Two more pieces of good news for Cornell.

Erin Taylor (UCLA) has accepted a tenure-track position at Cornell. Erin works on moral conflicts and associative obligations, and has developed really interesting positions on both topics. She argues, for instance, that it is possible to have situations where one person is obliged to do X, and another is obliged to prevent X happening. And she has a new take on why conventions of promise-keeping play an important role in generating the moral force of the obligation to keep promises. Erin is currently at the “UCLA Center for Society and Genetics”:http://www.societyandgenetics.ucla.edu/people.htm.

“Wylie Breckenridge”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~newc1666/ (Oxford) has accepted a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship to Cornell. Wylie’s “thesis”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~newc1666/Thesis.htm is on the meaning of the verb ‘looks’. He has “papers”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~newc1666/Papers.htm on, well, approximately everything. (At this stage if we were doing “PECOTA”:http://www.baseballprospectus.com/pecota/ comparisons, Wylie’s main comparable philosopher would be, I’d guess, me.) As well as having a number of striking philosophical views, his forthcoming _Philosophical Perspectives_ paper for instance argues against the view that visual experience has representational content, he is a great philosophical interlocutor, and will be a real asset to Cornell.

Obviously we’re very pleased each of them is coming to Cornell. (Hopefully they’ll each be active on the northeast conference circuit, because they are great people to talk philosophy with.) Cornell next semester will be almost unrecognisable compared to this semester. There will be at least six people teaching classes who are not teaching this semester, and maybe several more than that. Students considering Cornell should bear this in mind when thinking about what the program will look like over the next few years.