Anderson Harris, a graduate student within the department, has been awarded a Bilinski Fellowship! The award goes out to qualified PhD canditates to help support their research and eventual dissertation.

For Anderson, many philosophers think that emotions introduce a kind of noise to our deliberations that might guide us in the wrong directions. For example, it’s not uncommon in a state of enthusiasm to make an expensive purchase one maybe shouldn’t have. This has led some philosophers to think that emotions should play no role in moral deliberation. However, we tend to think that emotions play a crucial role in forming and sustaining some of our most important relationships like friendships. There is also good reason to think that our friendships lay at the heart of moral and ethical life. There is a tension here: it seems inappropriate when emotions influence some ethical relationships but not others. In my dissertation I explore one facet of this tension. Namely, how emotions positively factor into our close caring relationships like friendships. The goal of this project is to argue that a particular kind of emotional activity that I call expressive activity is an essential part of caring friendships.

Congrats, Anderson!