Department News

Laibah Mir, a graduating student in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), has been awarded the prestigious U.S. Fulbright award, a highly competitive national scholarship that supports study, research, and teaching abroad. For the 2025–2026 academic year, she will serve as an English Teaching Assistant in Amman, Jordan—becoming the first UB student in a decade to earn a Fulbright placement in the MENA region. Laibah's deep engagement with language, migration, and education, shaped by over two years as a Teaching Assistant in UB’s Linguistics Department and her work with refugee resettlement centers in Buffalo, drives her commitment to community-centered learning. In Amman, Laibah will conduct English language instruction in the classroom while also volunteering in local refugee camps, where she looks forward to meaningfully engaging with displaced Palestinian and Syrian communities. In this work, Laibah looks forward to fostering open dialogue while deepening her understanding of displaced communities through their resilience, stories, and perspectives. Read news story by Charles Anzalone.

Graduating Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) student Laibah Mir is one of only 15 recipients of the 2025 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence, the highest honor SUNY bestows upon its students. An Honors College scholar, Laibah was selected as UB’s second Key into Public Service Scholar by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. She published a policy proposal through the Honors College Think Tank and is conducting graduate-level research in critical race theory for an educational journal. Mir is president of the Muslim Students Association and interns for the Women’s Peace Network, a global nonprofit that documents political and gender-based violence in Myanmar. Read news story by Anna Heinz.

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.

In the revised second edition of Why Machines Will Never Rule the World, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith argue that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is mathematically impossible. Drawing on fields from neuroscience to physics, they explain why the human brain’s complexity can’t be replicated in machines and why even advanced systems like ChatGPT can’t truly think or feel. This edition updates their case for the era of Large Language Models, debunks myths of digital immortality and simulated realities, and reframes “AI ethics” as a matter of how humans use technology—not how machines behave. An essential read for anyone questioning the hype around AI.