While most Michigan-based legal practitioners lack adequate training in Tribal laws, Taylor Elyse Mills, a sixth-year doctoral candidate in Philosophy at Michigan State University and graduate of MSU’s College of Law, sought to do something about this significant gap in our state’s legal education and is now being recognized for her work. In partnership with the Little Traverse Bay Bands…
The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI) Center, a research and outreach program based within the Department of Philosophy in Michigan State University’s College of Arts & Letters, received a $750,000 contract from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a repeatable and scalable team science curriculum for NSF’s Convergence Accelerator Program. The Convergence Accelerator Program funds multidisciplinary teams to solve national-scale…
The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI) Center, a new service center within MSU’s College of Arts & Letters, is a one-of-a-kind organization that provides philosophically based capacity-building services to research and practice groups locally, nationally, and internationally. Established in June 2021 and led by Executive Director Michael O’Rourke and Associate Directors Dr. Edgar Cardenas, Dr. Chet McLeskey, and Dr. Marisa Rinkus,…
The challenge of interdisciplinary research can be easily explained through the parable of five blind-folded people and one very patient elephant.
Michigan State University’s Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI), led by Michael O’Rourke, Interim Director of the MSU Center for Interdisciplinarity (C4I), and Stephanie Vasko, Managing Director of C4I, has been named the winner of the 2018 APA/PDC Prize for Excellence and Innovation in Philosophy Programs. It also recently learned it will receive a $71,900 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to hold…
Today marks the launch of the Center for Interdisciplinarity’s Transdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship Program. This program will provide teams of graduate students the opportunity to work with community partners on significant problems while receiving training in transdisciplinary team research practice.
Through the creation of the Engaged Philosophy Internship Program (EPIP), MSU’s Department of Philosophy is hoping to change how the world views philosophy. The program connects philosophers with projects and interests outside of academia and includes work with community organizations and other non-academic partners. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYIUGhAltsk&feature=emb_title “In the Philosophy Department, we believe that philosophy has the power to make a positive…
Professor of Philosophy Michael O’Rourke has been appointed Interim Director of the MSU Center for Interdisciplinarity, effective August 16, 2017. The two-year appointment runs through August 15, 2019. As Interim Director of the Center for Interdisciplinarity, O’Rourke will lead the planning process to articulate and shape the strategic vision of this new center. “Many universities emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship,” said Christopher P. Long, Dean…
After practicing as an interdisciplinary environmental scholar and teacher for 10 years, Bethany Laursen switched fields to study theories of interdisciplinarity itself, which led her to Michigan State University where she is pursuing both an M.A. in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Community Sustainability. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-63bBkfO7c&feature=emb_title “At MSU, I have the freedom to sit in two colleges and have committees that work across disciplines,” said…
In recent years, we’ve seen a surge of articles, essays and blog posts by professional philosophers on the future of philosophy. While it isn’t surprising that people who reflect professionally would reflect on the future of their profession, this surge is symptomatic of a deeper anxiety that some philosophers, and many humanists, have felt in the modern, outcome-oriented academy. Some…