Janice Dowell is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University and a Regular Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh’s Eidyn Centre.  She earned her BA from the Johns Hopkins University and her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh.  She has worked previously at Bowling Green State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is currently chair of the 2015 APA Central Division Program Committee and is the 2014 recipient of the Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics. 

Her published work has covered a wide range of topics in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and metaethics.  A uniting theme in many of these papers is an interest in philosophical methodology.

In the philosophy of mind, Dowell is known for her influential work on the question of how best to formulate the thesis of physicalism.  In “the Physical: Empirical, Not Metaphysical” (2006), she defends a novel implementation of a familiar, futurist strategy for identifying what it takes for an object, relation, or property to be physical.  According to futurists, physical properties are those posited by the complete and ideal physical theory. An adequate implementation of such a strategy must show how such a view generates genuine ontological constraints. Dowell’s proposal meets this constraint by including an account of what makes a theory a physical one.

She is also known for her influential arguments against David Chalmers’ famous Argument from Conceptual Analysis for dualism (“A priori Entailment and Conceptual Analysis” (2008), “Empirical Metaphysics: The Role of Intuitions about Possible Cases in Philosophy” (2008)) and for her defense of a novel method, the Semantic Method, for vindicating metaphysical reductions (“Serious Metaphysics” (2008)).

Her current work focuses primarily on defending a flexibly contextualist interpretation of Kratzer’s formal semantics for modal expressions against a series of recent challenges posed in the literature in the philosophy of language and linguistics. Defending any semantics for modals expressions, she argues, requires showing how a favored semantics not only fits with, but also explains the data.  Explaining the data, in turn requires saying how in general it is that readings of particular utterances—or their assertability conditions or the points of evaluation tied to their assertability—are determined.

The significance of Dowell’s work lies in its, of the extent theories of modal expressions, uniquely meeting this constraint. At the center of her defense of Kratzerian contextualism is an account of how speakers’ publicly manifestable intentions, together with other features of contexts of use, determine propositions. This account, she argues, provides a unified explanation for all of the challenge data.

Currently, she is at work on a book for OUP that would pull together and expand upon her papers on this topic (“A Flexibly Contextualist Account of Epistemic Modals” (2011), “Contextualist Solutions to Three Puzzles about Practical Conditionals” (2012), “Flexible Contextualism about Deontic Modals” (2013), and, with Aaron Bronfman, “Language of Reasons and ‘Ought’” (forthcoming) and “Contextualism about Deontic Conditionals” (forthcoming).  The core of the book will be the further development of the positive account of the role speakers’ intentions play in determining the modal propositions expressed by the utterance of modal sentences, drawing on Bloom (2000) on language acquisition.

Finally, her interest in methodological issues remains alive in some of her recent work in metaethics, in particular, in her paper “Advice for Non-analytical Naturalists” (with David Sobel (forthcoming)) and “the Metaethical Insignificance of Moral Twin Earth” (Winner of the 2014 Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics (forthcoming).

Nancy Sherman is a distinguished University Professor and Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University.  In 1997-1999, she served as the inaugural holder of the Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the United States Naval Academy. She is the author of The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of our Soldiers  (W.W. Norton 2010); Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind (Oxford 2005); Making A Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge 1997); The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue (Oxford 1989).   She is also the editor of Critical Essays on the Classics: Aristotle’s Ethics (Rowman and Littlefield 1999). The Untold War was a NY Times “Editors’ Choice” and a featured “pick” of TIME magazine.

Sherman’s research is in the general area of ethics, history of moral philosophy, ancient philosophy, military ethics, moral psychology, and the emotions. Her work has been translated into many languages.  She has been the recipient of many national awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Mellon Foundation, and the Newcombe Fellowship Foundation of the Woodrow Wilson.  She is currently writing a book, Making Peace With War, on the moral psychology of returning from war, with a focus on positive reactive attitudes, such as trust, hope, and self-empathy, critical for moral repair.

Prof. Sherman holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University in philosophy, an M. Litt. in philosophy from University of Edinburgh, and a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, magna cum laude, with honors. Sherman is also a research graduate of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute.   Before arriving at Georgetown, she was an Assistant and Associate Professor at Yale. She is currently affiliated with the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown and frequently teaches at the Georgetown University Law Center. Sherman has held numerous posts in the APA Eastern Division over the years. She currently serves on the Nominating Committee of the Eastern Division, and was elected the Eastern Division Representative to the APA. She has been a member of the APA Committee on Committees, and the Program Committee.

In October of 2005, Sherman was part of a small team invited by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs to visit Guantanamo Bay Detention Center to observe and advise on medical and psychological conditions of detainees and matters of medical ethics. In 2011, she was invited as an observer to the Vice Chief of the Army’s Suicide Review Board. Sherman’s views on military ethics have been featured broadly in the media, at home and abroad.