and duties of informal representation in its latest podcast.