Plenary Speakers

SLSA '08 features two plenary sessions, one on Friday evening and one on Saturday evening. The Friday evening plenary will be held at the conference site, the Holiday Inn By the Bay. The Saturday evening plenary will be held at the Portland Museum of Art, a short walk from the conference hotel. If you anticipate needing special transportation to the museum, please contact Site Chair Arielle Saiber .

 

Rebecca Goldstein

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy.  While in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship.

After earning her Ph.D. she returned to Barnard, where she taught courses in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, the rationalists, the empiricists, and the ancient Greeks.  It was some time during her tenure at Barnard that, quite to her own surprise, she used a summer vacation to write her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem . which was published by Random House and went on to become a critical and popular success.

More novels followed: The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind ; The Dark Sister , which received the Whiting Writer's Award, Mazel , which received the 1995 National Jewish Book Award and the 1995 Edward Lewis Wallant Award; and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics . Her book of short stories, Strange Attractors , received a National Jewish Book Honor Award. Her 2005 book Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel , was featured in articles in The New Yorker and The New York Times , received numerous favorable reviews, and was named one of the best books of the year by Discover magazine, the Chicago Tribune , and the New York Sun . Goldstein's most recent book is, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us Modernity , published in May 2006, and winner of the 2006 Koret International Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought.

In 1996 Goldstein became a MacArthur Fellow, receiving the prize which is popularly known as the “Genius Award.”

In 2005 she was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship.

Aside from Barnard, Goldstein has taught in the Columbia MFA writing program and in the department of philosophy at Rutgers, has been a visiting scholar at Brandeis University , and taught for five years as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford , Connecticut . In 2006-2007 she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University , and a Guggenheim Fellow.

 

Robert M. Seyfarth

Robert Seyfarth is professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania . His work, predominantly with collaborator, Dorothy L. Cheney (Penn, Biology) focuses on the social behavior, vocal communication, and cognition of nonhuman primates in their natural habitat. Their research methods include observational sampling and playback experiments in which the calls of known individuals are played to subjects from a concealed loudspeaker and the subjects' behavior is filmed. Seyfarth and Cheney seek to clarify the differences between nonhuman primate communication and human language, and to explore the cognitive mechanisms that may underlie nonhuman primate social relationships. Species and research sites that are currently the focus of research by their team include baboons in the Okavango Delta, Botswana; red colobus and diana monkeys in the Tai Forest, Ivory Coast; spider monkeys in Mexico; and cebus monkeys in Costa Rica. His work on vervet monkeys was described in How Monkeys See the World (1990, University of Chicago Press ), and he has published more recently, Baboon Metaphysics : The Evolution of a Social Mind ( Chicago , 2007).