Department News

The Department of Philosophy is pleased to announce that three graduate students have been selected as Social Impact Fellows for Summer 2023. Botan Dolun, Katrina Johnson, and Noah Kim are among ten graduate students selected for this program. They’ll each receive a $5,000 stipend and spend the summer interning with a local, Buffalo non-profit organization. Learn more about the program.

When the student team in the PPE course, PHI 485, identified a need for places to read inside the Buffalo City Mission, they proceeded to develop three areas, and built bookshelves for over 1,000 donated books for the residents. Their capstone project is the subject of an article by Charles Anzalone, UB News.

The philosophical legacy of Jiyuan Yu is examined in two new books. Published in 2023, both books are written in Chinese. The first, Between Ancient and Modern China and the West: Academic Anthology of Jiyuan Yu, is a collection of his important articles and of responses by other scholars. The second, Lecture on Aristotle's Metaphysics, contains a series of lectures delivered in 2011 by Professor Yu at Shandong University that were later compiled by Professor Yu’s doctoral students.

PHI 485, Integrating PPE, is a course that challenges students to find a way to concretely make a social improvement, and then do it. One team accomplished that with BUFFALO SOUP. Their professor, Dr. David Gray, designed the philosophy course. He states, “I am really proud of our PPE students who continue working on their capstone project from Spring 2023, transforming Buffalo Soup into a regular Buffalo institution that is now bringing in partners from other colleges at UB.” BUFFALO SOUP is now apart of a micro-funding group. Read news story by David J. Hill.

Alexandria Oprea's research, published online by Cambridge University Press, strengthens the normative case for compulsory voting by arguing that it could improve democracy by reducing polarization, which existing work suggests can lead to democratic backsliding. Read the news story by Bert Gambini.

Under the leadership of Barry Smith, on-going research by UB ontologists has resulted in the development of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), an international standard top-level ontology that provides the common starting point for 100s of ontology initiatives throughout the world. Here in Buffalo, BFO has been extended to form the Common Core Ontologies (CCO), which is a family of mid-level ontologies used especially in military and security domains. BFO and CCO allow information to be effectively combined, retrieved and analyzed. In January of this year, the Chief Data Officers in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the DOD, and, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office defined BFO and CCO as the baseline standards for ontology work in the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community.