Kathrin Koslicki, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado
A “significant reorientation” is underway in analytic metaphysics, and Kathrin Koslicki, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, is among those leading the way.
Koslicki has won a $50,400 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which she will use to work on her next book project tentatively titled “Dependence, Constituency and Explanation.” Beginning in August, she will spend a year on the project.
The new work will complement “The Structure of Objects,” a 2008 book published by Oxford University Press. In that monograph, Koslicki advanced a neo-Aristotelian theory of parts and wholes, and she focused on the question of how the parts of ordinary objects are related to the wholes that they compose.
With her second book project, Koslicki aims to continue the work begun in “The Structure of Objects.” As she explains in her application for the NEH fellowship, during much of the 20th century, questions of ontology—the study of being—concerned issues of existence, or “what is there?”
Recently, however, several thinkers have argued that many of the most central questions in metaphysics and perhaps philosophy in general are more profitably understood not as asking about the existence of certain apparently problematic sorts of entities (e.g., abstract objects), but rather as asking whether one type of phenomenon (e.g., a smile) is in some important sense dependent on another type of phenomenon (e.g., the mouth that is smiling).
“Surprisingly, despite the central role dependence has played in philosophy since its very inception, this relation has only recently begun to receive the kind of attention it deserves from contemporary metaphysicians,” Koslicki writes.
Building on “The Structure of Objects,” she adds, “I now propose to develop this broadly neo-Aristotelian approach to metaphysics further by conducting a careful study that is aimed at increasing our understanding of the central concept of dependence and its role in helping to define a viable approach to metaphysics for the 21st century.”
“It is an exciting time right now for metaphysicians, and I am very enthusiastic about the prospect of contributing to the reorientation that is currently under way in the field,” Koslicki writes. “A second book on the nature of dependence and the role it can play in reshaping our approach to metaphysics is a natural next step.”
Koslicki, a native of Munich, Germany, completed her undergraduate work at SUNY Stony Brook and earned her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995. She joined CU’s Department of Philosophy in 2007.
She came to America after spending a year riding her motorcycle (a Honda XL500 single-cylinder enduro) across France, Span and Portugal. During that trek, she was “trying (and failing) to understand Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit.”
In Boulder, she strives “to fit into the local culture by engaging in excessive amounts of physical activity, especially rock and ice climbing, backcountry skiing, as well as mountain- and road-bike riding.”