The Sellars Lecture in Philosophy
The Roy Wood Sellars Lectureship was established in 1971 to celebrate both Roy Wood Sellars and W. Preston Warren. The latter was for many years chair of the philosophy department at Bucknell and was the author or editor of a number of papers and books on Roy Wood Sellars' philosophy. The first Sellars Lecture was given by Preston Warren and the second by Wilfrid Sellars (with his father in attendance).
2023 Lecturer: L.A. Paul
Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science, Yale University
Paul's research explores questions about the nature of the self, decision-making, temporal experience, philosophical methodology, causation, causal experience, time and time's arrow, perception, mereology, constitution and essence. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center and the Australian National University. She is also the author of several books, including Transformative Experience (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Causation: A User's Guide (Oxford University Press, 2013), which was awarded the American Philosophical Association Sanders Book Prize. In 2020 she received the Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution from the American Philosophical Association and Phi Beta Kappa Society. Her work on transformative experience has been covered in major media venues such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, the LA Times Book Review, NPR and the BBC and explored artistically in The Missing Shade of You, a dance and spoken word performance by the Logos Dance Collective, performed in New York City in 2017 and in the documentary film Comfort Zone, about off-piste and extreme skiing in Scotland. She is currently working on a book, under contract with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, about self construction, transformative experience, humility and fear of mental corruption.